The first comprehensive survey of the criticisms of Leibniz's philosophical optimism in the first half of the eighteenth century, when what has been called the 'debacle of the perfect world' first ...began.
Divine machines Smith, Justin E. H
2011., 20110411, 2011, 2011-04-11
eBook
Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent ...than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. In Divine Machines, Justin Smith offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. He shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines.
Who are the nations of Europe, and where did they come from? Early modern people were as curious about their origins as we are today. Lacking twenty-first-century DNA research, seventeenth-century ...scholars turned to language—etymology, vocabulary, and even grammatical structure—for evidence. The hope was that, in puzzling out the relationships between languages, the relationships between nations themselves would emerge, and on that basis one could determine the ancestral homeland of the nations that presently occupied Europe.
In Leibniz Discovers Asia, Michael C. Carhart explores this early modern practice by focusing on philosopher, scientist, and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who developed a vast network of scholars and missionaries throughout Europe to acquire the linguistic data he needed. The success of his project was tied to the Jesuit search for an overland route to China, whose itinerary would take them through the nations from whom Leibniz wanted language samples. Drawing on Leibniz's extensive correspondence with the members of this network, Carhart gives us access to the philosopher's scintillating discussions about astronomy and mapping; ethnology and missionary work; the contest of the Asiatic empires of Muscovy, Persia, the Ottoman, and China for control of the Caucasus, the steppes, and the Far East; and above all, language, as the best indicator of the prehistoric genealogy of the myriad peoples from Central Asia to Western Europe.
Placing comparative linguistics within Leibniz's intellectual program, this book offers extensive insight into how Leibniz built his early modern scholarly network, the network's functionality within the international Republic of Letters, and its limitations. We see the scholar, isolated and lonely in little Hanover, with his hands on knowledge trickling in from scientific centers across Europe and around the world. By the end of 1697—the year his network finally began to work—Leibniz laughed to one of his patrons, I'm putting a sign on my door reading, 'Bureau of Address for China'! Depicting Leibniz not as a philosophical authority but as a scholar with human limitations and frustrations, Leibniz Discovers Asia is a thrilling and engaging narrative.
Lloyd Strickland presents a new translation of the 'Monadology', alongside key parts of the 'Theodicy', and an in-depth, section-by-section commentary that explains in detail not just what Leibniz is ...saying in the text but also why he says it.
In this paper we evaluate the impact of Leibniz's defense of relativity of motion on his metaphysics. We argue that the abandonment of the absolutist position makes void his first notion of corporeal ...substance. First, we analyze Leibniz's conception of body and movement in his youth (1663-1672) and explain how the assumption of absolute motion during these years plays a role in his notion of corporeal substance. Second, we examine his arguments in favor of relativity of motion during the Parisian period (1672-1676) and show the repercussion on his first conception of the corporeal substance.
Leibniz is a relationalist about space and time. He believes that nothing spatial or temporal is more fundamental than the spatial and temporal relations that obtain between things. These relations ...are direct: they are unmediated by anything spatially or temporally absolute such as points in space or moments in time. In his correspondence with Clarke, Leibniz makes a number of claims regarding this issue that appear, on the face of it, to be inconsistent with one another.
This essay offers an account of the relationship between extended Leibnizian bodies and unextended Leibnizian monads, an account that shows why Leibniz was right to see intimate, explanatory ...connections between his studies in physics and his mature metaphysics. The first section sets the stage by introducing a case study from Leibniz's technical work on the strength of extended, rigid beams. The second section draws on that case study to introduce a model for understanding Leibniz's views on the relationship between derivative and primitive forces. The third section draws on Leibniz's understanding of the relationship between derivative and primitive forces in order to shed light, in turn, on his understanding of the relationship between extended, material bodies and unextended, immaterial monads. The fourth section responds to a likely objection by arguing that Leibniz's monads may, in a perfectly reasonable sense, be spatially located.
This book presents a comprehensive examination of Gottfried Leibniz's views on the nature of agents and their actions. Julia Jorati offers a fresh look at controversial topics including Leibniz's ...doctrines of teleology, the causation of spontaneous changes within substances, divine concurrence, freedom, and contingency, and also discusses widely neglected issues such as his theories of moral responsibility, control, attributability, and compulsion. Rather than focusing exclusively on human agency, she explores the activities of non-rational substances and the differences between distinctive types of actions, showing how the will, appetitions, and teleology are key to Leibniz's discussions of agency. Her book reveals that Leibniz has a nuanced and compelling philosophy of action which has relevance for present-day discussions of agency. It will be of interest to scholars and students of early modern philosophy as well as to metaphysicians and philosophers of action.
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