Leibniz: Creation and Conservation and Concurrence

The Leibniz Review, 2020

To explain why God is not the author of sin, despite grounding all features of the world, the early Leibniz marginalized the divine will and defined existence as harmony. These moves support each other. It is easier to nearly eliminate the divine will from creation if existence itself is something wholly intelligible, and easier to identify existence with an internal feature of the possibles if the divine will is not responsible for creation. Both moves, however, commit Leibniz to a necessitarianism that is stronger than what prominent interpreters such as Robert Sleigh and Mogens Lærke have found in the early Leibniz, and stronger than the necessitarianism that threatens his later philosophy. I defend this reading of Leibniz and propose that some features of Leibniz’s later metaphysics, including his “striving possibles” doctrine, are an artifact of the effort to rescue the early theodicy from its unwelcome implications.

2012

G. W. Leibniz professes a commitment to historical Christian theism, but the depth and orthodoxy of his commitment has been questioned throughout the past three centuries. In this project I defend both the cogency and the orthodoxy of Leibniz’s philosophical theology and, by extension, its application to the Christian task of theodicy. At the heart of this defense is the central claim of this project, namely, that Leibniz’s philosophical theology represents a traditional brand of Augustinianism. In short, I argue that Leibniz’s theodicy is not his own, but is the tacit claim of a longstanding theological tradition made explicit and brought to bear on the problem of evil as articulated in Leibniz’s day. Accompanying this central claim are a number of subordinate claims, the most significant of which center on how we read Leibniz on providence and on free choice. Regarding the former, I argue that Leibniz’s understanding of providence has precedence in and is a recapitulation of older Augustinian views of the God-world relationship. As for free choice, I maintain that the Augustinian tradition is not only incompatiblist, or libertarian, but was recognized as such in Leibniz’s day. Hence in adhering to this tradition, Leibniz is knowingly adhering to a libertarian theology. I show that his adherence to this tradition and its views of freedom has significant textual support. My method of defense is both historical and constructive. On the historical side I focus primarily on contextual and textual analysis. However, insofar as this defense includes the viability of Leibniz’s theodicy for Christian theology and theodicy today, constructive engagement with Leibniz’s contemporary objectors and the current literature on the problem of evil is also required. Therefore, I devote the latter part of this defense to lingering objections and interlocution with current approaches to the problem of evil. In the end I conclude that Leibniz’s theodicy, when read in the light of the Augustinian tradition, is not only orthodox, cogent, and defensible, but is perhaps the most viable response to the problem of evil for traditional Christian theology, if not the inevitable response for a traditional Augustinian.

Leibniz speaks, in a variety of contexts, of there being two realms-a "kingdom of power or efficient causes" and "a kingdom of wisdom or final causes." This essay explores an often overlooked application of Leibniz's famous "two realms doctrine." The first part turns to Leibniz's work in optics for the roots of his view that nature can be seen as being governed by two complete sets of equipotent laws, with one set corresponding to the efficient causal order of the world, and the other to its teleological order. The second part offers an account of how this picture of lawful over-determination is to be reconciled with Leibniz's mature metaphysics. The third addresses a line of objection proposed by David Hirschmann to the effect that Leibniz's doctrine undermines his stated commitment to an efficient, broadly mechanical account of the natural world. Finally, the fourth part suggests that Leibniz's thinking about the harmony of final and efficient causes in connection with corporeal nature may help to shed light on his understanding of the teleological unfolding of monads as well.

The monads are not the scary beasts of indescribable material of the universe, which some scholars have formulated and postulated, when interpreting the philosophic works of Leibniz's Monadology. The structure of the universe in its harmonious motion of time and space, have incorporated within its ranks the omnipotent mid of God. The flawlessness of all substance, creation, and being is the epitome of balance, symmetry and literally the best of all possible worlds.

In the debate on causality in eighteenth-century Germany, Leibniz's theory of pre-established harmony plays a central role. This theory presupposes important metaphysical assumptions, such as the monadological structure of the world, and represents a radical alternative to the theory of physical influx. This paper provides an overview of the debate in the period between C. Wolf and A.G. Baumgarten. While the former is skeptical about the monadology and accepts pre-established harmony as a valid hypothesis only concerning the soul-body relationship, the latter endorses the monadological theory and therefore adopts pre-established harmony in its universal value. A further conclusion is that Leibniz's Essais de Théodicée can be taken as a robust point of reference to highlight the main metaphysical topics at stake in this lively intellectual scene.

Leibniz and Adam, 1993

Synthese, 1993

This paper develops some important observations from a recent article by Maria Rosa Antognazza published in The Leibniz Review 2015 under the title " The Hypercategorematic Infinite " , from which I take up the characterization of God, the most perfect Being, as infinite in a hypercategorematic sense, i.e., as a being beyond any determination. By contrast, creatures are determinate beings, and are thus limited and particular expressions of the divine essence. But since Leibniz takes both God and creatures to be infinite, creatures are simultaneously infinite and limited. This leads to seeing creatures as infinite in kind, in distinction from the absolute and hypercategorematic infinity of God. I present three lines of argument to substantiate this point: (1) seeing creatures as entailing a particular sequence of perfections and imperfections; (2) seeing creatures under the rubric of an intermediate degree of infinity and perfection that Leibniz, in 1676, calls " maximum in kind " ; and (3) observing that primitive force, a defining feature of created substance, may be seen as infinite in a metaphysical sense. This leads to viewing Leibniz's use of infinity within a Neoplatonic framework of descending degrees of Being: from the hypercategorematic infinite, identified with the most perfect Being; to the intermediate degree of maximum in kind, identified with creatures; to the lowest degree of entia rationis (or beings of reason), identified with mathematical and abstract entities.

1985

The subject of creation has long been recognized as central to Leibniz's philosophy. 1 In general, the tendency has been to understand Leibniz's view of the creation of the universe as the actualization of a set of possible substances which stand together in a relation of pre-established harmony. 2 From there, scholarly interest generally seems to shift to questions concerning Leibniz's views on such related subjects as, e.g. the reasons behind God's choice to create one set of possibles rather than another, or the naturenecessary or contingent-of the relation between the possibles which God creates or actualizes. Undoubtedly these are all areas of serious and absorbing interest. Still, one concern which appears to have been overlooked is the quite literal question of how Leibniz views God's action in the creation of possibles in the first place. What does God actually do when he creates? What does this actualization of possibles actually amount to? In what follows I wish to detail the specifics of Leibniz's account of God's creation/actualization of the world. My main purpose in doing this is to draw attention to a little-noted but important feature of Leibniz's metaphysics. This is that Leibniz's view of creation is one which he uses specifically and intentionally to support his well-known view that existing things have their own force or power which is the source of their activity. 1 Nicholas Rescher's comment is representative: "Leibniz, more than any other modern philosopher, took seriously the idea of a creation of the universe, giving it a centrally important place in his system" (Leibniz:

Studia Neoaristotelica, 2019

Leibniz argued that (I) substantial forms only begin to exist via Divine creation; (II) created substances cannot transeuntly cause accidents in distinct substances; and yet (III) created substances immanently produce their accidents. Some of Leibniz’s support for (I) came from his endorsement of a widely-made argument against the eduction of substantial forms. However, in defense of eduction, Suárez argued that if creatures cannot produce substantial forms, they also cannot produce accidents, threatening the consistency of (I) and (III). In this paper, I argue that Leibniz successfully defends the consistency of (I) and (III) against Suárez’s argument, but at the expense of the consistency of (II) and (III).

Journal of Philosophical Research, 2011

This paper examines Leibniz's views on the theistic doctrine of continual creation and considers their implications for his theory of nite substance. Three main theses are defended: (1) that Leibniz takes the traditional account of continual creation to involve the literal re-creation of all things in a successive series of instantaneous states, (2) that a straightforward commitment to the traditional account would give rise to serious problems within Leibniz's theory of nite substance and his metaphysics more generally, and (3) that Leibniz does not straightforwardly af rm the continual creation doctrine, despite certain texts that initially seem to suggest otherwise. I also present a more speculative interpretive hypothesis about what Leibniz's considered view of creation might have been, namely that in a single act, God creates and conserves substances that are non-spatial and atemporal at the deepest level of reality.

Theodicy and Reason. Logic, Metaphysics and Theology in Leibniz's Essais de Théodicée (1710), 2016

This paper analyses the paragraphs 381-404 of Leibniz’s Theodicy, i. e. one of the more systematic discussions on creatures’ action sketched by Leibniz. Even rejecting ex professo only Bayle’s radical view that creatures are not truly efficient causes of their states (since to Bayle only God is), these paragraphs evidently have a wider polemical object, namely the “new Cartesians” as Malebranche and, still more generally, Cartesian metaphysics.

Igwebuike: African Journal of Arts and Humanities, 2020

A variety of arguments have been offered in response to the problem of evil, and some have been used in both theodicies and defenses. This paper seeks to elucidate for the church some significant understanding about evil using Leibniz's theodicy. A philosophical approach was used in its appraisal. The paper submits that God should be seen as a cosmic judge as well as a providential Father who allows evils for the actualization of his purpose among others.

One of the more persistent interpretations of Leibniz's system of pre-established harmony is as a temporal dislocation of occasionalism: whatever God is always doing on the occasionalist account he need only have done once – at creation – on Leibniz's. In accordance with this interpretation, the difference between the systems of La Forge, Cordemoy, and Malebranche, on the one hand, and Leibniz's, on the other, is one of how involved God is in the world. Here, I show the difference between these systems has nothing to do with God's degree of involvement in the universe. Rather, the basic difference between the systems must be found in their differing accounts of the nature of substance.

2016

One of the more exotic and mysterious features of Leibniz’s later philosophical writings is the harmony between the kingdom of nature and the kingdom of grace. In this paper I show that this harmony is not a single doctrine, but rather a compilation of two doctrines, namely (1) that the order of nature makes possible the rewards and punishments of rational souls, and (2) that the rewards and punishments of rational souls are administered naturally. I argue that the harmony is best considered as Leibniz’s distinctive collation, development, and rebranding of these doctrines, which were not themselves unique to Leibniz, nor uncommon in the seventeenth century. There follows a detailed examination of various concrete examples of the harmony in operation, from which I show that it is essentially the culmination of Leibniz’s lifelong thinking about divine justice.