<p>Leibniz</p><p>A. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz was born at Leipzig in 1646. He entered the university of Leipzig at the age of 15 where he studied philosophy and mathematics. He also studied jurisprudence and received his doctorate in law at the age of 21.</p><p>1. He was familiar with the writings of Descartes and Spinoza and was impressed by their ideas but would eventually pursue his own philosophical course.</p><p>2. Among his grand projects was the reconciliation of Protestantism and Catholicism and an alliance between the Christian states of Europe forming a United States of Europe.</p><p>3. He developed the infinitesimal calculus and published his results three years before Sir Isaac Newton had released his manuscript to the printers, the latter claiming to have made the discovery first.</p><p>4. He became the first president of the Society of the Sciences in Berlin, which later became known as the Prussian Academy. </p><p>5. He wrote several significant works including: New Essays on Human Understanding, Essays on Theodicy, Discourse on Metaphysics, New System of Nature and the Interaction of Substances, and the Monadology.</p><p>6. He was in the service of the House of Hanover, but when George I became King of England, Leibniz was not invited to go with him, possibly because of his quarrel with Newton. His public influence declined, and in 1716, neglected and unnoticed even by the learned society he founded, he died at the age of 70.</p><p>B. Substance:</p><p>Philosophy: Leibniz 1 KD McMahon Leibniz was concerned about Descartes dualistic approach because of the problems associated with describing the relationship between mind and body. Spinoza’s monistic approach blurred the distinctions between God, man, and nature and Leibniz believed it was essential to maintain that distinction. Furthermore, he was concerned about the deterministic nature of Spinoza’s cosmology even though he would ultimately adopt a monistic and mechanistic ontology.</p><p>1. Extension versus Force:</p><p> a. Descartes had argued that extension refers to a material substance that is extended in space and is not divisible into something more primary. </p><p> b. Spinoza agreed with Descartes to a point except that this extension was an extension of the single substance, that is, God.</p><p> c. Leibniz argued that there was no reason to believe that extension is primary; it is just as reasonable to believe that it is a composite, but here he is not suggesting an atomic theory such as that of Democritus or Epicurus, but something new. </p><p>(1) His principle argument with the atomic theory was that atoms are bits of matter, which must get their motion (force) from outside themselves.</p><p>(2) Leibniz suggested that the “true atoms of nature” (Urstoff) are monads. Leibniz said that matter is not the primary ingredient of things. Instead, monads with their element of force constitute the essential substance of things.</p><p>2. Monads</p><p>Philosophy: Leibniz 2 KD McMahon a. According to Leibniz, the monad is “capable of action.” He added that a compound substance is a collection of monads. Monas is a Greek word signifying unity. “Simple substances, lives, souls, spirits, are unities. Consequently all nature is full of life.”</p><p> b. Monads are unextended; they have no size or shape. A monad is a point, not a mathematical or a physical point, but a metaphysical point. Leibniz sometimes refers to monads as “souls” to emphasize their immaterial nature.</p><p> c. Monads are independent of other monads and do not have any causal relation to each other. Leibniz describes monads as “windowless” meaning that the rest of the universe has no influence upon them. </p><p> d. Each monad is different from another and they possess their own sufficiency and force. As Leibniz says, “there is a certain sufficiency which makes them the source of their internal actions and, so to speak, incorporeal automata.”</p><p> e. Nevertheless, the universe is orderly. How can this harmony exist given so many independent autonomous monads? </p><p>3. Preestablished Harmony</p><p> a. Each monad behaves in accordance with its own created purpose. These windowless monads, each following its own purpose, form a unity of the ordered universe. Even though each is isolated from the other, their separate purposes form a large-scale harmony. Leibniz describes it thus:</p><p>Philosophy: Leibniz 3 KD McMahon “Several different bands of musicians and choirs, playing their parts separately, and so placed that they do not see or even hear one another…. [they] keep perfectly together, by each following their own notes, in such a way that he who hears them all finds in them a harmony that is wonderful, and much more surprising than if there had been any connection between them.”</p><p> b. This “preestablished harmony” could not be the product of an accidental assortment of monads, instead it the result of God’s handiwork.</p><p>C. God’s Existence</p><p>1. To Leibniz, the harmony of monads provided a “new proof for the existence of God.” He was impressed by “this perfect harmony of so many substances which have no communication with each other.” This harmony, he believed, pointed to the existence of God with “surprising clearness,” because a harmony of many windowless monads “can only come from a common cause.”</p><p>2. This notion of cause is similar to the argument put forward by Aristotle, Aquinas, and others for God as being the Prime Mover or cause of thy Universe.</p><p> a. Leibniz stated that any event can be explained by referring to its prior cause. But that prior cause can, in turn, be explained by a still earlier cause. And this sequence can go on ad infinitum.</p><p> b. The solution to this infinite series of causes is to recognize that there must exist outside of this causation (the universe itself) an existence, which is necessary and existent in itself.</p><p>Philosophy: Leibniz 4 KD McMahon 3. The problem for Leibniz now was to explain how evil could exist in a universe, which was supposedly ordered by a “preestablished harmony.”</p><p> a. Leibniz solution was to explain that the only World that God create could create was the Best of All Possible Worlds.</p><p> b. To make a world free of evil or the potential for evil, God would have to create a perfect world. But only God is perfect, so God would have to create himself and there would be no distinction between him and the world. Hence in order to create something distinct from himself he would have to create an imperfect world: “for God could not give the creature all without making it God; therefore there must needs be…limitations also of every kind.”</p><p> c. Hence, evil does not come from God, but is the result of the necessary imperfection of Creation. Evil, then, is not something substantial but merely the absence of perfection. Evil is privation.</p><p> d. “God wills antecedently the good and consequently the best” since the most that God can do, in spite of his goodness, is to create the best possible world.</p><p> e. Furthermore, Leibniz argues that we cannot properly assess evil. Some things that in themselves appear to be evil turn out to be the prerequisites for good, as when “sweet things become insipid if we eat nothing else; sharp, tart and even bitter things must be combined with them, so as to stimulate the taste.”</p><p>Leibniz also gives the following analogy: “If you look at a very beautiful picture, having covered up </p><p>Philosophy: Leibniz 5 KD McMahon the whole of it except a very small part, what will it present to your sight, however thoroughly you examine it… but a confused mass of colors, laid on without selection and without art? Yet if you remove the covering, and look at the whole picture from the right point of view, you will find that what appeared to have been carelessly daubed on the canvas was really done by the painter with very great art.”</p><p>D. Human Freedom</p><p>1. How can freedom exist in Leibniz’s “preestablished harmony” of monads? Consider that each monad is involved in developing its built-in purpose, and “every present state of a simple substance is naturally a consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is big with its future.”</p><p>2. Each person, whose identity centers around a dominate monad, his soul, must represent in this mechanical view an unfolding of a life that has been set from the beginning.</p><p> a. Yet, since the basic nature of this person is thought, his development through life consists in overcoming confused thoughts and arriving at true ideas, which lie in all of us in the murky form of potentiality seeking to become actual.</p><p> b. When our potentialities become actual, we see things as they really are, and this is, according to Leibniz, what it means to be free. I am free to the extent that I know why I do what I do.</p><p>E. Epistemology</p><p>1. Leibniz distinguished between truths of reason and truths of fact. We know truths of reason purely by logic, whereas we know truths of fact by experience.</p><p>Philosophy: Leibniz 6 KD McMahon 2. Truths of Reason are necessarily true since for them to be false would be a contradiction. For example, “a triangle has three sides” is a truth of reason and is necessarily true since by definition a triangle has three sides. To say that “a triangle has four sides” would be a contradiction and is necessarily false.</p><p> a. Truths of reason are tautologies, because the predicate simply repeats what is already contained in the subject.</p><p> b. Truths of reason do not require or affirm that the subject of the proposition exists. It is true, for example, that a triangle has three sides even though one does not refer to any specific existing triangle.</p><p> c. Truths of reason are self-evident truths. They are analytic propositions, the predicate of which is contained already in the subject, and to deny the predicate is to be involved in a contradiction.</p><p>3. Truths of fact are known through experience and are contingent. Consider the statement, “Flying Saucers from outer space, exist.” Such a statement is not a truth of reason since the predicate is not contained in the subject and its truth is not known a priori. For this statement to be true, that is, a truth of fact, we would have to know this through experience. Such knowledge is a posteriori.</p><p>4. To God, all knowledge is Truth of Reason since he knows the predicates of all subjects. Since a person possesses all his predicates in a state of potential (monadally?), God can deduce the predicates of any person.</p><p>5. Leibniz’s Law of Continuity stated that a subject unfolds its predicates in an orderly and predictable way (at least from God’s perspective). The Law of Continuity states “Nature makes no leaps.” Change is continuous. Rest </p><p>Philosophy: Leibniz 7 KD McMahon and motion are aspects of each other, merging into each other through infinitesimal changes, “so much so that the rule of rest ought to be considered as a particular case of the rule of motion.”</p><p>6. Although the human mind cannot know all reality as God knows it, we can know certain innate ideas, self-evident truths. Even the truths we come to know, as we mature can be considered virtually innate. Like all the rationalists, Leibniz optimistically appraises the capacity of reason to know reality.</p><p>Philosophy: Leibniz 8 KD McMahon</p>