Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

1646-1716 · German · Metaphysics, Epistemology, Logic, Philosophy of Religion

This supreme wisdom, united to a goodness that is no less infinite, cannot but have chosen the best.

Born in Leipzig in 1646, just as the Thirty Years' War wound to a close, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent his career not in a university but in the service of German princes — diplomat, jurist, librarian, historian to the House of Brunswick at Hanover. He co-invented the calculus independently of Newton. Almost none of his philosophy appeared in print; the system must be reconstructed from the Monadology, the Discourse on Metaphysics, and letters still being edited.

Topics Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz addresses

• monads
• pre-established harmony
• the principle of sufficient reason
• the identity of indiscernibles
• the best of all possible worlds
• the complete individual concept
• the predicate-in-subject theory of truth
• necessary and contingent truths
• contingency and infinite analysis
• theodicy
• the problem of evil
• metaphysical, physical, and moral evil
• well-founded phenomena
• the windowless monad and expression
• petites perceptions
• apperception
• space and time as relational
• the principle of continuity
• the principle of the best
• force and dynamics
• innate ideas and the critique of Locke
• the reality of bodies and corporeal substance
• the vinculum substantiale
• human and divine freedom

Questions to put to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Monads and the Nature of Substance

• What do you mean by a monad?
• Why can't extended matter be the foundation of reality?
• If monads have no windows, how do they perceive anything at all?
• Are bodies real, or are they just illusions in our minds?
• What's the difference between a monad and a soul?

Pre-Established Harmony and Causation

• How does my soul move my body if substances never interact?
• What's wrong with the idea that mind and body influence each other directly?
• Why is pre-established harmony better than having God coordinate everything moment by moment?
• How can you call substances independent if God had to set them up to agree?
• Does each monad really express the entire universe from its point of view?

Sufficient Reason and the Complete Concept

• What do you mean by the principle of sufficient reason?
• How is the identity of indiscernibles connected to sufficient reason?
• What is the complete individual concept of a substance?
• Why do you say that in every true proposition the predicate is contained in the subject?
• Doesn't your theory make everything that happens to me already determined from the start?

Contingency, Necessity, and Freedom

• If everything about me is in my complete concept, how am I free?
• What's the difference between a necessary truth and a contingent one?
• How does infinite analysis preserve contingency?
• Why isn't freedom the ability to choose without any reason?
• How is your view different from Spinoza's, where everything happens by necessity?

The Best of All Possible Worlds and Theodicy

• What do you mean when you say this is the best of all possible worlds?
• How can this be the best world when there's so much suffering and evil?
• What's the difference between metaphysical, physical, and moral evil?
• Why would God permit sin and suffering instead of preventing them?
• How do you know God chose the best world rather than just a good enough one?

Space, Time, and the Critique of Newton

• Why do you think space and time are just relations rather than real things?
• What would be wrong with God creating the universe shifted over in absolute space?
• How does the identity of indiscernibles argue against absolute space?
• If space isn't real, what grounds the truth that two things are distant from each other?
• What was really at stake for you in the debate with Clarke about Newton's physics?

Converse with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's own writing, cited to the page.