This study of the metaphysics of G. W. Leibniz gives a clear picture of
his philosophical development within the general scheme of
seventeenth-century natural philosophy. Catherine Wilson examines the
shifts in Leibniz's thinking as he confronted the major philosophical
problems of his era. Beginning with his interest in artificial languages
and calculi for proof and discovery, the author proceeds to an
examination of Leibniz's early theories of matter and motion, to the
phenomenalistic turn in his theory of substance and his subsequent
de-emphasis of logical determinism, and finally to his doctrines of
harmony and optimization. Specific attention is given to Leibniz's
understanding of Descartes and his successors, Malebranche and Spinoza,
and the English philosophers Newton, Cudworth, and Locke.
Wilson analyzes Leibniz's complex response to the new mechanical
philosophy, his discontent with the foundations on which it rested, and
his return to the past to locate the resources for reconstructing it.
She argues that the continuum-problem is the key to an understanding not
only of Leibniz's monadology but also of his views on the substantiality
of the self and the impossibility of external causal influence. A final
chapter considers the problem of Leibniz-reception in the post-Kantian
era, and the difficulty of coming to terms with a metaphysics that is
not only philosophically "critical" but, at the same time,
"compensatory."
Originally published in 1990.
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