In recent years a certain emphasis has been put by some scholars on Leibniz’s concern about empirical sciences and the relations between such concern and the development of his mature metaphysical system. In this paper I focus on Leibniz’s interest for the microscope and the astonishing discoveries that such instrument made possible in the field of the life sciences during the last part of the Seventeenth century. The observation of physical bodies carried out by the “magnifying glasses” revealed a matter (...) swarming everywhere with life and activity, contrary to the cartesian and atomistic view of matter as something sterile and passive. Moreover, the discovery of uncountable complete “animalcula” living in the smallest drop of water provided evidence for the idea of the preformation of every organism. During his lifetime, Leibniz was extremely watchful about the new microscopical discoveries and came into contact with some of the major “observers” of his time, such as Hooke, Leeuwenhoek, Swammerdam and Malpighi. Relying both on some passages in Leibniz’s texts and on recent critical studies, I will argue that important aspects of his metaphysics have been strongly affected by the empirical observation of the “invisible world” which the microscope made possible. In the last part of the paper I show how the concept of “preformation”, originally drawn from the context of the life sciences, comes to play in Leibnizʼs philosophy a very general role, going far beyond the scope of biology and shaping important aspects of his overall philosophical system. (shrink)

Ideas will always resist single-statement definitions, but in a rough attempt at generalization one can say that they either play or are attributed a very special role in thinking and expressive processes, in perhaps all domains of human culture. People who specialize in creating, receiving, transforming, and disseminating them are usually called “intellectuals”—even if they do not monopolize those social practices. The constitution and circulation of ideas as structures of thinking and expression, the settings in which they originate and to (...) which they respond, the material supports in which they are conveyed as well as the intellectual agents specialized in dealing with them are studied by the history of ideas and its neighboring fields. These include intellectual history, history of concepts, histoire des mentalités, Geistesgeschichte, history of books, and even cultural history, sociology of knowledge, and the histories of science, philosophy, literature, and the humanities. As it is obvious, such labels do not support a clear-cut division of labor, nor can they be lined up in an organogram that would fix constant hierarchical relations between them. They show up with incommensurable frequency, displaying different connotations within different academic cultures. This explains why in some cases—as in Geistesgeschichte, Begriffsgeschichte, or histoire des mentalités—equivalent English terms are considered problematic or unnecessary. Having flourished, spread, and sometimes also decayed within different national, disciplinary, and generational contexts, the fields designated by them can only have intricate and overlapping limits. A good way to understand the traditions connected to the history of ideas is hence to look closely to their messy border zones. The closest and most intricate connections are those between “history of ideas” and “intellectual history,” which is reflected in the fact that these terms are often employed interchangeably—a use that will be noted also in the remainder of the present text. Even so, “intellectual history” clearly emerged as preferential designation in the English-speaking world in the final decades of the twentieth century. A reason for this is the spread of the suspicion that “ideas” are burdened by essentialist traits that would render us insensitive to historical discontinuity. The notion of ideas is also sometimes regarded as much too oblivious of the way language conditions thought, and accordingly some analysts suggest that it would be out of line with the best theoretical intelligence established since the so-called linguistic turn (see Kelley 2002a: 310–14). However, others claim that ideas should not be equaled to expressed words, as they refer to occurrences that are best described with psychological terms such as beliefs and attitudes, and, further, that there would be non-essentialist ways of addressing them . What seems more uncontroversial is that, in comparison to “history of ideas,” “intellectual history” opens up an enlarged space of ambivalence as regards the analytical focus, which can then toggle from intellectual products to intellectual producers, consumers, and the cultural frameworks in which they interact. There are also important crossroads between the history of ideas and conceptual history (or Begriffsgeschichte), as both terms signal to the historical study of basic structures of thought. Conceptual history, however, at least in its most well-known variety, which was very much inspired by social-historical approaches, tends to be less centered on biographical and psychological issues and to introduce concepts as more depersonalized linguistic entities. Such and other connections and disconnections between the various ways of attending to “the reflective communal life of human beings in the past” (Burrow) will be further discussed in the following from the perspective of a geographically multicentered historical synopsis. Hopefully, its many limitations will be compensated by the possibilty of bringing to the fore relations that otherwise would not become so salient. (shrink)

This paper explores how Maqāṣid al-Sharī‘ah could contribute to the application of the Sharī‘ah itself in contemporary Muslim societies and to making the appropriate related juridical policies. The soundness of the application of the Shar‘īah and related policies is subject to the degree of universality and flexibility of the Islamic rulings with changing circumstances, are discussed from various viewpoints in this paper. After a survey of the system of values that Maqāṣid al-Sharī‘ah represent, three methods are explored: differentiating between scripts (...) that are means to higher ends and scripts that are ends in their own right, preferring a multi-dimensional understanding for the conciliation of opposing juridical evidence, instead of reductionist methods such as abrogation and elimination, and achieving a universality of Sharī‘ah across cultures via the consideration of customs. A number of examples are provided throughout the paper in order to explain the impact of the proposed methods on contemporary Islamic rulings and juridical policies related to them. (shrink)