Narrow search


By category:

By publication type:

By language:

By journals:

By document type:


Displaying: 1-20 of 190 documents

0.075 sec

1. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 10
Catherine Wilson Plenitude and Compossibility in Leibniz
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
Leibniz entertained the idea that, as a set of “striving possibles” competes for existence, the largest and most perfect world comes into being. The paper proposes 8 criteria for a Leibniz-world. It argues that a) there is no algorithm e.g., one involving pairwise compossibility-testing that can produce even possible Leibniz-worlds; b) individual substances presuppose completed worlds; c) the uniqueness of the actual world is a matter of theological preference, not an outcome of the assembly-process; and d) Goedel’s theorem implies that there can be no algorithm for producing optimal worlds, assuming an optimal world contains truth-discerning creatures, though this is not to say that such worlds cannot arise naturally.
2. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 10
J. A. Cover, John Hawthorne Leibnizian Modality Again: Reply to Murray
3. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 10
Gregory Brown Leibniz on Wholes, Unities, and Infinite Number
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
One argument that Leibniz employed to rule out the possibility of a world soul appears to turn on the assumption that the very notion of an infinite number or of an infinite whole is inconsistent. This argument was considered in a series of three papers published in The Leibniz Review: in the first, by Laurence Carlin, the argument was delineated and analyzed; in the second, by myself, the argument was criticized and rejected; in the third, by Richard Arthur, an attempt was made to defend Leibniz’s argument against my criticisms. In the present paper, I take up the matter again in an attempt to clarify the issues involved and to defend my original criticisms of the argument against the objections raised by Arthur.
4. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 10
Massimo Mugnai Two Leibniz Texts with Translations: LH IV 1, 9 r and LH IV 1, Bl. 24 r
5. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 11
Catherine Wilson Response to Ohad Nachtomy’s “Individuals, Worlds, and Relations: A Discussion of Catherine Wilson’s ‘Plenitude and Compossibility in Leibniz’”
6. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 11
Maria Rosa Antognazza Debilissimae Entitates?: Bisterfeld and Leibniz’s Ontology of Relations
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
Over the past decades a number of scholars have identified Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld as one of the most decisive early influences on Leibniz. In particular, the impressive similarity between their conceptions of universal harmony has been stressed. Since the issue of relations is at the heart of both Bisterfeld and Leibniz’s doctrines of universal harmony, the extent of the similarity between their doctrines will depend, however, on Bisterfeld and Leibniz’s respective theories of relations, and especially on their ontologies of relations. This paper attempts to determine in more detail whether Bisterfeld’s ontology of relations contains at least the germ of the defining features of the ontology of relations later developed by Leibniz. It comes to the conclusion that, although Bisterfeld’s theory of relations is not as fully developed and explicit as that of Leibniz, it does contain all the key “ingredients” of it.
7. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 11
Richard Arthur Leibniz on Infinite Number, Infinite Wholes, and the Whole World: A Reply to Gregory Brown
8. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 11
Facsimiles of François Lamy’s ‘De la Conoissance de soi-même’, second edition, 1699 Title Page, 1701 Title Page, and Volume 2, pp. 224-43 and 387-92.
9. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 11
Ohad Nachtomy Individuals, Worlds, and Relations: A Discussion of Catherine Wilson’s “Plenitude and Compossibility in Leibniz” (The Leibniz Review, Vol. 10, 2000, 1-20)
10. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 11
R.S. Woolhouse Leibniz and François Lamy’s De la Connaissance de soi-même
11. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 12
Christia Mercer Reply to Cees Leijenhorst’s Review of Leibniz’s Metaphysics
12. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 12
Jean-Baptiste Rauzy Reply to Massimo Mugnai’s Review of La doctrine Leibnizienne de la vérité
13. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 12
Reginald O. Savage Reply to Ohad Nachtomy’s Review of Real Alternatives
14. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 12
Samuel Levey Leibniz and the Sorites
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
The sorites paradox receives its most sophisticated early modem discussion in Leibniz’s writings. In an important early document Leibniz holds that vague terms have sharp boundaries of application, but soon thereafter he comes to adopt a form of nihilism aboutvagueness: and it later proves to be his settled view that vagueness results from semantical indeterminacy. The reason for this change of mind is unclear, and Leibniz does not appear to have any grounds for it. I suggest that his various treatments of the sorites do notspring from a single integrated view of vagueness, and that his early position reflects a mercenary interest in the sorites paradox---an interest to use the sorites to reach a conclusion in metaphysics rather than to examine vagueness as a subject to be understood in itsown right. The later nihilist stance reflects Leibniz’s own (if undefended) attitude towards vagueness.
15. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 12
Martin Schönfeld Christian Wolff and Leibnizian Monads
16. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 12
Donald Rutherford Leibniz’s “On Generosity,” With English Translation
17. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 12
Philip Beeley Leibniz on Wachter’s Elucidarius cabalisticus: A Critical Edition of the so-called ‘Réfutation de Spinoza’
18. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 12
J-G. WACHTERI DE RECONDITA HEBRAEORUM PHILOSOPHIA (1706)
19. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 12
J. E. H. Smith German Scholarship on Leibniz, 1900-1945
20. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 13
Justin E. H. Smith Confused Perception and Corporeal Substance in Leibniz
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
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.