The revival of Leibniz studies in the past twenty-five years has cast important new light on both the context and content of Leibniz's philosophical thought. Where earlier English-language scholarship understood Leibniz's philosophy as issuing from his preoccupations with logic and language, recent work has recommended an account on which theological, ethical, and metaphysical themes figure centrally in Leibniz's thought throughout his career. The significance of these themes to the development of Leibniz's philosophy is the subject of increasing attention by philosophers (...) and historians. This collection of new essays by a distinguished group of scholars offers an up-to-date overview of the current state of Leibniz research. In focusing on nature and freedom, the volume revisits two key topics in Leibniz's thought, on which he engaged both contemporary and historical arguments. Important contributions to Leibniz scholarship in their own right, these articles collectively provide readers a framework in which to better situate Leibniz's distinctive philosophy of nature and the congenial home for a morally significant freedom that he took it to provide. (shrink)

Passion and Action is an exploration of the role of the passions in seventeenth-century thought. Susan James offers fresh readings of a broad range of thinkers, including such canonical figures as Hobbes, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Pascal, and Locke, and shows that a full understanding of their philosophies must take account of their interpretations of our affective life. This ground-breaking study throws new light upon the shaping of our ideas about the mind, knowledge, and action, and provides a historical context for (...) burgeoning current debates about the emotions. (shrink)

The selections contained in these volumes from the papers and letters of Leibniz are intended to serve the student in two ways: first, by providing a more adequate and balanced conception of the full range and penetration of Leibniz's creative intellectual powers; second, by inviting a fresher approach to his intellectual growth and a clearer perception of the internal strains in his thinking, through a chronological arrangement. Much confusion has arisen in the past through a neglect of the develop ment (...) of Leibniz's ideas, and Couturat's impressive plea, in his edition of the Opuscu/es et fragments (p. xii), for such an arrangement is valid even for incomplete editions. The beginning student will do well, however, to read the maturer writings of Parts II, III, and IV first, leaving Part I, from a period too largely neglected by Leibniz criticism, for a later study of the still obscure sources and motives of his thought. The Introduction aims primarily to provide cultural orientation and an exposition of the structure and the underlying assumptions of the philosophical system rather than a critical evaluation. I hope that together with the notes and the Index, it will provide those aids to the understanding which the originality of Leibniz's scientific, ethical, and metaphysical efforts deserve. (shrink)

Of all the thinkers of the century of genius that inaugurated modern philosophy, none lived an intellectual life more rich and varied than Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Maria Rosa Antognazza's pioneering biography provides a unified portrait of this unique thinker and the world from which he came. At the centre of the huge range of Leibniz's apparently miscellaneous endeavours, Antognazza reveals a single master project lending unity to his extraordinarily multifaceted life's work. Throughout the vicissitudes of his long life, Leibniz tenaciously (...) pursued the dream of a systematic reform and advancement of all the sciences. As well as tracing the threads of continuity that bound these theoretical and practical activities to this all-embracing plan, this illuminating study also traces these threads back into the intellectual traditions of the Holy Roman Empire in which Leibniz lived and throughout the broader intellectual networks that linked him to patrons in countries as distant as Russia and to correspondents as far afield as China. (shrink)

In his well-known Discourse on Metaphysics , Leibniz puts individual substance at the basis of metaphysical building. In so doing, he connects himself to a venerable tradition. His theory of individual concept, however, breaks with another idea of the same tradition, that no account of the individual as such can be given. Contrary to what has been commonly accepted, Leibniz’s intuitions are not the mere result of the transcription of subject-predicate logic, nor of the uncritical persistence of some old metaphysical (...) assumptions. They grow, instead, from an unprejudiced inquiry about our basic ontological framework, where logic of truth, linguistic analysis, and phenomenological experience of the mind’s life are tightly interwoven. Leibniz’s struggle for a concept capable of grasping concrete individuals as such is pursued in an age of great paradigm changes – from the Scholastic background to Hobbes’s nominalism to the Cartesian ‘way of ideas’ or Spinoza’s substance metaphysics – when the relationships among words, ideas and things are intensively discussed and wholly reshaped. This is the context where the genesis and significance of Leibniz’s theory of ‘complete being’ and its concept are reconstrued. The result is a fresh look at some of the most perplexing issues in Leibniz scholarship, like his ideas about individual identity and the thesis that all its properties are essential to an individual. The questions Leibniz faces, and to which his theory of individual substance aims to answer, are yet, to a large extent, those of contemporary metaphysics: how to trace a categorial framework? How to distinguish concrete and abstract items? What is the metaphysical basis of linguistic predication? How is trans-temporal sameness assured? How to make sense of essential attributions? In this ontological framework Leibniz’s further questions about the destiny of human individuals and their history are spelt out. Maybe his answers also have something to tell us. This book is aimed at all who are interested in Leibniz’s philosophy, history of early modern philosophy and metaphysical issues in their historical development. (shrink)

This book offers a major reassessment of Leibniz's metaphysics. Christia Mercer has exposed the underlying doctrines of Leibniz's philosophy. By analysing Leibniz's early works she demonstrates that the metaphysics of pre-established harmony developed many years earlier than previously believed and for reasons which have not been understood. As a result of this analysis she has unearthed a philosophical school that Leibniz scholars have not recognized. A much deeper understanding of some of Leibniz's key doctrines emerges. Moreover, since the Leibniz that (...) is revealed here does not fit neatly into the standard accounts of the history of philosophy and science, Christia Mercer's study will prompt scholars to reconsider their basic assumptions about early modern philosophy and science. (shrink)

Spinoza's Ethics is one of the most remarkable, important, and difficult books in the history of philosophy: a treatise simultaneously on metaphysics, knowledge, philosophical psychology, moral philosophy, and political philosophy. It presents, in Spinoza's famous 'geometric method', his radical views on God, Nature, the human being, and happiness. In this wide-ranging 2006 introduction to the work, Steven Nadler explains the doctrines and arguments of the Ethics, and shows why Spinoza's endlessly fascinating ideas may have been so troubling to his contemporaries, (...) as well as why they are still highly relevant today. He also examines the philosophical background to Spinoza's thought and the dialogues in which Spinoza was engaged - with his contemporaries, with ancient thinkers, and with his Jewish rationalist forebears. His book is written for the student reader but will also be of interest to specialists in early modern philosophy. (shrink)

C'est en janvier 1678 que Leibniz a adopté la formule mv2 comme mesure de la force et a identifié en elle l'invariant d'un principe général de conservation, évinçant le principe cartésien de conservation de la quantité de mouvement. Leibniz a caractérisé comme " réforme " cette nouvelle formulation qui rendait possible d'appréhender dans une systématicité originale les lois du mouvement. Le De corporum concursu est publié ici pour la première fois, avec d'autres documents entièrement inédits qui en éclairent les antécédents (...) et les suites. L'Introduction restitue l'état des problèmes qui ont soutenu la formation des idées fondatrices de la philosophie de la nature leiblizienne. Un Commentaire suivi, faisant place à la traduction de larges extraits, restitue la signification historique et épistémologique d'un document qui apporte une information entièrement nouvelle sur un moment essentiel dans la constitution de la pensée de Leibniz. (shrink)

Between the years 1643 and 1649, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes exchanged fifty-eight letters—thirty-two from Descartes and twenty-six from Elisabeth. Their correspondence contains the only known extant philosophical writings by Elisabeth, revealing her mastery of metaphysics, analytic geometry, and moral philosophy, as well as her keen interest in natural philosophy. The letters are essential reading for anyone interested in Descartes’s philosophy, in particular his account of the human being as a union of mind and body, as well as (...) his ethics. They also provide a unique insight into the character of their authors and the way ideas develop through intellectual collaboration. Philosophers have long been familiar with Descartes’s side of the correspondence. Now Elisabeth’s letters—never before available in translation in their entirety—emerge this volume, adding much-needed context and depth both to Descartes’s ideas and the legacy of the princess. Lisa Shapiro’s annotated edition—which also includes Elisabeth’s correspondence with the Quakers William Penn and Robert Barclay—will be heralded by students of philosophy, feminist theorists, and historians of the early modern period. (shrink)

Daniel Garber presents a study of Leibniz's conception of the physical world, elucidating his puzzling metaphysics of monads, mind-like simple substances.

Kant believed that true enlightenment is the use of reason freely in public. This book systematicaaly traces the philosophical origins and development of the idea that the improvement of human understanding requires public activity. Michael Losonsky focuses on seventeenth-century discussions of the problem of irresolution and the closely connected theme of the role of volition in human belief formation. This involves a discussion of the work of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza and Leibniz. Challenging the traditional views of seventeenth-century philosophy and (...) written in a lucid, non-technical language, this book will be eagerly sought out by historians of philosophy and students of the history of ideas. (shrink)

If we take a closer look at De affectibus we gain revealing insight into Leibniz's workshop of ideas. From the 20th to the 22nd of April 1679 he began to develop ideas which at first look like an attempt to realise his long-planned Philosophia de mente but which in fact move more and more in the direction of his later Monadology. He entitled these studies, on which he worked again and again, De affectibus because he ultimately sought the reason for (...) the mind's occupation with particular thoughts in the emotions which determine it. But this is only the theme in the first part of his investigations. In the second part of De affectibus, on which my paper focuses, Leibniz's investigations become more abstract. He ceases to be interested in emotions and proceeds instead to create definitions and draw principles from these with which he is able to achieve the logico-ontological construction of possible worlds, even if this term itself does not appear. He effectively creates laws which would bring order into the chaos of possibilities. To this end, he investigates between all possibilities the relations of consequence, identity and diversity, compatibility and incompatibility. The striving of essences for existence, limited only by incompatibility, is brought into a relational structure and submitted to the realisation of the best possible. In these studies we find the first explicit formulation of the principle of the predicate being contained in the subject in respect of all its possibilities and the particular momejit now in its existence. This present moment is constituted by everything which is, was, or will be and by so doing determines the order of succession and thus of time. The compact sequence of definitions, postulates, and propositions, gathered in the appendix, may be seen as the initial stage of metaphysics as a strict science. This was a project which Leibniz broke off and never took up again in this way. I hope to show that these studies deserve more consideration than they have had up to now. (shrink)