T. Allan Hillman

While considerable ink has been spilt over the rejection of idealism by Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore at the end of the 19th Century, relatively little attention has been directed at Russell’s A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, a work written in the early stages of Russell’s philosophical struggles with the metaphysics of Bradley, Bosanquet, and others. Though a sustained investigation of that work would be one of considerable scope, here I reconstruct and develop a two-pronged argument from the Philosophy of Leibniz that Russell fancied—as late as 1907—to be the downfall of the traditional category of substance. Here, I suggest, one can begin to see Russell’s own reasons—arguments largely independent of Moore—for the abandonment of idealism. Leibniz, no less than Bradley, adhered to an antiquated variety of logic: what Russell refers to as the subject-predicate doctrine of logic. Uniting this doctrine with a metaphysical principle of independence—that a substance is prior to and distinct from its properties—Russell is able to demonstrate that neither a substance pluralism nor a substance monism can be consistently maintained. As a result, Russell alleges that the metaphysics of both Leibniz and Bradley has been undermined as ultimately incoherent. Russell’s remedy for this incoherence is the postulation of a bundle theory of substance, such that the category of “substance” reduces to the most basic entities—properties.

This article attempts to determine how Leibniz might safeguard the simplicity of an individual substance (singular) while also retaining the view that causal powers (plural) are constitutive of said individual substance. I shall argue that causal powers are not to be understood as veritable parts of a substance in so far as such an account would render substances as unnecessarily complex. Instead, my proposal is that sense can be made of Leibniz’s metaphysical picture by appeal to truthmakers. In order to develop my argument I critically examine (a) Leibniz’s revival of the scholastic notion of substantial form, (b) his theory of accidents, and (c) his account of metaphysical predication, and argue that an application of truthmaker theory can satisfy each in accordance with his simplicity requirement on individual substances.

According to the stoic philosopher Chrysippus, we are to imagine our lives by analogy to a dog that is tied to a cart. It is not up to the dog whether or not he is so tied, just as it is not up to us what our external circumstances happen to be. However, it is up to the dog whether he willingly runs along behind the cart or is unwillingly dragged, just as it is up to us to decide the attitude or disposition we take to those events that occur in our life. To wit, a person who is dragged along by his passions or external circumstances is not and cannot be virtuous, while one who runs willingly assents to the events that are not under his control and can attain virtue. Epictetus..

Leibniz was a Lutheran. Yet, upon consideration of certain aspects of his philosophical theology, one might suspect that he was a Lutheran more in name than in intellectual practice. Clearly Leibniz was influenced by the Catholic tradition; this is beyond doubt. However, the extent to which Leibniz was influenced by his own Lutheran tradition—indeed, by Martin Luther himself—has yet to be satisfactorily explored. In this essay, the views of Luther and Leibniz on the non-cognitive component of faith are considered in some detail. According to Luther, the only non-cognitive aspect of faith worth favoring is trust (fiducia), since it is trust in God’s promise of mercy that warrants justification for the sinner. Leibniz, for his part, sides with the Thomistic tradition in emphasizing love (caritas) as the non-cognitive element of faith par excellence. I argue that Leibniz falls into a trap forewarned by Luther himself, even if Leibniz had systematic metaphysical reasons for his disagreement