This is an appreciation of Richard Arthur, assessing his contributions to Leibniz studies and recounting the nature of our friendship over the past 30 years.

Although scholars have given much attention to Leibniz’s view of space, they have given far less attention to his view of place. This neglect is regrettable because Leibniz holds that place is more fundamental than space. What is more, I argue that Leibniz’s view of place is novel, strange and yet, appealing. To have a Leibnizian place is to have a point of view. And nothing more. Because this reading is likely to sound counterintuitive, the first half of the paper motivates my reading by arguing that point of view plays a foundational role for Leibniz. Consequently, it would be reasonable for Leibniz to identify place with something so foundational. Having provided Leibnizian reasons for identifying place with point of view, I then argue that Leibniz identifies place with point of view by analyzing some neglected texts. I close by considering a worry from the Clarke Correspondence.

At the turn of the century (1899-1903) Bertrand Russell advocated an absolutist theory of space and time, and scornfully rejected Leibniz’s relational theory in his Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (1900). But by the time of the second edition (1937), he had proposed highly influential relational theories of space and time that had much in common with Leibniz’s own views. Ironically, he never acknowledges this. In trying to get to the bottom of this enigma, I looked further at contemporary texts by Russell, and also those he might have relied on, especially that of Robert Latta. I found that, like Latta’s, Russell’s interpretation of Leibniz was heavily conditioned by his immersion in neo-Hegelian and neo-Kantian philosophy prior to 1898, and that the doctrine of internal relations he attributes to Leibniz was more nearly the view of Lotze.

This paper examines the role that Leibniz’s philosophy played in the debate between the Idealists and their opponents at the turn of the twentieth century. While it is Russell’s The Philosophy of Leibniz (1900) which is most frequently referred to in this context, this paper focuses on John Dewey’s Leibniz’s New Essays which was written twelve years earlier, during the Hegelian phase of Dewey’s career. It is important to shift our attention to Dewey’s commentary not only because it has been almost entirely neglected, but also because it provides a broader perspective on the role of the Leibnizian system in one of the leading debates in the history of philosophy, namely the debate over the intelligibility of the idea of internal relations. In particular, Dewey’s book reveals Leibniz’s involvement in the emergence of the notion of organism which was at the heart of the debate.

In the essay “Principia Calculi rationalis” Leibniz attempts to prove the theory of the syllogism within his own logic of concepts. This task would be quite easy if one made unrestricted use of the fundamental laws discovered by Leibniz, e.g., in the “General Inquiries” of 1686. In the essays of August 1690, Leibniz had developed some similar proofs which, however, he considered as unsatisfactory because they presupposed the unproven law of contraposition: “If concept A contains concept B, then conversely Non-B contains Non-A”. The proof in “Principia Calculi rationalis” appears to reach its goal without resorting to this law. However, it contains a subtle flaw which results from failing to postulate that the ingredient concepts have to be “possible”, i.e. self-consistent. Once this flaw is corrected, it turns out that the proof – though formally valid – would not have been approved by Leibniz because, again, it rests on an unproven principle even stronger than the law of contraposition.