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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

He was born on July 1st, 1646 in Leipzig. The son of a philosophy professor in
Leipzig, he spent most of his professional career in the service of noblemen.
Leibniz, brilliant in matters ranging from engineering and mechanics to
political and theological theory, traveled widely, corresponded frequently and,
in many instances, worked privately on metaphysical and mathematical
problems.

In 1661 Leibniz entered the University of Leipzig, where he studied philosophy,


mathematics and law. When he was a child, he preferred reading history,
poetry and literature. By the age of twelve, he understood Latin fluently and
began to learn Greek. In the astonishment of his teacher and classmates, not
only he applied Aristotelian logic to practical problems but also pointed out the
weakness of Aristotelian logic. In 1664, he obtained a Master of Philosophy
degree. In 1666, when he was just twenty one years old, he received a doctor's
degree in law. At the same time, he rejected the professorship offer because he
believed that the university life could not facilitate the reform and
improvements of science.

Leibniz was intellectually gifted; he taught himself Latin and read profusely in
the classics at an early age. When he was an adolescent, Leibniz began to
entertain the notion of constructing an alphabet of human thought from which
he could generate a universal, logically precise language. He regarded this
language as consisting of primitive simple words expressing primitive simple
concepts which are then combined into larger language complexes expressing
complex thoughts. His obsession with this project played an important role
throughout his life.

Among Leibnizs most amazing and early achievements was the invention
of one of the first mechanical calculators, or crude computers. It was
called the Stepped Reckoner and could perform addition, subtraction,
multiplication and division. Although the design and concept was sound,
the mechanical skills of the day were not equal to manufacturing the
precision metal parts needed to make the machine work properly. Two
working prototypes were produced of this machine.
Leibnizs first real job was that of an alchemist in Nuremberg. He soon
found other employment, however, in rewriting the legal code of his
electorate, putting his law and philosophy education to practical use. He
dabbled considerably in international politics, formulating plans for the
advancement of German policies after the disastrous Thirty Years War,
which left his home country weakened, shattered, and economically
backwards.

Leibnizs philosophy was rationalist. According to this theory, human


knowledge has its origins in the fundamental laws of thought instead of in
human experience of the world as in the doctrine of empiricism. In fact, Leibniz
argued that the laws of science could be deduced from fundamental
metaphysical principles and that observation and empirical work were not
necessary for arriving at knowledge of the world. What was needed instead was
a proper method of calculating or demonstrating everything contained in
certain fundamental tenets. For example, he believed that he could deduce the
fundamental laws of motion from more basic metaphysical principles. In this
general conception, he followed in the intellectual footsteps of Ren Descartes.
The great problem with interpreting Leibnizs contribution to this tradition of
thought is that he published only one major book during his lifetime, and it
does not contain a systematic account of his full philosophy. Accordingly, it is
necessary to reconstruct his system from the short articles and the more than
fifteen thousand letters which he wrote

Truths of facts

According to Leibniz, a conception of truth has important consequences for a


conception of reality and how it is to be understood at its most profound level.
Intuitively, a proposition is true when its content is adequate to the situation in
the world to which it refers. For example, "the sky is gray" is true if and only if
the thing out there in the world called "the sky" is actually the color called
"gray" at the time the proposition is stated. This, however, raises issues about
the relationship of language to the world and what "adequacy" consists in.

Truth, according to Leibniz, is simply a proposition in which the predicate is


contained in the subject. The predicate is what is asserted; the subject is what
the assertion is about. All true propositions, then, can be expressed by the
following general form: "subject is predicate."

This notion of truth seems straight-forward enough for what are commonly
called analytic propositions, such as "Blue is a color," which has more to do
with the definition of blue than it does with the world. The notion of color is
part of the notion of blue. Similarly, in the basic logical truth "A is A," the
predicate is not just contained in the subject, it is the subject. But, Leibniz
states that this "being contained" is implicitly or virtually the case with other
truths.

Take, for example, the statement "Peter is ill." Intuitively, this proposition is
true only if it refers to a real world in which Peter is, in fact, ill. Leibniz,
however, analyzes this as follows: if one knew everything there is to know about
Peter, that is, if one had a complete conceptof Peter, one would also know
(among many other things) that he is ill at the moment. Therefore, the
statement "Peter is ill" is true not primarily because of some reference to the
world, but in the first instance because someone has the concept of Peter,
which is the subject of the proposition, and that concept contains (as a
predicate) his being ill. Of course, it may be the case that one happens to
know that Peter was ill because one refers to the world (perhaps sees him
cough repeatedly). But the fact that one finds out about Peter in this way does
not make the statement that "Peter is ill" true and thus a piece of knowledge
because of that reference. One must distinguish the concept of truth from
pragmatic or methodological issues of how one happens to find out about that
truth, or what one can do with the truth. The latter, according to Leibniz, are
completely irrelevant to the question "What is truth?" in itself.

Truths of reason

As previously stated, for any proposition, truth is defined by Leibniz in the


same way: the predicate is contained in the subject. It only takes a little
thought to realize that for any one subject (like Peter or Caesar), the number of
predicates which are true of it will be infinite (or at least very large), for they
must include every last thing Peter or Caesar did or will do, as well as
everything that did or will ever happen to them. But now it is natural to ask:
Why do all these predicates come together in the one subject? It could be that
the predicates are a quite arbitrary or random collectionalthough Leibniz
does not believe this, and it is certainly not intuitive. Rather, one predicate or
set of predicates explains another. For example, Peter's coming into contact
with a virus explains his illness. Or, Caesar's ambition and boldness explains
why he decided to cross the Rubicon. So, many (at least) of the predicates that
are true of a subject "hang together" as a network of explanations.

Leibniz goes further still by claiming that for every predicate that is true of a
subject, there must be a set of other true predicates which constitute a
sufficient reason for its being true. This he calls the principle of sufficient
reasonthat there must be a sufficient reason for why things are as they are
and not otherwise. This is why he uses words like "foundation" and "reason" in
the quotation above. Unless this were true, Leibniz argues, the universe would
not make any sense, and science and philosophy both would be impossible.
Moreover, it would be impossible to account for a basic notion
like identity unless there was a sufficient reason why Caesar, for example, with
his particular properties at a given time, is identical with the Caesar who
existed a week prior with such different properties.

Innate Ideas

An innate idea is any idea which is intrinsic to the mind rather than arriving in
some way from outside it. During this period in philosophy, innate ideas tended
to be opposed to the thorough-going empiricism of Locke. Like Descartes before
him--and for many of the same reasons--Leibniz found it necessary to posit the
existence of innate ideas. At the metaphysical level, since monads have no
"windows," it must be the case that all ideas are innate. That is to say, an idea
in one's monad/soul is just another property of that monad, which happens
according to an entirely internal explanation represented by the complete
concept. But at the phenomenal level, it is certainly the case that many ideas
are represented as arriving through one's senses. In general, at least any
relation in space or time will appear in this way.

Thus, one could imagine Leibniz being a thorough-going empiricist at the


phenomenal level of description. This would amount to the claim that the
metaphysically true innateness of all ideas is epistemologically useless
information. Leibniz finds it necessary, therefore, to advance the following
arguments in favor of phenomenally innate ideas:

(i) Some ideas are characterized by universal necessity, such as ideas in


geometry, logic, metaphysics, morality, and theology. But it is impossible to
derive universal necessity from experience. (Note that this argument is hardly
new to Leibniz.)

(ii) An innate idea need not be an idea consciously possessed (because of "little
perceptions," for example). An innate idea can be potential, as an inclination of
reason, as a rigid distortion in Locke'stabula rasa. (Here, Leibniz provides the
famous analogy of the veins in the marble prior to the sculptor's work.) It
requires "attention" (especially in the form of philosophical thinking) to bring to
explicit consciousness the operation, and to clarify the content, of these innate
ideas.

(iii) Consider the possibility of foreseeing an event that is not similar to (and
thus merely an associated repetition of) a past event. By using rational
principles of physics, for example, one can analyze a situation and predict the
outcome of all the masses and forces, even without ever having experienced a
similar situation or outcome. This, Leibniz says, is the privilege of humans over
animals ("brutes"), who only have the "shadow" of reason, because they can
only move from one idea to another by association of similars (see Leibniz's joke
about empiricists in Monadology, 28).

Thus, at the phenomenal level, Leibniz can distinguish between innate and
empirical ideas. An empirical idea is a property of a monad which itself
expresses a relation to some other substance or which arises from another
internal property that is the expression of an external substance. Although the
difference between empirical and innate is in fact an illusion, it does make a
difference, for example, to the methodology of the sciences. This is similar to
the distinction made above between the idea of truth (as the containedness of
the predicate in the subject), and the pragmatic/methodological issue of how
one comes to know that truth. The latter is not irrelevant, except to the
foundation and definition of truth. (Leibniz's most extensive discussion of
innate ideas, not surprisingly, is in the New Essays on Human Understanding.)

Monadic Activity and Time

Correlate to the inter-connectedness of predicates in the complete concept is


an active power in the monad, which thus always acts out its predicates
spontaneously. Predicates are, to use a fascinating metaphor of Leibniz's,
"folded up" within the monad. In later writings such as the Monadology, Leibniz
describes this using the Aristotelian/Medieval idea of entelechy: the becoming
actual or achievement of a potential. This word is derived from the idea of
perfections. What becomes actual strives to finish or perfect the potential, to
realize the complete concept, to unfold itself perfectly as what it is in its
entirety. This active power is the essence of the monad. Leibniz has several
different names for this property (or closely related properties) of monads:
entelechy, active power, conatus or nisus (effort/striving, or urge/desire),
primary force, internal principle of change, and even light (in "On the Principle
of Indiscernibles").

This activity is not just a property of human souls, but of all types of monads.
This inner activity must mean not only being the source of action, but also
being affected (passivity), and of resisting (inertia). Again, what one calls
"passivity" is just a more complex and subtle form of activity. Both a monad's
activity and resistance, of course, follow from its complete concept, and are
expressed in phenomena as causes and as effects. Change in a monad is the
intelligible, constantly, and continuously (recalling here the principle of
continuity discussed above) unfolding being of a thing, from itself, to itself.
"Intelligible" here means: (i) according to sufficient reason, not random or
chaotic; and (ii) acting as if designed or purposed, as if alive--hence Leibniz's
contribution to the philosophical tradition of "vitalism."

It is important to understand that this is not just a power to act, conceived as


separable from the action and its result. Rather, Leibniz insists that one must
understand that power together with (i) the sufficient reason of that power; (ii)
the determination of the action at a certain time and in a certain way; (iii)
together with all the results of the action, first as the merely potential and then
as the actual. (See "On the Principle of Indiscernibles," and Monadology 11-
15.) One is not, therefore, to understand it as a sequence of states, the
individual bits of which are even ideally separable (except as an object of mere
description for science), nor a sequence of causes and effects, again understood
to be ideally separable (as if there could have been the cause without the
effect). All this follows from the complete concept, the predicates of which are
connected in one concept. Each state therefore contains the definite trace of all
the past, and is (in Leibniz's famous phrase) "pregnant" with the future.

But time, like space, is an illusion. How then is one to understand change
without time? The important question is: what conception of time is being
discussed? Just like space, Leibniz is objecting to any conception of time which
is exterior to the objects that are normally said to be "in" time (time as an
exterior framework, a dimension). Also, he objects to time as mere chronology,
a conception of time as a sequence of "now points" that are ideally separable
from one another (that is, not essentially continuous) and are countable and
orderable separately from any thing being "in" them (that is, abstract).

However, in discussing relational properties above (and, in particular, Leibniz's


response to the Newton-Clarke argument about non-linear motion), "space" was
in a sense preserved as a set of rules about the representative properties of
monads. Here, too, but in a more profound way, "time" is preserved immanently
to the monad. The active principle of change discussed above is immanent to
monads, and no one state can be separated from all the others, without
completely altering the thing in question into a thing that never changes (that
has only the one state for all eternity). For Leibniz, the past and future are no
more disconnected, in fact less, from the present than "here" is from "there."
Both distinctions are illusions, but temporal relations in a substance form an
explanatory, intelligible sequence of a self-same thing. The principle of change
becomes an original, internal and active power of the thing constantly
becoming the thing that it is, as the spontaneous happening and internal
principle of the particular order of things which make up that substance. In
other words, substances unfold, become the things God always knew them to
be, in a time that is nothing other than precisely that becoming.

Time, then, has three levels, according to Leibniz

i. the atemporality or eternality of God;


ii. the continuous immanent becoming-itself of the monad as entelechy;
iii. time as the external framework of a chronology of "nows."
The difference between (ii) and (iii) is made clear by the account of the internal
principle of change. The real difference between the necessary being of God
and the contingent, created finitude of a human being is the difference between
(i) and (ii).

THIS NOTES IS PREPARED FOR PG STUDENTS OF PHILOSOPHY

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