Review of Mogens Laerke's Leibniz lecteur de Spinoza

J.A. Nicolás, J.M. Gómez & M. Escribano (eds.), Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016

Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1997

2010

2021

Leibniz and Spinoza are the two of the last great system philosophers of Rationalism. While their criticism of earlier Rationalists are aiming at the same systemic deficiencies, their methods are drastically divergent. The mind and body problem, referring to the interaction of our abstract intellect with our concrete body, is one such deficiency. In this essay we will ask whether Spinoza or Leibniz provide a better account for the mind and body. We will start by defining the substance and their notion of God, which in turn prepares the ground for the discussion of the mind and body problem itself. We will argue that, while the differences are not too great, Spinoza does manage to provide a better account for the problem of the mind and body.

Contemporary Political Theory, 2002

It is almost inevitable that we should get a great philosopher's doctrine wrong, usually a few times, before we get it right (and a good thing too for the employment prospects of historians of philosophy). With Spinoza, however, the situation has been direr. For centuries we were wrong not only about what he thought, but about his very character, both personal and philosophical. We were mistaken about his attitude concerning the role of philosophy, his place in history, and his orientation towards his society. Pierre Bayle's dictionary entry on Spinoza, for example, provided the world with an image that would remain the dominant one for a long time. It depicts Spinoza as a philosophical hermit, spinning out his austere metaphysical system in meditative isolation from the world. Solitary in life, this Baylean Spinoza was equally so in posterity: his followers were few, and what small influence he had on later thinkers was indirect and usually negative. When the German Romantics began to read Spinoza's philosophy, they believed they had unearthed an undiscovered treasure, an opinion that was endorsed by generations of otherwise attentive historians -Eduard Meyer, for instance. Jonathan Israel's work over the last decade has challenged the Baylean picture to the point of erring in the opposite direction. His claim -defended in his trilogy of books Radical Enlightenment, Enlightenment Contested, and Democratic Enlightenment -is that Spinoza's philosophy 'played the primary role in grounding the egalitarian and democratic core values and ideals of the modern world.' 1 This is an 1 Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of

2014

In the literature on Spinoza, accounts of why he wrote his first book -the Principles of Cartesian Philosophy (1663), and of its intellectual impact, are usually rather brief and straightforward. Spinoza's Principia philosophiae cartesianae (1663) or the [Beginselen van de cartesiaanse wijsbgeerte] as the expanded Dutch version of 1664 is entitled -the only book to appear openly under his own name during his life-time -was at first, in the mid and later 1660s, invariably taken as being an authentically Cartesian work , and in this way it is usually also interpreted by scholars in recent times. Especially during the interval between 1663 and the appearance of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, in 1670, it counted, particularly in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia, as one of the most authoritative and important commentaries on Descartes's philosophy. Likewise, it is again usually considered in recent times a work which simultaneously sets out to expound and defend Descartes' system while at the same time endeavouring to resolve difficulties which Descartes left to one side. 1 It is conceived as 'basically a textbook in the Cartesian philosophy', as Nadler calls it, 2 and a tool for teaching Cartesianism to advanced students.

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.