Volume 25, December 2015
Dedicated to Robert C. Sleigh, Jr.
Kyle Sereda
Pages 31-54
Leibniz’s Relational Conception of Number
In this paper, I address a topic that has been mostly neglected in Leibniz scholarship: Leibniz’s conception of number. I argue that Leibniz thinks of numbers as a certain kind of relation, and that as such, numbers have a privileged place in his metaphysical system as entities that express a certain kind of possibility. Establishing the relational view requires reconciling two seemingly inconsistent definitions of number in Leibniz’s corpus; establishing where numbers fit in Leibniz’s ontology requires confronting a challenge from the well-known nominalist reading of Leibniz most forcefully articulated in Mates (1986). While my main focus is limited to the positive integers, I also argue that Leibniz intends to subsume them under a more general conception of number.