Paul Lodge

This chapter provides an overview of one of Leibniz’s longest and most important works, the _Theodicy_. It is argued that the _Theodicy_ is best understood against a careful reading of the Preface, where Leibniz outlines the primary aim of the book, i.e. to provide the means by which natural theology and Leibniz’s conception of God as a being deserving of love may be maintained in the face of objections that stem from considering the nature of freedom and the so-called “problem of evil”. Due to space constraints, the chapter presents the main issues by focusing mainly on their presentation in Part1 rather than on the way in which Leibniz contrasts his views with those of with Pierre Bayle in Parts 2 and 3. It also includes a detailed discussion of the Preliminary Dissertation on the Conformity of Faith with Reason, in which Leibniz spells out his conception of the relationship between these notions.

Justin Garson introduces the distinction between two views on Madness we encounter again and again throughout history: Madness as dysfunction, and Madness as strategy. On the latter view, Madness serves some purpose for the person experiencing it, even if it’s simultaneously harmful. The strategy view makes intelligible why Madness often holds a certain allure—even when it’s prima facie terrifying. Moreover, if Madness is a strategy in Garson’s metaphorical sense—if it serves a purpose—it makes sense to use consciously chosen strategies for living with Madness that don’t necessarily aim to annihilate or repress it as far as possible. In this paper, we use our own respective stories as case studies. We have both struggled to resist the allure of Madness, and both ended up embracing a kind of Pyrrhonian scepticism about reality instead of clinging to sane reality.

The main concern of this essay is to make a case for the thesis that Leibniz conceived of his philosophy as a way of life in something like the sense articulated in the works of Pierre Hadot. On this view, philosophy was a type of conduct, or a mode of existing‐in‐the‐world, which had to be practised at each instant, with the goal of transforming the whole of the individual’s life. The essay also serves as an introduction to some of the main themes in Hadot’s work. While it includes a brief discussion of a number of the central components of Leibniz’s philosophy conceived as a way of life, the essay does not aim to do so in great detail. Rather, it offers a manifesto and initial road map.

This paper is a new translation and interpretation of the essay by Leibniz which has come to be known as “Leibniz’s Philosophical Dream.” Leibniz used many different literary styles throughout his career, but “Leibniz’s Philosophical Dream” is unique insofar as it combines apparent autobiography with a dreamscape. The content is also somewhat surprising. The essay is reminiscent of Plato, insofar as Leibniz describes a transition from existence in a cave to a more enlightened mode of being outside of it. But, in contrast with the usual identification of Leibniz as a “rationalist,” the mode of being that is valorised involves cognition that is intuitive and supra-rational. The paper begins with the translation followed by an interpretation of the essay. I conclude by considering the ramifications of my interpretation for our conception of Leibniz’s philosophy.

The main concern of this essay is to make a case for the thesis that Leibniz conceived of his philosophy as a way of life in something like the sense articulated in the works of Pierre Hadot. On this view, philosophy was a type of conduct, or a mode of existing‐in‐the‐world, which had to be practised at each instant, with the goal of transforming the whole of the individual’s life. The essay also serves as an introduction to some of the main themes in Hadot’s work. While it includes a brief discussion of a number of the central components of Leibniz’s philosophy conceived as a way of life, the essay does not aim to do so in great detail. Rather, it offers a manifesto and initial road map.

This paper explores the issue of Leibniz's commitment to the doctrines of eternal punishment and universal salvation. I argue against the dominant view that Leibniz was committed to eternal punishment, but rather than defending the minority position that Leibniz believed in universal salvation, I suggest that the evidence for his adherence to each is indicative of the way in which he regards religious doctrine as instrumentally valuable. My hypothesis is that Leibniz thought that the appropriateness of advocating eternal damnation, universal salvation or any other eschatological position was a function of the role that it would play in engendering the virtue of true piety in a given audience.

The dissertation is a study the correspondence between G. W. Leibniz and Burcher de Voider that took place between 1698 and 1706. De Voider came to Leibniz as a Cartesian, but one who was disenchanted with the view due to its inability to provide a natural explanation of bodily change. I examine Leibniz's attempts to: disabuse De Voider of his lingering Cartesianism---in particular, his view that the material world is a substance constituted by extension alone; and convince De Voider of the alternative metaphysic of body that he favors. The first part of the dissertation is concerned with the negative aspect of this project. A number of different arguments against the Cartesian view of material reality are discussed, along with a consideration of methodological differences that separate the two philosophers. In the second part of the dissertation, the views of Leibniz are explained. Here an account of material reality and bodily change emerges which is grounded in his categories of simple and corporeal substance, with the category of corporeal substance accorded a more prominent status than has been found in many recent studies

This paper illuminates Leibniz’s conception of faith and its relationship to reason. Given Leibniz’s commitment to natural religion, we might expect his view of faith to be deflationary. We show, however, that Leibniz’s conception of faith involves a significant non-rational element. We approach the issue by considering the way in which Leibniz positions himself between the views of two of his contemporaries, Bayle and Locke. Unlike Bayle, but like Locke, Leibniz argues that reason and faith are in conformity. Nevertheless, in contrast to the account that he finds in Locke’s Essay, Leibniz does not reduce faith to a species of reasonable belief. Instead, he insists that, while faith must be grounded in reason, true or divine faith also requires a supernatural infusion of grace.

The question of Leibniz’s relationship to mysticism has been a topic of some debate since the early part of the 20th Century. An initial wave of scholarship led by Jean Baruzi presented Leibniz mystic. However, later in the 20th Century the mood turned against this view and this negative appraisal holds sway today. In this paper I aim to do two things: First I provide a detailed account of the ways in which Leibniz is critical of mysticism; second, I argue that there is, nonetheless, an important sense in which Leibniz should be regarded as an advocate of mysticism. However, the approach that I take does not focus on an effort to overturn the kinds of considerations that led people to reject the views of Baruzi. Instead, I try to reframe the discussion and explore more complex and interesting relationships that exist between mysticism and Leibniz’s philosophical theology than have been articulated previously. Here I draw on some recent discussions of mysticism in the philosophical literature to illuminate Leibniz’s own distinction between “false mysticism” and “true mystical theology.”

Schon in seinen frühen Jahren war Leibniz ein Gegner der Cartesischen Naturphilosophie, ca. 1697 zeigt sich in seinen Texten dann ein Argument gegen Descartes, das ich im folgenden behandle und als ,heterogeneity argument‘ bezeichnen möchte - eingangs wird hier dargestellt, wie Leibniz es im Paragraphen 13 seiner Schrift De ipsa natura expliziert, anschließend diskutiere ich zwei frühere Ansätze, die sich um das Thema drehen und die darin einig sind, daß Leibniz Descartes' Auffassung von der materiellen Welt aus a priori - Gründen kritisiert, da sie intern inkonsistent bleibt: Ich versuche nachzuweisen, daß diese Interpretationen Leibniz nicht gerecht werden und plädiere für eine a posteriori - basierte Auslegung - Leibniz zieht Descartes' Ansatz in Zweifel, indem er sich auf ,contingentia‘ hinsichtlich der Art beruft, in der unsere Sinneswahrnehmung die materielle Welt repräsentiert. Zum Abschluß erörtere ich einige allgemeinere hermeneutische Probleme, die sich aus den Unterschieden zwischen früheren Interpretationen und meiner eigenen Deutung nun ergeben

According to one of Leibniz's theories of contingency a proposition is contingent if and only if it cannot be proved in a finite number of steps. It has been argued that this faces the Problem of Lucky Proof , namely that we could begin by analysing the concept ‘Peter’ by saying that ‘Peter is a denier of Christ and …’, thereby having proved the proposition ‘Peter denies Christ’ in a finite number of steps. It also faces a more general but related problem that we dub the Problem of Guaranteed Proof . We argue that Leibniz has an answer to these problems since for him one has not proved that ‘Peter denies Christ’ unless one has also proved that ‘Peter’ is a consistent concept, an impossible task since it requires the full decomposition of the infinite concept ‘Peter’. We defend this view from objections found in the literature and maintain that for Leibniz all truths about created individual beings are contingent

In this paper I offer a discussion of chapter 3 of Adrian Moore’s The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, which is titled “Leibniz: Metaphysics in the Service of Theodicy.” Here Moore discusses the philosophy of Leibniz and comes to a damning conclusion. My main aim is to suggest that such a conclusion might be a little premature. I begin by outlining Moore’s discussion of Leibniz and then raise some problems for the objections that Moore presents. I follow this by raising a Moore-inspired problem of my own and offer a possible response. The response is based on a little-known essay of Leibniz’s called “Leibniz’s Philosophical Dream” and leads me to consider Leibniz’s deepest motivations for engaging in philosophical reflection.

Seine Kritik an Descartes' Auffassung vom Körper gründet Leibniz bekanntlich auf Erörterungen zur Teilbarkeit und Ausdehnung. Obgleich jene Argumentation im Fokus einer Auseinandersetzung mit Leibniz' Metaphysik angesiedelt werden muss, ist sie bisher nicht recht verstanden worden. Mein Anliegen hier ist im Kern, Leibniz' Gedankengang zu explizieren und dessen Stichhaltigkeit auszuleuchten. Das Argument, um das es geht, ist wohl am ehesten aus der Darlegung in Leibniz' Korrespondenz mit Antoine Arnauld bekannt, findet sich jedoch zudem im späteren Briefwechsel mit De Volder. Neben Parallelen gibt es zwischen den Verfahrensweisen, die Leibniz in den zwei Korrespondenzen jeweils favorisiert, gleichwohl derart signifikante Differenzen, dass es nicht unbegründet scheint, ihm auch zwei Argumentationslinien zuzuschreiben -die Unterschiede dieser Linien werde ich im Folgenden auch hinsichtlich ihres Entstehungszusammenhangs beleuchten und einen Ausblick auf weitere Forschungserfordernisse wagen

According to Robert Sleigh Jr., “The opening remarks of DM.18 make it clear that Leibniz took the results of DM.17 as either establishing, or at least going a long way toward establishing, that force is not identifiable with any mode characterizable terms of size, shape, and motion.” Sleigh finds this puzzling and suggests that other commentators have generally been insufficiently perplexed by the bearing that the DM.17 has on the metaphysical issue. In this brief paper, I examine the solution that Sleigh offers to his puzzle, and present an alternative way of understanding the relationship between these two sections of the Discourse.

Between 1698 and 1706 Leibniz was engaged in one of his most interesting correspondences, with the Dutch philosopher and physicist Burcher de Volder. The two men were concerned primarily with the question of how the motion of bodies can be explained without appeal to the direct intervention of God. Leibniz presented a naturalistic account of motion to De Volder, but failed to convince him of its adequacy. I shall examine one reason for this failure - the disagreement that arose over the issue of whether there is a substance whose nature is constituted by extension.

Section 17 of Leibniz’s Monadology contains a famous argument in which considerations of what it would be like to enter a machine that was as large as a mill are offered as reasons to reject materialism about the mental. In this paper, I provide a critical discussion of Leibniz’s mill argument, but, unlike most treatments, my discussion will focus on texts other than the Monadology in which considerations of the mill also appear. I provide a survey of three previous interpretations of the argument and a partial defence of one of them, namely the one that Marc Bobro and I offered in Stepping Back Insider Leibniz's Mill (The Monist, 1998). However, I also argue that a fourth interpretation is necessary to account for the appearances of Leibniz’s mill in at least some of his writings.

Unlike most of the other great philosophers Leibniz never wrote a magnum opus, so his philosophical correspondence is essential for an understanding of his views. This collection of essays by pre-eminent figures in the field of Leibniz scholarship is a most thorough account of Leibniz's philosophical correspondencee. It both illuminates Leibniz's philosophical views and pays due attention to the dialectical context in which the relevant passages from the letters occur. The result is a book of enormous value to all serious students of early-modern philosophy and the history of ideas.

In a recent paper, Dennis Plaisted examines an important argument that Leibniz gives for the existence of primitive concepts. After sketching a natural reading of this argument, Plaisted observes that the argument appears to imply something clearly inconsistent with Leibniz’s other views. To save Leibniz from contradiction, Plaisted offers a revision. However, his account faces a number of serious difficulties and therefore does not successfully eliminate the inconsistency. We explain these difficulties and defend a more plausible alternative. In the process, we call attention to the neglected topic of Leibniz’s views on the nature of conceiving, and reveal his commitment to the somewhat surprising thesis that one can conceive something through a concept even if one has no conscious grasp of that concept.

In discussion of Leibniz’s philosophical methodology Donald Rutherford defends the view that Leibniz regarded metaphysics as an a priori demonstrative science. In the course of this discussion Rutherford isolates and tries to deflect a significant challenge for his view, namely the observation that in many of his mature writings on metaphysics Leibniz appears to defend his views by means of a posteriori arguments. I present some prima facie difficulties with Rutherford’s position and then offer an alternative account of how Leibniz thought he needed to establish metaphysical claims. My suggestion is that the challenge that Rutherford poses may be best answered by attending to the fact that Leibniz recognized a kind of metaphysical enquiry, ‘real metaphysics’, that is essentially a posteriori, in virtue of the fact that it is concerned not just with possible kinds of beings, but with the kinds of beings that God actually created.

Thanks to the efforts of Paul Schrecker and John W. Nason some half century ago, the University of Pennsylvania is home to microfilm reproductions of over one hundred thousand hand-written pages drawn from the collection of Leibniz’s papers presently housed in the Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek, Hannover. The microfilms are to be found on the mezzanine floor of the reference section in the Van Pelt Library and are readily accessible to visitors. Xerox copies may be made, although the Van Pelt Library stresses that the microfilms remain the property of the Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek, and that permission to copy must be obtained from Hannover beforehand.