Abstract

This paper concerns the distinction between imagination and reason in Leibniz’s epistemology and metaphysics, a major point that remains poorly documented. Rather than opposing the two, as was often the case during the seventeenth century, Leibniz’s theory enables us to explain how both faculties complement each other. This is particularly clear for empirical knowledge, but also in mathematics, a discipline which Leibniz often referred to as the logic of imagination. This paper also demonstrates how important principles of Leibnizian metaphysics require us to discard imagination as a source of knowledge, a point that is well illustrated in the critique of Hartsoeker’s atomism.