Abstract

The article deals with the issue of public items (objects, processes, events) in the philosophy of Leibniz. Starting from the famous passage of the Monadology which illustrates his conception of the substance by the image of a city perceived from different perspectives, the author shows how Leibniz conceives the public character of certain items, i.e. the reality of the phenomena that express them, not only in disagreement with the causal model, according to which public items would be the causal source of shared perceptions, but in disagreement even with the correspondence model, according to which shared perceptions would correspond to external objects. The key to understand the position of Leibniz is rather to look at his concept of the compossible, which makes it possible to explain the congruence between shared perceptions without having to resort to the concept of correspondence.