Thomas Feeney

Leibniz was and is well known for his effort to answer the philosophical and theological problems posed by evil. Already in his own day he was gratified that his Theodicy (1710), a book-length treatment of “the goodness of God, the freedom of man, and the origin of evil,” had “pleased excellent theologians of all three main confessions” (Antognazza 2009, 482–3). Voltaire’s popular play, Candide (1759), features Dr. Pangloss, whose refusal to acknowledge the badness of things seems to caricature Leibniz’s optimism. More recently, scholars have given the problem of evil a central place in Leibniz’s thought (Rutherford 1995; Antognazza 2009). Major projects have provided access to key texts (CP; LGR; DPG), insight into the Theodicy itself (Rateau 2011; Jorgensen & Newlands 2014), and a synthetic understanding of Leibniz’s developing views (Rateau 2019). This entry follows Leibniz’s effort to credit God for good while excusing God of evil, beginning with his first attempts in the early 1670s and culminating in his most extensive and popular published work, the Theodicy (Antognazza 2009, 480). The first section outlines Leibniz’s understanding of why evil presents a problem for his conceptions of God, freedom, and creation. The second section presents Leibniz’s first attempt at a complete answer, and the final section focuses on the emergence and coherence of Leibniz’s mature view.

To explain why God is not the author of sin, despite grounding all features of the world, the early Leibniz marginalized the divine will and defined existence as harmony. These moves support each other. It is easier to nearly eliminate the divine will from creation if existence itself is something wholly intelligible, and easier to identify existence with an internal feature of the possibles if the divine will is not responsible for creation. Both moves, however, commit Leibniz to a necessitarianism that is stronger than what prominent interpreters such as Robert Sleigh and Mogens Lærke have found in the early Leibniz, and stronger than the necessitarianism that threatens his later philosophy. I defend this reading of Leibniz and propose that some features of Leibniz’s later metaphysics, including his “striving possibles” doctrine, are an artifact of the effort to rescue the early theodicy from its unwelcome implications.

The apparently circular arguments in Descartes’s Meditations should be read as analytic arguments, as Descartes himself suggested. This both explains and excuses the appearance of circularity. Analysis “digs out” what is already present in the meditator’s mind but not yet “expressly known”. Once this is achieved, the meditator may take the result of analysis as an epistemic starting point independent of the original argument. That is, analytic arguments may be reversed to yield demonstrative proofs that follow an already worked-out order of ideas. The “Cartesian Circle,” for example, is circular only when Descartes’s original analytic argument is mistaken for the demonstration that it enables. This approach to Cartesian Circles is unlike the standard approach, which attempts to show that Descartes’s original arguments do work as demonstrations after all.

Leibniz claims that God acts in the best possible way, and that this includes creating exactly one world. But worlds are aggregates, and aggregates have a low degree of reality or metaphysical perfection, perhaps none at all. This is Leibniz’s tendency toward acosmism, or the view that there this no such thing as creation-as-a-whole. Many interpreters reconcile Leibniz’s acosmist tendency with the high value of worlds by proposing that God sums the value of each substance created, so that the best world is just the world with the most substances. I call this way of determining the value of a world the Additive Theory of Value (ATV), and argue that it leads to the current and insoluble form of the problem of incompossibility. To avoid the problem, I read “possible worlds” in “God chooses the best of all possible worlds” as referring to God’s ideas of worlds. These ideas, though built up from essences, are themselves unities and so well suited to be the value bearers that Leibniz’s theodicy requires. They have their own value, thanks to their unity, and that unity is not preserved when more essences are added.