This is the first modern interpretation of Leibniz's comprehensive critique of Locke, the New Essays on Human Understanding. Arguing that the New Essays is controlled by the overriding purpose of refuting Locke's alleged materialism, Jolley establishes the metaphysical and theological motivation of the work on the basis of unpublished correspondence and manuscript material. He also shows the relevance of Leibniz's views to contemporary debates over innate ideas, personal identity, and natural kinds.

Seventeenth century discussions of materialism, whether favorable or hostile towards the position, are generally conducted on a level of much less precision and sophistication than recent work on the problem of the mind-body relation. Nevertheless, the earlier discussions can still be interesting to philosophers, as the plethora of references to Cartesian arguments in the recent literature makes clear. Certainly the early development of materialist patterns of thought, and efforts on both the materialist and immaterialist side to establish fundamental points in (...) the philosophical analysis of mind, have considerable historical interest at the present time. This paper attempts to clarify the significance of some of leibniz's views in connection with the materialist thesis. I do not have in mind his rather notorious parallelism, though some of the points made below bear indirectly on the character of this position. Instead, I will examine his approach to arguments against materialism. (shrink)

It is an honor to have been given the opportunity by the editor to reply to J.A. Cover’s review of Leibniz’s Metaphysics, and to have a chance to revisit, five years after the book’s publication, the still-active battleground of intrinsic and extrinsic properties, the extensionality and intensionality of perception, and the reality of aggregates and to say more, a little informally perhaps, about about some methodological questions in Leibniz scholarship. Cover’s review when it appeared gave me a great deal of (...) pleasure because he addressed sharply and directly exactly the central issues, in a way which was not in the least distanziert, and defended several alternative critical positions concisely and eloquently. (shrink)