Robert Adams’s book has already established itself as a major contribution to the Leibniz literature. It is marked by a rare combination of scholarly and philosophical virtues. Adams knows Leibniz’s texts as well as anyone working today and has an unmatched ability to draw from them novel and penetrating interpretations of Leibniz’s doctrines. In describing the book, Adams declares that it is “not an introduction to Leibniz’s philosophy, nor even a fully comprehensive account of his metaphysics. It is a piece (...) of research into three areas related to the three attributes mentioned in the title”. This is a fair assessment of the volume’s scope, yet any implied limitations are more than compensated for by the depth of Adams’s treatment of his topics, by the connections he establishes between them, and by the range of textual evidence on which he draws. (shrink)

Adams presents an in-depth interpretation of three important parts of Leibniz's metaphysics, thoroughly grounded in the texts as well as in philosophical analysis and critique. The three areas discussed are the metaphysical part of Leibniz's philosophy of logic, his essentially theological treatment of the central issues of ontology, and his theory of substance. Adams' work helps make sense of one of the great classic systems of modern philosophy.

This is the most up-to-date and comprehensive interpretation of the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Amongst its other virtues, it makes considerable use of unpublished manuscript sources. The book seeks to demonstrate the systematic unity of Leibniz's thought, in which theodicy, ethics, metaphysics and natural philosophy cohere. The key, underlying idea of the system is the conception of nature as an order designed by God to maximise the opportunities for the exercise of reason. From this idea emerges the view that (...) this world is the best of all possible worlds, and an ethical ideal in which the well-being of human beings is promoted through the gradual extension of intellectual enlightenment. (shrink)

Approaches to historical figures may be roughly divided into three clumps. Internalist approaches feature close textual exegesis, analyzing, interpreting and interpolating various texts of the thinker, all in aid of careful exposition of his or her flow of thought; Don Rutherford’s Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature provides an exemplar here. Externalist approaches attempt to place the thinker in his or her intellectual milieu, paying careful attention to links of origin and consequence; Catherine Wilson’s Leibniz’s metaphysics: a historical and (...) comparative study is an exemplar of this sort of work. Historicist approaches attempt to find contemporary relevance for aspects of the thinker’s work, oftentimes extending and extrapolating elements of the original texts in consistent and coherent ways; Dionysios Anastasiou Anapolitanos’s Leibniz: Representation, Continuity, and the Spatio-Temporal is an exemplar of this approach. Anapolitanos investigates Leibniz’s writings on the continuum in an attempt not only to discover the nature of Leibniz’s view of the issues, but also to asses his successes and failures in dealing with this difficult topic’s inherent problems. Anapolitanos‘s conclusion is quite straightforward: Leibniz’s own solution to the labyrinthus continui fails, but “without substantial modifications, his metaphysics could have allowed him to adopt a solution much closer to our modern conception of the problem.” This is a bold claim, clearly revisionary, clearly historicist, perhaps anachronistic, but, if Anapolitanos can successfully make his argument, it is a useful and interesting point to add to contemporary Leibniz scholarship. In my view, the argument succeeds. (shrink)

This essay examines one of the cornerstones of Leibniz's defense of teleology within the order of nature. The first section explores Leibniz's contributions to the study of geometrical optics, and argues that his "Most Determined Path Principle" or "MDPP" allows him to bring to the fore philosophical issues concerning the legitimacy of teleological explanations by addressing two technical objections raised by Cartesians to non-mechanistic derivations of the laws of optics. The second section argues that, by drawing on laws such as (...) the MDPP, Leibniz is able to introduce a thin notion of teleology that gives him the resources to respond to the most pressing charges of his day against teleological explanations within natural philosophy. Finally, the third section argues that contemporary philosophers have been overly hasty in their dismissal of Leibniz's account of natural teleology, and indeed that their own generally thin conceptions of teleology have left them with few well-motivated resources for resisting his elegant position. (shrink)