Robert M. Adams claims that Leibniz’s rehahilitation of the doctrine of incomplete entities is the most sustained etlort to integrate a theory of corporeal substances into the theory of simple substances. I discuss alternative interpretations of the theory of incomplete entities suggested by Marleen Rozemond and Pauline Phemister. Against Rozemond, I argue that the scholastic doctrine of incomplete entities is not dependent on a hylomorphic analysis of corporeal substances, and therefore can be adapted by Leibniz. Against Phemister, I claim that Leibniz did not reduce the passivity of corporeal substances to modifications of passive aspects of simple substances. Against Adams, I argue that Leibniz’s theory of the incompleteness of the mind cannot be understood adequately without understanding the reasons for his assertion that matter is incomplete without minds. Composite substances are seen as requisites for the reality of the material world, and therefore cannot be eliminated from Leibniz’s metaphysics.

Leibniz devoted immense energy and thought to questions concerning moral responsibility and human freedom. This paper examines Leibniz’s views on freedom and sin in two important early texts - “Von der Allmacht Allmacht und Allwissenheit Gottes und der Freiheit des Menschen” and “Confessio Philosophi” - as a propaedeutic to a detailed examination of the development of Leibniz’s views on freedom and sin. In particular, my aim is to see if Leibniz’s early thinking on freedom and sin in these early writings was among those metaphysical topics about which he changed his mind. My focus is on human, not divine, freedom, and the young Leibniz’s metaphysical psychology, rather than his early efforts in theodicy. I conclude that Leibniz’s views on freedom and sin are in place as early as 1672/3, and remain relatively stable thereafter.

I argue against the view that Leibniz’s construction of reality out of perceiving substances must be seen as the first of the modern idealist philosophies. I locate this central feature of Leibniz’s thought instead in a decidedly premodern tradition. This tradition sees bodiliness as a consequence of the confused perception of finite substances, and equates God’s uniquely disembodied being with his maximally distinct perceptions. But unlike modern idealism, the premodern view takes confusion as the very feature of any created substance that makes possible its distinctness from the Creator. Modern idealism, in contrast, emerges when the external world becomes a problem, when the epistemological worry arises as to how the mind might access it. In the tradition in which I place Leibniz, there simply is no such worry.