Nick Okrent

Leibniz used Descartes’ strict notion of substance in “That a Most Perfect being is Possible” to characterize God but did not intend to undermine his own philosophical views by denying that there are created substances. The metaphysical view of substance in this passage is Cartesian. A discussion of radical substance without any sort of denial in the possibility of other substances does not indicate Spinozism. If this interpretation is correct, then the passage is neither anomalous nor mysterious. There is reason to believe that the passage expresses just the beliefs that we should expect Leibniz to hold in his De Summa Rerum period. Furthermore, this interpretation indicates that while Leibniz’s metaphysics during this stage of his career is suggestively similar to Spinoza’s, there is no evidence that Leibniz accepted Spinoza’s pantheistic conclusion.

This paper argues that Spinoza makes a distinction between the constitutive essence of God (the totality of His attributes) and the essence of God per se (His power and causal efficacy). Using this distinction, I explain how Spinoza can conceive of God as being both an immutable simple unity and a subject for constantly changing modes. Spinoza believes that God qua Natura Naturans is immutable, while God qua Natura Naturata is not. With this point established, Curley’s claim that Spinozistic modes are causally dependent on but not properties of God loses much of its attraction. In conclusion, I suggest how God’s essence is related to His attributes and His modes.

According to the traditional account of Leibniz's early philosophy, he briefly accepted a broadly Cartesian physics by which "only God has the ability to move bodies by continually recreating them in different places..." Some believe that this Cartesianism, which seems to be endorsed in the 1669 letter to Thomasius, indicates that Leibniz accepted a version of occasionalism in that letter. This paper argues that Leibniz does not hold an occasionalistic notion of causation in the 1669 letter to Thomasius. In pursuing a synthesis of hylomorphism and Cartesianism, Leibniz arrives at an account that avoids occasionalism and has striking similaries to scholastic theories about motion.