The article is a critical notice of Daniel Garber, Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad. Garber presents a developmental reading of Leibniz's metaphysics that focuses on Leibniz's evolving analysis of body and force as the key to his account of substance. Garber claims that Leibniz shifts from an early theory of body to a theory of corporeal substance in his middle years, and only develops a theory of monads in his later writings—and that even then Leibniz looks not to abandon the scheme (...) of corporeal substances but to reconcile it with that of monads. The present article considers several challenges to Garber's interpretation, questioning, among other things, Garber's claims about development and Garber's account of Leibniz's primary arguments for the theory of monads. The article concludes that while crucial elements of the standard interpretation of Leibniz as an idealist can be defended against Garber's critique, the original traditional view that takes the theory of monads as the first and most fundamental principle of Leibniz's metaphysics is no longer sustainable. (shrink)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is the self-proclaimed inventor of the binary system and is considered as such by most historians of mathematics and/or mathematicians. Really though, we owe the groundwork of today’s computing not to Leibniz but to the Englishman Thomas Harriot and the Spaniard Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz, whom Leibniz plagiarized. This plagiarism has been identified on the basis of several facts: Caramuel’s work on the binary system is earlier than Leibniz’s, Leibniz was acquainted—both directly and indirectly—with Caramuel’s work and (...) Leibniz had a natural tendency to plagiarize scientific works. (shrink)

Daniel Garber has put forward an argument that aims to show that Kant’s understanding of Leibniz’ metaphysics should be discounted because he could only have had access to a small and narrow sample of Leibniz’ works from around 1710–1714. In particular, Garber argues that as Kant could not have read Leibniz’ correspondence with Arnauld or his correspondence with Des Bosses he could not have had an adequate conception of Leibniz’ understanding of the relation between substance and body. I will show (...) that Kant could have read some of the Arnauld correspondence and practically all of the Des Bosses correspondence, as well as a number of other related texts that are important for understanding Leibniz’ metaphysics, over a decade before writing the Critique of Pure Reason. Garber’s historical-textual argument for dismissing Kant’s account of Leibniz’ metaphysics is therefore seriously misleading. (shrink)