In this article, I develop a higher-order interpretation of Leibniz's theory of consciousness according to which memory is constitutive of consciousness. I offer an account of Leibniz's theory of memory on which his theory of consciousness may be based, and I then show that Leibniz could have developed a coherent higher-order account. However, it is not clear whether Leibniz held (or should have held) such an account of consciousness; I sketch an alternative that has at least as many advantages as (...) the higher-order theory. This analysis provides an important antecedent to the contemporary discussions of higher-order theories of consciousness. (shrink)

A famous mathematical theorem says that the sum of an infinite series of numbers can depend on the order in which those numbers occur. Suppose we interpret the numbers in such a series as representing instances of some physical quantity, such as the weights of a collection of items. The mathematics seems to lead to the result that the weight of a collection of items can depend on the order in which those items are weighed. But that is very hard (...) to believe. A puzzle then arises: How do we interpret the metaphysical significance of this mathematical theorem? I first argue that prior solutions to the puzzle lead to implausible consequences. Then I develop my own solution, where the basic idea is that the weight of a collection of items is equal to the limit of the weights of its finite subcollections contained within ever-expanding regions of space. I show how my solution is intuitively plausible and philosophically motivated, how it reveals an underexplored line of metaphysical inquiry about quantities and locations, and how it elucidates some classic puzzles concerning supertasks. (shrink)

As I assume to begin with, animals with a high level of consciousness, are those beings which are more dependent on their materialistic ecological circumstances than those with less cognition. The most obvious support for this factual claim is the yet still unofficial unit of geological time named the Anthropocene Epoch demarcating human devastation of earthly resources, whereby there is no doubt which species on earth is the most materially dependent. Notwithstanding, we need to keep things quantitively in perspective. Of (...) the 545.8 gigatons of biomass on Earth of which most is plants, animals make up 0.47% while humans only 0.01%, bacteria reigns supreme with 12.8% of total. (shrink)

Leibniz is unclear about the nature of pleasure. In some texts, he describes pleasure as a perception of perfection, while in other texts he describes pleasure as being caused by a perception of perfection. In this article, I disambiguate two senses of “perception of perfection”, which clarifies Leibniz’s considered position. I argue that pleasure is a perception of an increase in a substance’s power which is caused by a substance’s knowledge of a perfection of the universe or God. This reading (...) helps clarify the nature of Leibnizian happiness. Happiness is a cognitive process (akin to a mood), constituted fundamentally out of pleasure, which is grounded in increases in a substance’s power. A rational substance will sustain its happiness so long as it is more powerful than it is weak, and it is engaging in activities that increase its power. (shrink)

Philosophers after Leibniz used a technical idiom to classify and explain the nature of mental content. Substantive philosophical claims were formulated in terms of this vocabulary, including claims about the nature of mental representations, concepts, unconscious mental content, and consciousness. Despite its importance, the origin and development of this vocabulary is insufficiently well understood. More specifically, interpreters have failed to recognize the existence of two distinct and influential versions of the post-Leibnizian idiom. These competing formulations used the same technical terms (...) and taxonomic relations but assigned different connotations to those terms and employed different criteria for their application. This paper explains the two most influential versions of the post-Leibnizian idiom. (shrink)

The Molyneux problem is one of the major questions addressed by early modern authors. Whereas Locke’s response to Molyneux’s question has been the subject of extensive scholarly discussion, Leibniz’s response has received comparatively little attention. This paper defends an interpretation of Leibniz’s nuanced response to the problem and criticizes a competing interpretation that has recently been proposed.

Since his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft was first published in 1786, controversy has surrounded Immanuel Kant’s conception of matter. In particular, the justification for both his dynamical theory of matter and the related dismissal of mechanical philosophy are obscure. In this paper, I address these longstanding issues and establish that Kant’s dynamism rests upon Leibnizian, metaphysical commitments held by Kant from his early pre-Critical texts on natural philosophy to his major critical works. I demonstrate that, throughout his corpus and inspired (...) by Leibniz, Kant endorses the a priori law of continuity of alteration as a truth of metaphysics, according to which all alterations in experience must occur gradually through all intervening degrees. The principle thus legislates against mechanical philosophy’s absolutely impenetrable atoms, as they would would involve instantaneous changes of velocity in impact. This reveals the metaphysical incoherencies in mechanical philosophy and leaves Kant’s own dynamical theory of matter, grounded on material forces, as the only viable approach to physical explanation. Subsequently, I demonstrate that Kant nevertheless made conceptual space in his system for the theoretical consideration of mechanical explanations, which makes manifest one of the positive roles that the faculty of reason can play with respect to natural science. (shrink)

In the Monadology Leibniz has us imagine a thinking machine the size of a mill in order to show that matter can’t think. The argument is often thought to rely on the unity of consciousness and the notion of simplicity. Leibniz himself did not see matters this way. For him the argument relies on the view that the qualities of a substance must be intimately connected to its nature by being modifications, limitations of its nature. Leibniz thinks perception is not (...) a modification of matter because it is active and matter is passive. At the same time, there are traces in Leibniz of a different argument that relies on the notion of internal action, which may involve the notion of simplicity. Critics have sometimes charged that the Mill Argument is an argument from ignorance, but Leibniz was aware of this problem and made clear that he did not make that mistake. (shrink)

El presente artículo se centra en el esclarecimiento de las nociones de percepciones inconscientes («petites perceptions»), percepciones y apercepciones en la teoría de la conciencia en Leibniz con el fin de responder dos preguntas: 1) Ad intra, es decir, intra-sustancialmente: ¿Cómo un evento inconsciente se vuelve consciente dentro de una misma sustancia simple?; 2) Ad extra, es decir, inter-sustancialmente: ¿dónde puede decirse que surge la conciencia en la jerarquía de mónadas? Para responder estas preguntas, seguiré la siguiente metodología. En primer (...) lugar, presentaré la teoría de la conciencia en Leibniz enmarcada en su visión metafísica. Presentaré a su vez los pasajes más conflictivos y el problema que surge al momento de definir la conciencia. En segundo lugar, presentaré las interpretaciones más comentadas que existen actualmente acerca de este problema. Me centraré en las posturas de Rocco J. Gennaro, Larry M. Jorgensen, Christian Barth y Alison Simmons. Finalmente, propondré una interpretación propia de la teoría de la conciencia en Leibniz. (shrink)

In this paper, I compare Pierre-Simon Laplace's celebrated formulation of the principle of determinism in his 1814 Essai philosophique sur les probabilités with the formulation of the same principle offered by Roger Joseph Boscovich in his Theoria philosophiae naturalis, published 56 years earlier. This comparison discloses a striking general similarity between the two formulations of determinism as well as certain important differences. Regarding their similarities, both Boscovich's and Laplace's conceptions of determinism involve two mutually interdependent components—ontological and epistemic—and they are (...) both intimately linked with the principles of causality and continuity. Regarding their differences, however, Boscovich's formulation of the principle of determinism turns out not only to be temporally prior to Laplace's but also—being founded on fewer metaphysical principles and more rooted in and elaborated by physical assumptions—to be more precise, complete and comprehensive than Laplace's somewhat parenthetical statement of the doctrine. A detailed analysis of these similarities and differences, so far missing in the literature on the history and philosophy of the concept of determinism, is the main goal of the present paper. (shrink)

Many historians of the calculus deny significant continuity between infinitesimal calculus of the seventeenth century and twentieth century developments such as Robinson’s theory. Robinson’s hyperreals, while providing a consistent theory of infinitesimals, require the resources of modern logic; thus many commentators are comfortable denying a historical continuity. A notable exception is Robinson himself, whose identification with the Leibnizian tradition inspired Lakatos, Laugwitz, and others to consider the history of the infinitesimal in a more favorable light. Inspite of his Leibnizian sympathies, (...) Robinson regards Berkeley’s criticisms of the infinitesimal calculus as aptly demonstrating the inconsistency of reasoning with historical infinitesimal magnitudes. We argue that Robinson, among others, overestimates the force of Berkeley’s criticisms, by underestimating the mathematical and philosophical resources available to Leibniz. Leibniz’s infinitesimals are fictions, not logical fictions, as Ishiguro proposed, but rather pure fictions, like imaginaries, which are not eliminable by some syncategorematic paraphrase. We argue that Leibniz’s defense of infinitesimals is more firmly grounded than Berkeley’s criticism thereof. We show, moreover, that Leibniz’s system for differential calculus was free of logical fallacies. Our argument strengthens the conception of modern infinitesimals as a development of Leibniz’s strategy of relating inassignable to assignable quantities by means of his transcendental law of homogeneity. (shrink)

There has recently been a growing interest in the topic of vagueness and indeterminacy in contemporary metaphysics, with two views taking center stage. The semantic view holds that indeterminacy is due to vagueness in the extension of concepts, while the ontological view holds that indeterminacy is due to the vagueness of certain objects. There has, however, been little research on discussions of vagueness and indeterminacy in early-modern philosophy despite the relevance of vagueness and indeterminacy for issues such as real and (...) nominal definitions, clear and distinct ideas, and the principle of complete determination. In this paper, I survey discussions of vagueness in Locke, Leibniz, and Kant and point to ways in which the problem of vagueness and indeterminacy touches on broader issues in their respective philosophies. Although Locke, Leibniz, and Kant all suggest that vagueness is a semantic phenomenon, Kant also appears to countenance an ontological view according to which objects as appearances may sometimes be indeterminate. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to show that we can extract an elaborate account of phe- nomenal consciousness from Leibniz’s (1646-1716) writings. Against a prevalent view, which attributes a higher-order reflection account of phenomenal consciousness to Leibniz, it is argued that we should understand Leibniz as holding a first-order concep- tion of it. In this conception, the consciousness aspect of phenomenal consciousness is explained in terms of a specific type of attention. This type of attention, in turn, is (...) accounted for in terms of cognitive appetites aiming at knowledge about a repre- sented object by means of initiating cognitive operations on representational content. Furthermore, against the view that Leibniz holds a reifying account, it is argued that Leibniz accepts an epistemic account of phenomenal character. According to this view, the phenomenal character of phenomenally conscious states rests on the con- fusing effect of imperfect acts of attention directed towards representational contents. Holding this view, Leibniz finds fruitful middle ground between contemporary stan- dard positions like higher-order theories, representationalist conceptions, and qualia accounts of phenomenal consciousness. His position possesses resources to meet sev- eral objections these standard accounts are confronted with. (shrink)

In attempts to come to grips with Kant’s thought, the influence of the philosophy of Christian Wolff (1679-1754) is often neglected. In this paper, I consider three topics in Kant’s philosophy of mind, broadly construed, where Wolff’s influence is particularly visible: consciousness, self-consciousness, and psychology. I argue that we can better understand Kant’s particular arguments and positions within this context, but also gain a more accurate sense of which aspects of Kant’s accounts derive from the antecedent traditions and which constitute (...) genuine philosophical innovations. (shrink)

Resumen El objetivo principal de este artículo es analizar la distinción leibniziana entre apercepción sensible y consáentia a la luz de su ontología monadológica, con la intención de esclarecer las diferencias constitutivas entre los tres tipos de mónadas que Leibniz postula, esto es, entre las mónadas simples, las meras almas y los espíritus. Con esto, además de argumentar en contra de la concepción estándar de la apercepción, la cual termina por confinarla al caso específico de los espíritus, sitúo la propuesta (...) del hannoveriano entre dos lecturas contemporáneas: por un lado, aquella que comprende la apercepción como un acto de orden superior reflexivo, esto es, una percepción de la percepción; y, por otro lado, aquella que, al distinguir entre apercepción sensible y consáentia, privilegia una teoría de primer orden para hablar de la primera, reservando los actos reflexivos para la segunda. Aunque la evidencia textual es más afín con la segunda, hay elementos de la primera que permiten matizarla.The main aim of this article is to analyze Leibniz’s distinction between sensitive apperception and ‘conscientia’ through his monadological ontology, with the intention of lighten the constitutive differences between the three types of monads that Leibniz state, that is, between bare monads, souls and spirits. By proving this, my approach not only argues against the standard conceptions of Leibniz's notion of apperception, which ends attributing apperception only to the specify case of spirits, but it abo places the Hanoverian proposal between two contemporary lectures: on one side, an approach that understand apperception as a high order reflexive act, that is, a perception of a perception; on the other side, an approach that distinguishes sensible apperception from ‘conscientia’ in order to privilege a first order theory for the first one, reserving the reflective acts only for the second. Even when the textual evidence is closer to the last one, there are some elements of the first approach that allow us to improve it. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper expounds and critically assesses G. W. Leibniz’s mature theory of the cohesion of material bodies. Leibniz’s later view of cohesion was forged in polemical engagement with the views of John Locke and the Dutch natural philosopher Nicolaas Hartsoeker and it is in Leibniz’s response to Locke in his New Essays on Human Understanding, and especially his correspondence with Hartsoeker, that the theory is revealed. After setting out Locke’s theory of solidity and cohesion, the paper examines Leibniz’s response to (...) Locke in the New Essays. It then proceeds to the mechanical theory of conspiring motions developed in the Hartsoeker correspondence. The final section of the paper poses three problems for Leibniz’s theory – explanatory, empirical, and conceptual. (shrink)