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book reviews

1. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 21
Mogens Lærke

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articles

2. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 21
David Lay Williams

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This essay clarifies Patrick Riley’s account of G. W. Leibniz by placing Leibniz’s moral and political doctrines in historical perspective. By understanding Leibniz’s practical philosophy as a solution to the same problems confronted by Thomas Hobbes, one can appreciate the originality and appeal of Riley’s Leibniz — with its emphasis on benevolence and Platonic ideas. By drawing attention to Leibniz’s practical works, Riley has resurrected an important voice in the history of political thought that had been long neglected. The essay concludes with some personal remarks about Riley’s own Leibnizian charity.
3. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 21
Douglas Bertrand Marshall

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Leibniz holds that nothing in nature strictly corresponds to any geometric curve or surface.Yet on Leibniz’s view, physicists are usually able to ignore any such lack of correspondence and to investigate nature using geometric representations. The primary goal of this essay is to elucidate Leibniz’s explanation of how physicists are able to investigate nature geometrically, focussing on two of his claims: (i) there can be things innature which approximate geometric objects to within any given margin of error; (ii) the truths of geometry state laws by which the phenomena of nature are governed. A corollary of Leibniz’s explanation is that physical bodies do have boundaries with which geometric surfaces can be compared to very high levels of precision. I argue that the existence of these physical boundaries is mind-independent to such an extent as to pose a significant challenge to idealist interpretations of Leibniz.
4. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 21
Mogens Lærke

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In this article, I propose a conjecture concerning the transmission of Spinoza’s Korte Verhandeling (KV) in the 1670s involving Leibniz. On the basis of a report about Spinoza’s philosophy written down by Leibniz after some conversations with Tschirnhaus in early 1676, I suggest that Tschirnhaus may have had in his possession a manuscript copy of KV and that his account of Spinoza’s doctrine to Leibniz was colored by this text. I support the hypothesis partly by means of external evidence, but mainly through a comparative analysis of Leibniz’s report and the doctrine contained in KV, showing that the report in important respects corresponds better to this text than to Ethics. I finally point to the importance that this hypothesis, if true, would have for our knowledge of Tschirnhaus’ role in the first diffusion of Spinoza’s philosophy outside Holland and for our understanding Leibniz’s reception of Spinoza in the mid-1670s.
5. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 21
Laurence Carlin

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My aim in this paper is to underscore the novelty of Leibniz’s teleology from a historical perspective. I believe this perspective helps deliver a better understanding of the finer details of Leibniz’s employment of final causes. I argue in this paper that Leibniz was taking a stance on three central teleological issues that derive from Aristotle, issues that seem to have occupied nearly every advocate of final causes from Aristotle to Leibniz. I discuss the three Aristotelian issues, and how major thinkers treated them in the medieval period. I argue that Leibniz rejected all of the mainstream Aristotelian teleological views on these issues. I conclude that Leibniz broke with longstanding threads of teleological thinking in ways that were often extreme.
6. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 21
Richard T. W. Arthur

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This paper consists in a study of Leibniz’s argument for the infinite plurality of substances, versions of which recur throughout his mature corpus. It goes roughly as follows: since every body is actually divided into further bodies, it is therefore not a unity but an infinite aggregate; the reality of an aggregate, however, reduces to the reality of the unities it presupposes; the reality of body, therefore, entails an actual infinity of constituent unities everywhere in it. I argue that this depends on a generalized notion of aggregation, according to which a thing may be an aggregate of its constituents if every one of its actual parts presupposes such constituents, but is not composed from them. One of the premises of this argument is the reality of bodies. If this premise is denied, Leibniz’s argument for the infinitude of substances, and even of their plurality, cannot go through.

book reviews

7. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 21
Patrick Riley

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8. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 21
Yitzhak Y. Melamed

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9. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 21
Michael LeBuffe

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10. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 21
Michael Futch

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11. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 21
Hasana Sharp

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12. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 21
Herbert Breger

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13. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 21

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14. The Leibniz Review: Volume > 21

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