Born July 1 1646 in Leipzig. His father a professor of philosophy. Very precocious, declines a professorship at 21 and enters into the service of Boinebourg. Sent to Paris (1672) on a diplomatic mission (Consilium Aegyptiacum). Contact with Cartesianism (Malebranche, Arnauld, Huygens). Leaves Paris (1675) goes to London, and on his way to Hanover, meets Spinoza. Takes up the history of the House of Brunswick. Travels to Italy and often to Vienna. In 1684 publishes Nova Methodus (first paper on derivation) and continues work in history, math's, physics, law, engineering (calculating machine). Interest in China.  New Essays (1705 but published posthumously), Theodicy (1710), many short articles and manuscripts. Great amount of correspondence. Controversy with Newton on calculus; Leibniz/Clarke correspondence. Dies Nov. 14, 1716.

Monadology

Thematic structure:

• monads: §§ 1-19
• bare monads, souls, and spirits: §§ 20-30
• principles of truth: §§ 31-37
• God and creation: §§ 38-60
• panpsychism and pre-established harmony: §§ 61-81
• spirits and the city of God: §§ 82-90.

• Aristotle on substance:
1. never predicated and subject of predication
2. keeps identity through change
3. it is an unity (Unum per se vs. unum per accidens)
4. is capable of action and passion (at least living organisms, the archetype of substance in the sub lunar world)
• Descartes on substance:
1. subject of predication (2nd reply)
2. causally independent in the sense that it is logically possible for it to subsist without any other substance.  How the notion of substance not applied univocally to God and creatures (Principles I, 51)
• Spinoza on substance:
1. self caused and cause of everything
2. only one substance.
• Leibniz on substance:
1. never predicated and subject of predication.  Inherence is conceived in modal terms.
2. keeps identity through change.
3. it is an unity. Indeed it is a simple entity, without parts
4. it is an agent, i.e., the source of active change.
5. it is causally independent,

1. pluralities require unities
2. composites which are unified require true (per se) unities to serve as unifiers, since only per se unities can unify a plurality (§ 2).

• hence, monads, like Democritus’ atoms, are coextensive and coeval with nature and are the ultimate substances.  However, they are unextended and, by unifying aggregates of monads, they produce composite substances.
• contrast with Spinoza or Clarke, who deny that extension entails divisibility.

4.
Monads change (like every creature), and the change is continuous (law of continuity).
NOTE: the law of continuity follows from the principle of perfection, which governs God's choice of the actual world
Hence, they must have an internal principle of change, a force (appetition) which determines and produces all the modes of the monad (§§ 10-11).
NOTE: analogy to the generating rule of a continuous curve or a compressed spring extending.
So, in each monad appetition must produce an internal complexity, that is, multiplicity in unity, which is perception (§§ 12-16)
Problem: unclear why the multiplicity in unity is synchronous, which is required for perception of any sort.
NOTES:

• A perception is a type of expression
• Against his contemporaries, Lz thought that perceptions can be so minute that they are not consciously perceived.
• perception cannot be produced by a mechanism (the mill example) (§ 17).
• Hence, each monad is an incorporeal automaton (§ 18; 22).

 
 

All monads are incorporeal automata with appetition and perception.  However:
A. souls have:

• consciousness and more sophisticated perceptual experience reflecting the complexity of the sense organs of the animals whose bodies they organize into organisms. (§§ 19, 20, 24, 25)

NOTE: a conscious perception differs from a mere perception not because of its content, but because of its distinctness and vivacity.
• memory and imagination, both organized on the basis of mere associative laws (§§ 25-27).

NOTE: contrast image of stick-image of beating vs. image of stick-general principle (“whenever a stick, a beating”)-image or thought of beating.

• apperception or self-awareness (the capacity to think of oneself as oneself), which involves a capacity to reason.
• This gives them access to universalization (and hence theory vs. mere association) and to the eternal truths of mathematics, metaphysics and theology, although most of the time we act on the basis of associative principles (§§ 28-30).

The principle of non-contradiction (PNC): if a statement is contradictory, then it is false, and its negation is true (§ 31).
The principle of sufficient reason (PSR): for every truth, be it necessary or contingent, there's a reason why it's so rather than otherwise (§ 32).
NOTE: the identity of indiscernibles follows from PSR: if two things were identical, there would be no reason for them to be two.
There are two types of truth:

1. truths of reason, which are necessary and their negation contradictory: these are formal identities or are reducible to formal identities in a finite number of steps (ex. mathematical, metaphysical or theological truths) (§§ 33-35).
2. truths of fact, which are contingent and their negation possible: these are neither formal identities nor reducible to formal identities in a finite number of steps (ex. laws of nature (vs. Spinoza), Darius is defeated by Alexander, etc.) (§§ 36-37).

1.
Three arguments for God's existence:

1. The sufficient reason of truths of fact can never be given in its entirety, and it presupposes the necessary existence of a being (God) who is the ultimate reason of contingent truths. (§ 38)

NOTES:
• this is a very compressed version of the cosmological argument.
• God is perfect, infinite, immense, the creator and sustainer of all that is good in creatures (§§ 39-42).
2. Since eternal truths are possible only insofar as they are thought, there must be a necessary being thinking them, i.e., God (§§ 43-44)

NOTES:
• This is the old argument from eternal truths, which is based in Christian Platonism and found, e.g., in Augustine
• contrary to Descartes and Scotus, eternal truths don't depend on God's will but merely on his understanding, while contingent truths depend on his will as well (§ 46-7)
3. Since if it possible that X necessarily exists, then X necessarily exists, God is such that if he is possible, then he exists necessarily.  But the notion of God is coherent because it's that of the being with infinite perfections, which contain no negation or limitation (§ 45)

NOTE: Although reminiscent of the Ontological argument, this is original with Lz.

• however, contra Newton and Clarke, God doesn't intervene in the world in its day to day run.
• The triad power/understanding/will in God is paralleled in created monads by the triad being/perception/apperception (§ 48)

1. A monad A exerts influence on a monad (or an aggregate of monads) B if A is part of the sufficient reason for some fact about B (§§ 50; 52).
2. But God attunes monads so that if A is more perfect than B, then B is organized so as to accommodate A’s needs (§ 51).
3. The more a monad has distinct perceptions, the more perfect it is (§ 49)
4. Hence, the more a monad has distinct perceptions, the more it is active, that is, the more other monads are designed taking its development as their guidelines for action.

3.
Among all the possible combinations of monads (all the possible worlds), God freely chooses to create the best (§§ 53-58).  This involves creating a world in which

• moral laws are safeguarded (§§ 89-90)
• the greatest possible variety and the greatest quantity of perfection is governed by the simplest possible laws (note that this is a problem of maxima/minima) (§ 58)

Panpsychism and pre-established harmony

1.
Each monad represents (albeit confusedly) every other monad because:

1. this is required by the best possible world (§ 60)
2. because of the plenum in nature, each body, and ultimately each monad, is influenced by every other body, and ultimately every other monad (§ 61-2).

• organism: an aggregate of monads plus an entelechy
• an animal: an organism whose entelechy is a soul
• an intelligent creature (a person): an animal whose soul is a spirit.

• how metamorphosis is possible.

NOTES: however,
• metempsychosis doesn't occur
• no monad but God is ever without a body
• it doesn't follow that each piece of matter has a leading monad, i.e. is an organism.
• that death is nothing but an enfolding of the body brought about by an increase of confusedness in perception; birth is the reverse (§ 73). Nothing really dies or is really born (§§ 76-77)

NOTE: all  monads are coeval with the universe.
• how preformism, which is supported by new discoveries (no originatio equivoca and micro-organisms everywhere) is possible ( 74-75).

Spirits and the city of God

While every monad mirrors (i.e. represents) the whole universe, spirits, by having distinct ideas, mirror God because they can understand the system of the world. Hence, they can enter in a personal relation with God, viewing God as a perfect monarch (§§ 83-84).  They are part of the city of God, a moral order  to which the natural order is harmoniously subordinated (§§ 85-8).  Hence, the natural development of efficient causes will bring about the punishments and rewards required by grace and justice (§ 89).  Finally, although God's antecedent will is that no evil be in the world, his consequent will is that this world (the best but with evil in it) be created (§ 90)
NOTE:
There are three traditional ways of dealing with the problem of evil:

1. Absolute optimism: everything is actually good; evil is mere lack of being, like a whole in a garment.  As such, evil does not exist
2. Instrumental optimism: evil exists, but it's a means to greater good.
3. Compensatory optimism: evil exists, but it's an ineliminable part of the best possible world

1.
Newton and Clarke:

• View of space and time as eternal and infinite
• Take space and time to be divine attributes (immensity and eternity)
• Adopt a substantival view of space, in which places are parasitic on space, which exists independently of any object.

• Space and time, if real, would have infinite parts.  But then the whole would not be bigger than the part, which is impossible.  Hence, space and time do not exist.
• Space and time, if real, would be either absolute and eternal besides God, or they would be aspects of God.  Both options are unacceptable.
• Space and time are continua, and as such undifferentiated homogeneous wholes (each part is structurally isomorphic to the whole). Hence, they have merely potential parts.   But wholes are made up of their parts and therefore no real whole can have merely potential parts.  Hence, space and time do not exist.
• If space and time existed, since they are homogeneous, there would be no reason for God's placing the universe where and when he did; this would be incompatible with the Principle of Sufficient Reason.  Hence, they don't exist.

• consider an object X and a spatial metric

NOTE: spatial relations are prior to space in the relational theory.
• all the actual or possible objects having the same spatial relation with X (e.g., at a certain distance from X), determine a place

NOTES:
• analogy with the genealogical tree; each place in the tree is determined, but not constituted by, the persons occupying it.
• a place is not a thing or an object, but an ideal entity
• space is all the places taken together.

NOTE: space is constructed out of places, which are themselves constructed out of objects (possible or real) and spatial relations.

Free Will

1. Lz. is a compatibilist; however, he also insists that freedom of the will is incompatible with any sort of necessitarianism (the view that  Spinoza held).

2. Lz. contrasts necessary and contingent statements:

• Necessary:
1. their negation is contradictory
2. they can be demonstrated, i.e. proved in a finite number of steps
3. their truth depends on the divine understanding alone
• Contingent:
1. their negation is not contradictory
2. they cannot be demonstrated
3. their truth involves the divine will

1. Necessarily, L (necessitarianism)
2. Necessarily, if C, then L (hypothetical necessitarianism)
3. If C, then L (determinism)

NOTES:
• the difference between (2) and (3) is that the laws of nature governing the transition from C to L are necessary in (2) and contingent in (3).
• If C is true, I don't have the power to make L false. However, I can take steps to change my character and train myself to do what I think I should do, i.e. attune my motivations to my evaluations.
• Absolute freedom of indifference (agent causation) doesn't obtain.

4.  Lz. adopts an internalist view of motivation: we are motivated by our perception of the good; however, even if X is judged less of a good than Y, the attainment of Y can still be the motive of our action if Y is represented more vividly than X.
NOTE: compare to Locke's externalism.