Part II: Modeling Chapter 3: Single Populations Chapter 4: Multiple Populations Chapter 5: Information [ “The Use of Information Theory in Epistemology”, Philosophy of Science ...] Chapter 6: A two level model for Bacterial Epistemology Chapter 7: A three level model for Bumblebee Epistemology [ “Reliability and Novelty”.

Unter Berücksichtigung von Ishiguros Gegenargumenten untersucht dieser Aufsatz erneut die traditionelle Interpretation von Leibniz' These, daß es keine kausale Wechselwirkung zwischen den Substanzen gebe und daß die kausalen Erklärungen für die Eigenschaften einer Substanz völlig in ihrer Natur lägen. Ishiguros Argumente benutzen die Unterscheidung zwischen dem Begriff einer Substanz und ihrer Natur, und in der Tat kann die Philosophie von Leibniz ohne diese Unterscheidung nicht voll gewürdigt werden. Aber sie lassen nicht erkennen, daß für Leibniz keine eindeutige Entsprechung zwischen ihnen (...) besteht. Sie lassen nicht erkennen, daß die kausale Erklärung für die Eigenschaften einer Substanz nicht völlig in ihrer eigenen Natur liegt. Die traditionelle Interpretation der prästabilierten Harmonie wird von allem, was Leibniz sagt, unterstützt und sollte wieder zur Geltung kommen. (shrink)

The article discusses issues explaining the effectiveness of practical application of mathematical results. The proposed approach is based on Leibniz’s metaphysics, a modern system theory and non-rational view of selection criteria in the “future needs” models.

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. (shrink)

Causation was an important topic of philosophical reflection during the Seventeenth Century. This reflection centred around certain particular problems about causation, one of which was the problem of causation between mind and body. The doctrine of the pre-established harmony is Leibniz's response to the problem of causation between mind and body. In this chapter I shall (a) explain the problem of mind-body causation; (b) explain Leibniz's pre-established harmony; and (c) assess his case for it.

‘Linguistic meaning must be public’ – for Quine, here is not a statement to rest with, whether it be reckoned true or reckoned false. It calls for explication. When we do, using Quine’s words to piece together what he thought, we find that much too much is concealed by the original statement. Yes, Quine said ‘Language is a social art’; yes, he accepts behaviourism so far as linguistic meaning is concerned; yes, he broadly agrees with Wittgenstein’s anti-privacy stricture. But precisely (...) what is being said by the original statement to be public, and what does calling it ‘public’ amount to? Pressing such questions complicates the picture enormously, partly though by no means entirely aligning Quine with linguistic internalism vis-à-vis Chomsky. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 3 Seiten: 338-377.

For more than a century the notion of a pre-established harmony between the mathematical and physical sciences has played an important role not only in the rhetoric of mathematicians and theoretical physicists, but also as a doctrine guiding much of their research. Strongly mathematized branches of physics, such as the vortex theory of atoms popular in Victorian Britain, were not unknown in the nineteenth century, but it was only in the environment of fin-de-siècle Germany that the idea of (...) a pre-established harmony really took off and became part of the mathematicians’ ideology. Important historical figures were in this respect David Hilbert, Hermann Minkowski and, somewhat later, Albert Einstein. Roughly similar ideas can be found also among British theorists, among whom Arthur Eddington, Arthur Milne, and Paul Dirac are singled out. Although largely limited to the period 1870–1940, the paper also considers Max Tegmark’s recent hypothesis of the universe being a one-to-one reflection of mathematical structures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume: Between Leibniz and Kant (The role of pre-established harmony in Hume's philosophy) Vadim Vasilyev 1. Introduction In the history of eighteenth century European philosophy, Hume appears as an important connecting link between Leibniz and Kant. I mean, however, not only the well-known historical fact that Hume "awakened Kant from his dogmatic slumber" (and it was the "dogmatism" ofLeibnizian metaphysics), but I shall try to show that (...) it is true from the philosophical point of view as well. The first problem I would like to discuss is the actual relationship between Hume and Leibniz. Hume never openly criticized the views of Leibniz. On the other hand, Hume did not admit himself to be a follower of him. Did Hume everread any works ofLeibniz? Hume has never said thathe did. Hume also hasn't directly quoted these works, so it looks like Hume wasn't acquainted with them at all. Nonetheless, we can show that already in 1739 Hume had known Theodicée which can be considered as the main treatise ofLeibniz. In his Abstract Hume writes: The celebratedMonsieurLeibnitz has observed it tobe a defect in the common systems of logic, that they are very copious when they explain the operations ofthe understanding in the forming ofdemonstrations, but are too concise when they treat of probabilities, and those other measures of evidence on which life and action entirely depend, and which are our guides even in most of our philosophical speculations. In this censure, he comprehends the essay on human understanding, Ie recherche de la vérité, and l'art dépenser.1 The fragment is a rendering of the following passage from Theodicée: caril n'y a rien de plus impartaitqui nostre Logique, lorsqu'on va au delà des argumens nécessaires; et les plus excellens philosophes de nostre temps, tels que les Auteurs de l'Art de penser, de la Recherche de la vérité, et de l'Essai sur Volume XLX Number 1 19 VADIMVASILYEV l'entendment, ont été fort éloignés de nous marquer les vrais moyens propres à aider cette faculté qui nous doit faire peser les apparences du vrait et du faux: sans parler de l'art d'inventer.2 So, it is highly probable that Hume knew Theodicée. The ideas ofLeibniz in Hume's philosophy The most important philosophical ideas of Theodicée are: the definitions ofpossibility and oftwo kinds ofnecessity, a theory of"the best possible world" and a conception ofthe pre-established harmony. As we shall see, all these ideas, one way or another, were assimilated by Hume. In his Theodicée Leibniz states that a distinction should be made between two kinds of necessity and, correspondingly, between two kinds ofnecessary knowledge: metaphysical and moral.? ne faut done que bien entendre des distinctions, comme celle que nous avons pressée bien souvent entre le necessaire et le certain, et entre la nécessité métaphysique et la nécessité morale. (Theodicée, 284, par. 282) Metaphysical or mathematical truths are such that propositions which are opposite to them imply contradictions. Or les vérités de la Raison sont de deux sortes; les unes sont ce qu'on appelle les Vérités Eternelles, qui sont abolument nécessaires, en sorte que l'opposé implique contradiction. (Theodicée, 50, par. 2) Not so regarding the moral truths; the opposite statements may be false but they imply no contradictions and are possible: "? est vray qu'il n'y auroit point eu de contradiction dans la supposition que Spinosa fût mort à Leide, et non pas à La Haye; il n'y auroit rien de si possible" (Theodicée, 218, par. 174). The possibility is equivalent to logical consistency and what is possible may be distinctly conceived: puisqu'il y a bien des choses qui ne sont jamais arrivées et n'arriveront jamais, et qui cependant sont concevables distinctement, et n'impliquent aucune contradiction, comment peut on dire qu'elles sont absolument impossibles? (Theodicée, 257, par. 234) 20Hume Studies HUME: BETWEEN LEIBNIZ AND KANT Hume uses all these definitions. The following fragment is a good example. The non-existence ofany being, without exception, is as clear and distinct an... (shrink)

This article aims to make further progress in revising the standard account of Wolff’s philosophy as a popularisation and systematisation of Leibniz’s doctrines. It focuses on the topic of the communication among substances and the metaphysics of simples and activity underlying it. It is argued that Wolff does not accept the pre-established harmony in its orthodox Leibnizian version. The article explains Wolff’s departure from Leibniz’s PEH as stemming from his rejection of Leibniz’s construal of the activity of every (...) simple as representational power and of the metaphysics of unity and activity in which that construal is rooted. (shrink)

Leibniz' prästabilierte Harmonie kann leicht als ein Versuch ausgelegt werden, die Beziehung zwischen cartesianischem Geist und Körper zu erklären, während gleichzeitig das Problem der 'kausalen Gleichheit' vermieden wird, das der cartesianische 'Interaktionismus' aufwirft. Es entstehen jedoch zwei Probleme durch eine Interpretation dieser Art. Erstens, warum wendet der frühe Leibniz die prästabilierte Harmonie auf alle Interaktionen zwischen Substanzen an und nicht nur auf die zwischen Geist und Körper? Zweitens, warum wendet der frühe Leibniz die prästabilierte Harmonie auf die Beziehung zwischen Geist (...) und Körper an, obwohl seine Ontologie nicht cartesianisch ist und also keine prästabilierte Harmonie zu rechtfertigen scheint? Ich behaupte, daß die Antwort auf die erste Frage in dem, was ich Leibniz' 'metaphysischen Fundamentalismus' nenne zu finden ist, und die Antwort auf die zweite Frage in Leibniz' Bemühung, die 'moralische Identität' der rationalen Seele zu erhalten. Ich behaupte außerdem - in beiden Fällen - 'daß Leibniz' Ziel eine fundamentale Alternative zum Cartesianismus und nicht nur eine bloße Abwandlung ist. (shrink)

In this paper I wish to examine the nature and role of "the phenomena of God" in Leinbiz's mature thought. In the first part of the paper, I discuss the nature of the universal harmony and argue that they are the perceptiual states of finite substances and the relations among them that constitute God's phenomena. In the second part of the paper, I attempt to specify the theoretical role that God's phenomena play in Leibniz's phenomenalism. This leads finally to (...) a discussion of Leibniz's teleological reasoning in the investigation of nature and of how that justification undercuts the argument for God's existence from the pre-established harmony. (shrink)

Die Kontroverse mit François Lamy ist unter denen von Leibniz' Système nouveau hervorgerufenen eine der am wenigsten diskutierten. Die wenigen neueren Quellen sind schlecht dokumentiert und in wichtigen Details nicht korrekt. Wir versuchen hier, die Bibliographie richtigzustellen. Da Lamys Arbeit äußerst selten ist, fügen wir englische Übersetzungen der relevanten Stellen bei. Nach Pierre Bayle war eher Lamy als Leibniz der erste, der den Begriff , prüstabilierte Harmonie' verwendete. Es stellt sich heraus, daβ dem nicht so ist.

It has become something of a received view among contemporary scholars that Leibniz first adopted the pre-established harmony around the time of the Discourse on Metaphysics and Correspondence with Arnauld, i.e., 1686-87. However, in their recent contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, Christia Mercer and Robert Sleigh Jr. have challenged this orthodoxy by claiming that Leibniz was committed to the doctrine, in all but name, by April 1676. In the present paper, I argue that the evidence that (...) Mercer and Sleigh present to support their somewhat radical thesis is problematic in a number of respects. But rather than embracing the ‘received view’, I present further evidence in favor of the view that Leibniz had in fact adopted the pre-established harmony by 1679. (shrink)

Husserl’s first work formulated what proved to be an algorithmically complete arithmetic, lending mathematical clarity to Kronecker’s reduction of analysis to finite calculations with integers. Husserl’s critique of his nominalism led him to seek a philosophical justification of successful applications of symbolic arithmetic to nature, providing insight into the “wonderful affinity” between our mathematical thoughts and things without invoking a pre-established harmony. For this, Husserl develops a purely descriptive phenomenology for which he found inspiration in Mach’s proposal of (...) a “universal physical phenomenology.” To account for applications to any domain, Husserl envisages a theory of all possible deductive systems, which he develops extensively in his Göttingen lectures wherein he engages with Hilbert’s work on deductive systems for geometry, real arithmetic, and physics. This leads Husserl to formulate claims of decidability and proofs of completeness for various arithmetics that result from his analysis of Kronecker’s general arithmetic. Careful attention to these proofs seem to show that Husserl was not oblivious to problems that underlie our incompleteness theorems, namely that of showing that some inversions of his algorithmic arithmetic are undefined. His growing preoccupation with the issue of a pre-established harmony between mathematical thought and reality motivate his pursuit of a “supramathematics” of all possible complete theory forms to demystify such harmony, by having such a form on hand for describing any empirical domain. He soon decides that a transcendental idealism of nature will reveal the wonderful affinity of thoughts and things comprising such harmony, to be a wonderful “parallelism of objective unities and constituted manifolds of consciousness.” But the paradoxes of logic and set theory cloud the clarity of mathematics, which Weyl would restore with Brouwer’s intuitionism and Hilbert with his metamathematics. Husserl informed Weyl that his student Becker had formulated a phenomenological foundation not only for Weyl’s generalization of relativity theory but also for the Brouwer-Weyl continuum. But Weyl eventually rejected much of Becker’s work, especially when it became clear that his phenomenological intuitionism could not account for the success of Hilbert’s transfinite mathematics in quantum physics. Becker responded to this “crisis of phenomenological method” with his mantic phenomenology celebrating the magic of mathematical mysticism, which Husserl finally rejects in favor of a pluralistic phenomenology of mathematics and nature. (shrink)

This article aims to offer a thorough and new account of the components of Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony, understood as an explanation of the unity among all substances. It argues for a formulation of the theory in terms of six complementary components, developing interpretations of them along with critical discussions of other interpretations found in the Leibniz literature. The paper shows that, as they have been presented so far, interpretations of pre-established harmony have almost universally (...) omitted one of its key components, namely Leibniz’s construal of intrinsic force as representational power. Once this is established, the article offers a novel interpretation of the relationship between representational power and the harmony among substances. Particularly, it is argued that, correctly understood, the representation of all substances among themselves entails, or is sufficient for, their harmony. (shrink)

Leibniz took pride in the Pre-established Harmony as an account of mind-body union. On the other hand, he sometimes claimed that he did not have a good account of such a union. I explain the tension by distinguishing between two importantly different issues that concern the union: body-soul interaction and the per se unity of the composite. Leibniz's positive evaluation concerns the issue of interaction rather than per se unity, R.M. Adams proposed that Leibniz did have the philosophical (...) resources to account for a per se unity of the body-soul composite, in the form of Aristotelian scholastic solutions to that problem. I argue, by contrast, that Leibniz's notions of body and soul were too far removed from their scholastic predecessors for him to be able to deploy those resources in a compelling way. (shrink)

Leibniz accepts causal independence, the claim that no created substance can causally interact with any other. And Leibniz needs causal independence to be true, since his well-known pre-established harmony is premised upon it. So, what is Leibniz’s argument for causal independence? Sometimes he claims that causal interaction between substances is superfluous. Sometimes he claims that it would require the transfer of accidents, and that this is impossible. But when Leibniz finds himself under sustained pressure to defend causal independence, (...) those are not the reasons that he marshals in its defense. Instead, deep into his long correspondence with Burchard de Volder, he gives a different sort of argument, one that has gone nearly unnoticed by commentators and has not yet been properly understood. In part, this is because the argument develops slowly over four years of correspondence. It emerges in early 1704, but it is formulated tersely and appears murky unless understood in light of Leibniz and De Volder’s tangled exchanges. There Leibniz argues that, on his distinctive ontology of an infinity of created substances, no two created substances could possibly causally interact, for roughly the same reasons that some Cartesians like De Volder deny interaction between minds and bodies on their substance dualist ontology. In this paper I draw out this lost argument, explain it and the metaphysics on which Leibniz builds it, and untangle Leibniz and De Volder’s exchanges concerning causation from which this argument results. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to explain how and why all human cognition depends on the body for Leibniz. I will show that there are three types of dependence: (a) the body is needed in order to supply materials, or content, for thinking; (b) the body is needed in order to give us the opportunity for the discovery of innate ideas; and (c) the body is needed in order to provide sensory notions as vehicles of thought. The third type (...) is intimately connected to the faculty of the imagination, which supplies the sensory vehicles of thought. Hence, the paper will also examine Leibniz’s account of that faculty and its operations. Before doing any of this, however, I will address the elephant in the room: Leibniz’s claim that mind and body do not interact at all, metaphysically speaking. The correspondence between mind and body is merely a matter of what he calls ‘pre-established harmony’. At first glance, this Leibnizian doctrine may suggest a radical disembodiment of all human cognition. Yet, I will argue that this is not the case and that, quite to the contrary, pre-established harmony requires that cognition is embodied in one important sense. (shrink)

Leibniz’s interest in the Talmud and in Jewish philosophy and theology in general, is well established in the scholarly literature. In this paper, we suggest a short comparative study of Leibniz’s concept of the monad and the Talmudic idea of “Malchut.” Our study is based, specifically, on a tractate of the Talmud titled Yoma. This tractate is mainly focused on the Jewish Atonement Day, in which Jews are judged by God for their sins in the previous year. In particular, (...) in pages 38a-b of Yoma, the Talmud reads: “By your name they shall call you, and in your place they shall seat you, and from your own they shall give you; No person may touch that which is prepared for another, and one Malchut does not touch another even to the extent of a hairbreadth.” The Talmud suggests here that even though we somehow influence one another’s life, one cannot directly affect others’ predetermined place in the world or interfere in the individual paths prepared for others. In this paper, we aim to indicate the similarities between such Talmudic notions and Leibniz’s ideas in the Monadology – such as the ideas that monads have “no windows” and that a pre-established harmony is set among all monads by God – as a ground for future research. (shrink)

A survey of the issue. Topics include Descartes; early critics of Descartes; occasionalism and pre-established harmony; materialism; idealism; views about animal minds; and simplicity.

will give an overview of the fascinating communication between G. W. Leibniz and Pierre Bayle on pre-established harmony and sudden change in the soul which started from Bayle’s footnote H to the article “Rorarius” in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) and ended in 1706 with Bayle’s death. I will compare the views presented in the communication to Leibniz’s reflections on the soul in his partly concurrent Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (1704) and argue that many topics in (...) the communication with Bayle are discussed with more details in Nouveaux essais. I also argue that the communication helped Leibniz to respond to Locke’s views concerning uneasiness in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, xxi. Bayle himself, however, was not able to completely understand Leibniz’s views on spontaneity as he was unaware of the contents of the Nouveaux essais, especially the systematic role of petites perceptions in Leibniz’s philosophy of mind. I will also reflect on whether the controversy could have ended in agreement if it would have continued longer. (shrink)

The 1695 publication of the “New System of the Nature of Substances and their Communication, and of the Union which Exists between the Soul and the Body” in the June 27 and July 4 issues of the Parisian Journal des sçavans marks an important milestone in Leibniz’s philosophical trajectory. It presented the first comprehensive public presentation of his metaphysics as it had matured over the preceding decades, and it would spark many lively exchanges and debates between Leibniz and his philosophical (...) contemporaries in the decades to come. This chapter provides background regarding the text’s genesis and reception, and introduces its main philosophical themes. After highlighting some interpretative challenges raised by both the “New System’s” form and philosophical content, it goes on to explore two key elements of the metaphysical picture it advances: Leibniz’s account of individual substances, and his theory of the pre-established harmony between them. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Band versammelt drei Texte: Johann Gustav Reinbecks 'Abhandlung Von dem Gebrauch der Vernunfft Und Welt-Weißheit In der GOttes-Gelahrtheit' (1733) und 'Erörterung Der Philosophischen Meynung von der sogenandten Harmonia Praestabilita (1737) und Johann Friedrich Bertrams dagegen gerichtete 'Beleuchtung Der Neu-getünchten Meynung von der Harmonia Praestabilita' (1737). Stellt die erste der drei Abhandlungen - schon mit ihrem Titel - so etwas wie Reinbecks Programmschrift des auf die Übereinstimmung von Vernunft und Offenbarung bedachten 'Theologischen Wolffianismus' dar, so dokumentieren die zwei anderen (...) die Debatte Reinbecks mit einem nicht unbedeutenden Vertreter des Halleschen Pietismus über ein zentrales Lehrstück des Leibnizischen Philosophie, die Praestabilierte Harmonie, zu der allerdings auch Reinbeck als Theologe eine differenzierte Meinung hat. (Aus dem Vorwort von Stefan Lorenz) This volume brings together three texts: Johann Gustav Reinbeck’s 'Abhandlung von dem Gebrauch der Vernunfft und Welt-Weißheit in der Gottes-Gelahrtheit' (1733) and 'Erörterung Der Philosophischen Meynung von der sogenandten Harmonia Praestabilita' (1737) and Johann Friedrich Bertram’s refutation of these, 'Beleuchtung Der Neu-getünchten Meynung von der Harmonia Praestabilita' (1737). While the first of these works presents – even in ist title – in effect Reinbeck’s programmatic statement of ‘theological Wolffianism’, concerned with the harmonisation of reason and revelation, the other two document Reinbeck’s debates with a not insignificant representative of Halle Pietism about a central teaching of Leibniz’s philosophy, pre-established harmony, which Reinbeck as a theologian had a sophisticated understanding. (From the introduction by Stefan Lorenz). (shrink)

Las filosofías de Wolff y Baumgarten han sido tradicionalmente evaluadas como una mera sistematización de las doctrinas de Leibniz, carente de toda originalidad. Se revisa esta opinión, concentrándose en el problema específico de la interacción de las sustancias naturales. Se muestra que ellos no siguen a Leibniz con el mismo grado de cercanía en algunos de los principios centrales de la teoría de la armonía preestablecida. Se problematiza así el uso de la etiqueta "leibnizianismo" como referida a un cuerpo homogéneo (...) e indiferenciado de doctrinas. The philosophies of Wolff and Baumgarten have been traditionally evaluated as mere systematizations of the doctrines of Leibniz, and, therefore, as lacking all originality. The paper revises that opinion, focusing on the specific problem of the interaction of natural substances, in order to show that they do not follow Leibniz as closely with respect to some of the central principles of pre-established harmony. It also questions the use of "Leibnizianism" as a label to refer to a homogeneous and undifferentiated body of doctrines. As filosofias de Wolff e Baumgarten têm sido tradicionalmente avaliadas como uma mera sistematização das doutrinas de Leibniz, carente de toda originalidade. Neste artigo, revisa-se essa opinião concentrando-se no problema específico da interação das substâncias naturais. Mostra-se que eles não seguem Leibniz com o mesmo grau de aproximação em alguns dos princípios centrais da teoria da harmonia preestabelecida. Problematiza-se, assim, o uso da etiqueta "leibnizianismo" como referência a um corpo homogêneo e indiferenciado de doutrinas. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of Gilles Deleuze’s interpreta- tion of the Critique of Pure Reason such as it appears in his 1963 monographic work La Philosophie critique de Kant. We will show that the originality of Deleuze’s reading lies in reading the critical project in retrospect, taking the sensus communis problem from the Critique of the Power of Judgment and applying it to the first Critique. In so doing, he points out the survival of (...) a pre-established harmony, now interiorized, both between heterogeneous faculties and between the matter of phenomena and the Ideas of reason. This implies a reinterpretation of the critical project that has passed unnoticed within Kantian studies and that places the Third Critique as the ground of the previous ones, unveiling common sense as a condition of possibility of knowledge. (shrink)

Christia Mercer has exposed for the first time the underlying doctrines of Leibniz's philosophy. By analyzing Leibniz's early works she demonstrates that the metaphysics of pre-established harmony developed many years earlier than previously believed and for reasons that have not been understood. A much deeper understanding of some of Leibniz's key doctrines emerges. Christia Mercer's study will force scholars to reconsider their basic assumptions about early modern philosophy and science. This is a very significant contribution to the history (...) of early modern philosophy that will be of special importance to philosophers, historians of ideas, historians of science and those in religious studies. (shrink)

In the present book, Pauline Phemister argues against traditional Anglo-American interpretations of Leibniz as an idealist who conceives ultimate reality as a plurality of mind-like immaterial beings and for whom physical bodies are ultimately unreal and our perceptions of them illusory. Re-reading the texts without the prior assumption of idealism allows the more material aspects of Leibniz's metaphysics to emerge. Leibniz is found to advance a synthesis of idealism and materialism. His ontology posits indivisible, living, animal-like corporeal substances as the (...) real metaphysical constituents of the universe; his epistemology combines sense-experience and reason; and his ethics fuses confused perceptions and insensible appetites with distinct perceptions and rational choice. In the light of his sustained commitment to the reality of bodies, Phemister re-examines his dynamics, the doctrine of pre-established harmony and his views on freedom. The image of Leibniz as a rationalist philosopher who values activity and reason over passivity and sense-experience is replaced by the one of a philosopher who recognises that, in the created world, there can only be activity if there is also passivity; minds, souls and forms if there is also matter; good if there is evil; perfection if there is imperfection. (shrink)

Moral debunking arguments are meant to show that, by realist lights, moral beliefs are not explained by moral facts, which in turn is meant to show that they lack some significant counterfactual connection to the moral facts (e.g., safety, sensitivity, reliability). The dominant, “minimalist” response to the arguments—sometimes defended under the heading of “third-factors” or “pre-established harmonies”—involves affirming that moral beliefs enjoy the relevant counterfactual connection while granting that these beliefs are not explained by the moral facts. We show (...) that the minimalist gambit rests on a controversial thesis about epistemic priority: that explanatory concessions derive their epistemic import from what they reveal about counterfactual connections. We then challenge this epistemic priority thesis, which undermines the minimalist response to debunking arguments (in ethics and elsewhere). (shrink)

Christia Mercer’s magnum opus, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origin and Development, long awaited, is finally about to appear from Cambridge University Press. It was well worth the wait. The book is impressive in the wealth of detailed argumentation and historical background that fills the work. Mercer’s general thesis is still that Leibniz’s mature thought emerges from a view that Leibniz shares with his teachers, an eclectic philosophy that sees truth lurking in many places, and that he sees the task of the (...) philosopher as mining the past for its truths, and showing how the different philosophies can be made consistent with one another and made into a single system. As in her earlier work, the resolution of the conflict between Aristotelianism and the new mechanism is important. But Mercer also claims to have discovered something else utterly unexpected, a strong Platonistic strain in seventeenth-century German thought. While Aristotelianism and mechanism may have dominated thought about the physical world, Mercer has discovered strongly Platonistic strains in the conception of God and the soul, both in the young Leibniz and in his teachers. Even more surprising, Mercer argues that the main tenets of Leibniz’s mature thought emerged out of this mixture, and did so as early as 1670 and 1671. In particular, she argues that both the pre-established harmony and the idealism characteristic of his mature thought emerged in these years, as the result of an attempt to harmonize different elements of Aristotelian, Platonic, and mechanist philosophies, in response to particular problems in philosophy, theology, and even physics that gripped him at that time. If she is right, this will fundamentally alter our view of Leibniz. (shrink)

There is a second way in which the question is capable of a twofold interpretation. One might begin with a priori concepts which have no empirical reference and ask how they can apply to objects. Or, one might deny the dichotomy between the a priori and experience and inquire how synthetic a priori judgments about experience can be accounted for. Initially Kant regarded the problem of schematism in the former way as that of bringing together two divorced realms. From this (...) standpoint it is assumed: a) that a priori concepts are generated by mind independently of experience, and b) that objects are given in intuition However, Kant came to see that if the problem is stated in this way it is insoluble. Only a pre-established harmony would guarantee that a priori concepts apply to objects. He attempted to break down this dualism between intuition and thought, between objects and concepts by showing that the knowledge of objects requires both intuition and thought. Unfortunately the original statement of the problem recurs alongside of the revised formulation at many places in the Critique. A close study of the development of Kant's thought makes it sufficiently clear that it is the latter statement of the problem which alone represents his mature insight and is consonant with his transcendental method of proof. (shrink)

Before the story can be told, however, some stage-setting is necessary. First, it is important to be clear about the most basic doctrines of Pre-established Harmony, Occasionalism, and Physical Influx. Physical Influx asserts intersubstantial causation amongst finite substances. For instance, when I appear to kick a ball, I really am the cause of the ball's motion. Pre-established Harmony denies intersubstantial causation, but affirms intrasubstantial causation. According to Pre-established Harmony, then, I am not the cause (...) of the ball's motion, but rather the ball is simply causing itself to move. Occasionalism, like Pre-established Harmony, denies intersubstantial causation, but, unlike Pre-established Harmony, it denies intrasubstantial causation as well. Occasionalism typically asserts that God alone, that is, an infinite substance, is the cause of all changes, and thus of the ball's motion. Though there are other ways of defining these causal theories, this way has the advantage that the causal theories form an exhaustive disjunction. (shrink)

A collection of essays covering a range of topics related to Leibniz. The monads and the pre-established harmony make numerous appearances, and so do Leibniz's discussions of causality, relations, individuation, nature, freedom, consciousness, and divinity. In addition to sections on Leibniz's physics and his theory of substance, a number of papers are included on his philosophy of mind that draw heavily on the New Essays, along with several articles on metaphysical and theological issues, and a section on Leibniz's (...) relationships with his contemporaries and predecessors. (shrink)

Recent feminists have critiqued G.W. Leibniz’s Theodicy for its effort to justify God’s role in undeserved human suffering over natural and moral evil. These critiques suggest that theodicies which focus on evil as suffering alone obfuscate how to thematize evil, and so they conclude that theodicies should be rejected and replaced with a secularized notion of evil that is inextricably tied to the experiences of the victim. This paper argues that the political philosophy found in the writings of Catherine Macaulay (...) (1731–1791) can serve as a support to Leibniz’s larger claims and can also offer a more concrete, situated notion of evil that escapes the contemporary feminist critique. Macaulay’s work on natural and moral political evil, especially, will be presented as an early modern precursor to feminism, which defends divine perfection and a pre-established harmony in the face of political evil. I then identify three unique theodicical arguments in Macaulay’s work: the pragmatically beneficial defense, the eschatalogical defense, and the redemptive defense. (shrink)

The article compares views of C.G. Jung and N.O. Lossky on the nature of time, including in the context of contemporary to them physical theories - quantum mechanics by W. Pauli and relativistic physics by A. Einstein. In particular, the author points to the similarity of ideas of both thinkers that the psyche relativizes time not only subjectively, but also objectively. Jung and Lossky provide this statement with a similar empirical basis, for example, the researches of T. Flournoy, as well (...) as similar theoretical arguments by postulating a fundamental acausal principle of the connection of all things, which is better suited for describing psychic and some physical phenomena than the classical causal explanation. In analytical psychology, such a principle is synchronicity, in hierarchical personalism - gnoseological coordination. Both concepts are genetically related to the G.W. Leibniz idea of pre-established harmony, which was reinterpreted by Jung and Lossky through different worldview foundations. Jung in his reasoning relied on the transcendental idealism of I. Kant, the principle of complementarity and the discoveries of quantum mechanics, Lossky - on intuitivism, the principle of subordination and on his own interpretation of Einsteins theories. Jung comes to the conclusion that the psyche has a timeless character, and Lossky comes to the conclusion that it has a super-temporal character. Jungs timelessness indicates the transcendental nature of psyche and the strive to get away from the classical causal explanation, saving it according to the principle of complementarity only to consider the phenomenal side of being and mainly physical processes. One of the pioneers of quantum mechanics Pauli was of the same opinion in general. Because of there is nothing transcendent in hierarchical personalism, Losskys super-temporality is of a strive to find a deeper basis for occurring in time processes, and, according to the principle of subordination, to include time in the hierarchical structure of the universe, prescribing for it a role of one of the two key forms of psychic and psycho-material processes characteristic of a certain stage of being. (shrink)

Bayle's article on Rorarius, author of a work purporting to demonstrate that animals reason better than humans, describes and rejects all but one of the current opinions concerning the souls of animals. That survivor is Leibniz's theory of monads, but Bayle cannot accept pre-established harmony, and so Leibniz goes by the wayside too. Bayle exhibits clearly the consequences of Cartesianism for attempts to distinguish us from the animals. The alternatives are reduced to two: either we do not have (...) an immortal soul, or animals do. Both are untenable on moral grounds. The result for Bayle is that no opinion on animal souls can be stably maintained. (shrink)

What did Leibniz have to contribute to the philosophy of mind? To judge from textbooks in the philosophy of mind, and even Leibniz commentaries, the answer is: not much. That may be because Leibniz’s philosophy of mind looks roughly like a Cartesian philosophy of mind. Like Descartes and his followers, Leibniz claims that the mind is immaterial and immortal; that it is a thinking thing ; that it is a different kind of thing from body and obeys its own laws; (...) and that it comes stocked with innate truth-tracking intellectual ideas and an epistemically troubling habit of forming confused sensory ideas on the occasion of external corporeal events. Nothing is new. Of course, Leibniz adds unconscious perceptions to the mind in the form of his famous petites perceptions, and he offers a unique solution to the problem of mind-body interaction in the form of his infamous pre-established harmony. In the overall scheme of things, however, these look like minor alterations in a philosophy of mind that the Cartesians had been advocating for some fifty years. Or so it appears. (shrink)

I argue that, all else being equal, theism is more probable than naturalism on the assumption that human beings are able to arrive at a body of moral knowledge that is largely accurate and complete. I put forth this thesis on grounds that, if naturalism is true, the explanation of the content of our moral intuitions terminates either in biological-evolutionary processes or in social conventions adopted for pragmatic reasons; that, if this is so, our moral intuitions were selected for their (...) utility, not their truth; and that, if our moral intuitions were so selected, they are probably false. I defend the argument against three objections: first, that the argument amounts to a generic skeptical challenge; second, that ethical naturalism explains how our moral intuitions could have been selected for their truth; and third, that there is a pre-established harmony between the utility of moral beliefs and their truth-values. (shrink)