Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole were philosophers and theologians associated with Port-Royal Abbey, a centre of the Catholic Jansenist movement in seventeenth-century France. Their enormously influential Logic or the Art of Thinking, which went through five editions in their lifetimes, treats topics in logic, language, theory of knowledge and metaphysics, and also articulates the response of 'heretical' Jansenist Catholicism to orthodox Catholic and Protestant views on grace, free will and the sacraments. In attempting to combine the categorical theory of the (...) proposition with a Cartesian account of knowledge, their Logic represents the classical view of judgment which inspired the modern transformation in logic and semantic theory by Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and recent philosophers. This edition presents a new translation of the text, together with a historical introduction and suggestions for further reading. (shrink)

What did Leibniz have to contribute to the philosophy of mind? To judge from textbooks in the philosophy of mind, and even Leibniz commentaries, the answer is: not much. That may be because Leibniz’s philosophy of mind looks roughly like a Cartesian philosophy of mind. Like Descartes and his followers, Leibniz claims that the mind is immaterial and immortal; that it is a thinking thing ; that it is a different kind of thing from body and obeys its own laws; (...) and that it comes stocked with innate truth-tracking intellectual ideas and an epistemically troubling habit of forming confused sensory ideas on the occasion of external corporeal events. Nothing is new. Of course, Leibniz adds unconscious perceptions to the mind in the form of his famous petites perceptions, and he offers a unique solution to the problem of mind-body interaction in the form of his infamous pre-established harmony. In the overall scheme of things, however, these look like minor alterations in a philosophy of mind that the Cartesians had been advocating for some fifty years. Or so it appears. (shrink)

Drawing on remarks scattered through his writings, I argue that Leibniz has a highly distinctive and interesting theory of color. The central feature of the theory is the way in which it combines a nuanced subjectivism about color with a reductive approach of a sort usually associated with objectivist theories of color. After reconstructing Leibniz's theory and calling attention to some of its most notable attractions, I turn to the apparent incompatibility of its subjective and reductive components. I argue that (...) this apparent tension vanishes in light of his rejection of a widely accepted doctrine concerning the nature of bodies and their geometrical qualities. (shrink)

Leibniz est-il devenu phénoménaliste pendant ses années dernières ? Contre Furth et Loeb, ce travail rend une réponse négative à cette question. Quoique Leibniz a caressé les idées phénoménalistes, il ne les a jamais vraiment acceptées ; au contraire, il soutient une autre thèse réductioniste, c'est-à-dire que les corps sont des agrégats des monades. Cependant, cette conclusion entraîne ses propres difficultés, car à certains égards, la doctrine phénoménaliste paraît plus satisfaisante que l'option concurrante. On soutient que la répugnance leibnizienne à (...) accepter le phénoménalisme doit s'expliquer par son dessein de concilier la monadologie et la physique. (shrink)

This volume is a critical edition of the eight-year correspondence between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Burcher de Volder, professor of philosophy and mathematics at Leiden University. Containing the surviving correspondence between Leibniz and De Volder, the volume also presents a generous selection from the letters between Leibniz and his friend Johann Bernoulli, through whose intercession the correspondence began. Bernoulli acted as intermediary throughout, and the often candid discussions between Leibniz and Bernoulli provide illuminating background to the correspondence proper. Each of (...) the selections appears both in the original Latin and in English translation. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Dennis Plaisted examines an important argument that Leibniz gives for the existence of primitive concepts. After sketching a natural reading of this argument, Plaisted observes that the argument appears to imply something clearly inconsistent with Leibniz’s other views. To save Leibniz from contradiction, Plaisted offers a revision. However, his account faces a number of serious difficulties and therefore does not successfully eliminate the inconsistency. We explain these difficulties and defend a more plausible alternative. In the process, (...) we call attention to the neglected topic of Leibniz’s views on the nature of conceiving, and reveal his commitment to the somewhat surprising thesis that one can conceive something through a concept even if one has no conscious grasp of that concept. (shrink)

According to Margaret Wilson, Leibniz is inconsistent when it comes to the question of whether one can have distinct ideas of sensible qualities, and this because he sometimes conceives of sensible qualities as sensations and sometimes conceives of them as complexes of primary qualities. When he conceives of them as sensations, he denies that we can have distinct ideas of sensible qualities; when he conceives of them as complexes of primary qualities, he asserts that we can. In this paper I (...) argue that Wilson is wrong to think that Leibnizian ideas admit of various degrees of confusion or distinctness. I also argue that although Wilson's problem admits of being reformulated in a manner consistent with a correct understanding of Leibnizian perceptions and ideas, this reformulated version of the problem admits to a satisfactory interpretive solution. (shrink)

On its face, Leibniz's argument for primitive concepts seems to imply that unless we can analyze non-primitive concepts into their primitive constituents, we cannot grasp them. This implication, together with Leibniz's belief that we do conceive of some non-primitive concepts, entails that we can analyze some non-primitive concepts into their primitive components. However, Leibniz claims elsewhere that we are incapable of doing this. To resolve this inconsistency, I argue that, for Leibniz, grasping a concept is not an all-or-nothing affair; instead (...) we possess concepts in degrees. When reinterpreted in line with this, Leibniz's argument can avoid the inconsistency. (shrink)

This paper examines Aquinas’ account of a certain kind of rational control: the control one exercises in using one’s reason to make a judgment. Though this control is not itself a kind of voluntary control, it is a precondition for voluntariness. Aquinas claims that one’s voluntary actions must spring from judgments that are subject to one’s rational control and that, because of this, only rational animals can act voluntarily. This rational kind of control depends on a certain distinctive feature of (...) the rational faculty. For Aquinas, reason differs from other faculties in that it can be exercised in a peculiarly self-reflective way: in exercising reason one can be grasping the point of what one is doing in that very exercise of reason. The sense in which one controls one’s rational judgment is that one is, in judging, guided by the norm of judging truly. Aquinas holds that it is only possible to be so guided because the power by which one judges (namely, reason) is self-reflective in this special sense: part of what it is to judge is to grasp the point of what one is doing in that very act of judging. The paper argues that the roots of this view can be found in neoplatonic discussions of self-constitution and self-knowledge. (shrink)

In the first section of this paper I discuss what Leibniz meant by a miracle and why Leibniz’s definition of the best of all possible worlds implies that it is a world in which miracles are minimized. In the second part of the paper I argue that human happiness within the best of all possible worlds also requires, on Leibniz’s principles, that miracles must there be minimized. In the third section of the paper I consider what, if any, miracles actually (...) remain possible for Leibniz within the best of all possible worlds. In the final section I discuss one important kind of event upon which Leibniz vacillated whether it required miraculous intervention -- namely, the elevation of the sensitive soul to rationality -- and some speculation about the cause of this vacillation in Leibniz is offered. (shrink)

Robert M. Adams behauptet, daß Leibniz' zwei Konzeptionen der Körper als bloße Phänomene und als Aggregate von Substanzen konsistent und somit Bestandteile einer einzigen Theorie der Phänomene seien. Dagegen möchte ich hier zeigen, daß Adams' Strategie, Körper als intentionale Objekte der Perzeption zu verstehen - als objektive Realität von Ideen im kartesischen Sinn - nicht vereinbar damit ist, sie als Aggregate von Substanzen aufzufassen. Mit Adams stimme ich insofern überein, als Aggregate von Monaden sich nur im Geist als Einheit finden, (...) ich bestreite jedoch, daß nur im Geist die Aggregate dann auch sind. (shrink)

Draws on new evidence to argue that the Jesuits had plotted Galileo's downfall for reasons other than his beliefs about astronomy.

This paper discusses the problem of sensible qualities, an important, but underestimated topic in Leibniz's epistemology. In the first section, the confused character of sensible ideas is considered. Produced by the sensation alone, ideas of sensible qualities cannot be part of distinct descriptions of bodies. This is why Leibniz proposes to resolve sensible qualities by means of primary or mechanical qualities, a thesis which is analysed in the second section. Here, I discuss his conception of nominal definitions as distinct empirical (...) representations. The provisional and modifiable status of nominal definitions is then explained in the third section. Since nominal descriptions always contain sensible determinations, Leibniz claims that empirical knowledge is indefinitely changeable according to progress in sciences. In the final section, I address the criterion of coherence that enables us to approve of hypotheses that are based on both sensible and empirical properties. (shrink)

In this paper I wish to examine the nature and role of "the phenomena of God" in Leinbiz's mature thought. In the first part of the paper, I discuss the nature of the universal harmony and argue that they are the perceptiual states of finite substances and the relations among them that constitute God's phenomena. In the second part of the paper, I attempt to specify the theoretical role that God's phenomena play in Leibniz's phenomenalism. This leads finally to a (...) discussion of Leibniz's teleological reasoning in the investigation of nature and of how that justification undercuts the argument for God's existence from the pre-established harmony. (shrink)

I argue Leibniz could not have been a dualist since his notion of matter is not defined by extension but by mentalistic "primitive passive force." So Leibniz was some kind of idealist. However, Leibniz was neither a phenomenal idealist like Berkeley nor a conceptualist idealist like Hegel. Instead, despite some suggestions in favor of the latter kind of idealism, Leibniz must be regarded as an idealist who admitted extraconceptual considerations irreducible to materialism.

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)