Abstract

One of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s most distinctive philosophical theories is the pre-established harmony, his big-picture explanation for the appearance of causal interaction in the world. According to Leibniz, and despite how it seems, neither you, me, nor any other thing created by God can cause changes in any other thing! When I high-five you, it’s not really me that causes the stinging sensation in your hand. Instead, every change each created thing undergoes—including that sting in your hand—is actually, surprising as it might seem, caused internally by that thing itself. But then, why does the world appear to be a place of orderly, law-like pushings and pullings, actions and reactions? This is because God chose to create only those things that would each, of its own internal nature, cause changes in itself in perfect harmony with what every other created thing causes in itself, sort of like a symphony of automata programmed and synchronized to play their own individual parts of the same overall composition in perfect, well, harmony. Leibniz offers perhaps his best-known statement of the pre-established harmony in “A New System of Nature” (1695), where he also argues that we ought to accept his theory instead of its major competitors at the time, namely, Descartes’s interactionism and Malebranche’s occasionalism. The present work is an open-access, peer-reviewed, and user-friendly version of "A New System of Nature”, intended for use in teaching courses on early modern philosophy. It's edited for clarity and accessibility, and includes commentary, examples, and other elements meant to help engage readers.