Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to try and understand what Leibniz is up to in his 1684 Meditations on Knowledge, Truth and Ideas. A close reading of the text shows that, by composing it, Leibniz casts into a new, systematic shape, a number of epistemological concepts, insights or tenets which had gradually emerged, in relative independence from one another, in his writings of the previous eight years (approximately since 1676, the last year of his stay in Paris, which was also the moment when he first read some drafts of Spinoza's Ethics). This systematic exposition consists first of a dichotomous classification of "notions", and then of critical considerations on "ideas" and on the way we know (or do not know) them. It is crucial for the understanding of this text to note that, pursuing a distinction made here and there in the Paris writings, Leibniz does not use here the terms "notion" and "idea" as synonyms. How do these two parts of the Meditationes argument relate to one another? What is the relation between "notions" and "ideas"? Attempting to answer these questions, I am led to the conclusion that the themes of "idea" and of its "contemplatio", in the Hanover writings, do not constitute the foundations of Leibniz's epistemology, but are merely polemical devices directed against cartesianism. The conclusions of this paper are partly summarized in the first part of " What is the foundation of knowledge? Leibniz and the Amphybology of intuition" ( in Leibniz : What kind of Rationalist ? M. Dascal (ed.), 213-229, Berlin : Springer, 2008).