•  422
    Leibniz’s Early Theodicy and its Unwelcome Implications
    The Leibniz Review 30 1-28. 2020.
    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 necessitaria…Read more
  •  1293
    Cartesian Circles and the Analytic Method
    International Philosophical Quarterly 60 (4): 393-409. 2020.
    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 pro…Read more
  •  390
    Leibniz, Acosmism, and Incompossibility
    In Gregory Brown & Yual Chiek (eds.), Leibniz on Compossibility and Possible Worlds, Springer. pp. 145-174. 2016.
    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 be…Read more