LEIBNIZ ON POSSIBILIA, CREATION, AND THE REALITY OF ESSENCES

This article chapter discusses Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's philosophical reflections on essences, ideas, and truths in God's mind and in the human mind. After discussing Leibniz's claim that the essences (essentiae) of things are like numbers, the chapter article goes on to analyze his argument that ideas are the buildings blocks of truths , and that the intimate nature of ideas is what enters in a proposition determining its truth. It then examines Leibniz's views about ideas and truths in relation to God's understanding; human language , particularly philosophical language; scholasticism and nominalism; and the relationship among between between words, signs, and ideas. Finally, it considers Leibniz's notion of the nature of ideas in the human mind in relation to the existence of God.

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:

Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 1994

One of the most striking differences between the early and later Leibniz is his characterization of substance and the system of nature. While divine action as an explanation of natural phenomena is not infrequent in the early writings, it is unexpected after the Discours de metaphysique of 1686 when he begins placing strong emphasis on the autonomy of nature and the substances within it. Yet such explanations ore found in the later writings, presenting the appearance of an internal tension in Leibniz's system. The later Leibniz strongly emphasizes the autonomy of nature, which goes without need of mending or extraordinary intervention of God. Yet he also insists on transcreation and the attribution of increases in creaturely perfection to God. Outwardly the former claims of nature's autonomy would seem to be in conflict with the latter emphasis on creatural dependency. Robert Sleigh Jr. has acknowledged this apparent tension between Leibniz's metaphysical and theological exposition of creaturely action (Sleigh 1990, 184 f.). For this reason, Catherine Wilson has understood Leibniz's mentions of emanation and continuous creation as vestiges of a prior Occasionalism (Wilson 1989, 166-168). In what follows I will argue that Leibniz's expositions of continuous creation and divine emanation are in fact central to his mature account of created substance and his opposition to Occasionalism. I will show that the tension between Leibniz's emphasis on creatural autonomy and creatural dependency appears only on the outward edges of his system and that it disappears when placed within the context of his full account of divine causation. I shall contend further that this context includes a well-established tradition of Christianized Neoplatonism in which creatural autonomy is grounded in God's emanative causality.

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.

2007

This work presents Leibniz’s subtle approach to possibility and explores some of its consequential repercussions in his metaphysics. Ohad Nachtomy presents Leibniz’s approach to possibility by exposing his early suppositions, arguing that he held a combinatorial conception of possibility. He considers the transition from possibility to actuality through the notion of agency; the role divine agency plays in actualization; moral agency and human freedom of action and the relation between agency and necessity in comparison to Spinoza. Nachtomy analyzes Leibniz’s notion of nested, organic individuals and their peculiar unity, in distinction from his notion of aggregates. Nachtomy suggests that Leibniz defined possible individuals through combinatorial rules that generate unique and maximally consistent structures of predicates in God’s understanding and that such rules may be viewed as programs for action. He uses this definition to clarify Leibniz’s notions of individuation, relations and his distinction between individual substances and aggregates as well as the notion of organic individuals, which have a nested structure to infinity. Nachtomy concludes that Leibniz’s definition of a possible individual as a program of action helps clarifying the unity and simplicity of nested individuals. The book thus reveals a thread that runs through Leibniz’s metaphysics: from his logical notion of possible individuals to his notion of actual, nested ones.

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.

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.

Abstract. The present discussion is generate of the book Lectures et interprétations des Essays de théodicée de G.W. Leibniz, edited par Paul Rateau, and published at Franz Steiner Verlag, in the excellent series of Studia Leibnitiana Sonderhefte, in order to see if it is possible to have new lights on Leibniz’s Theodicy.

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.