Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (b. 1646–d. 1716) was one of the greatest of the early modern “rationalist” philosophers. He is perhaps best known to students of philosophy as an advocate of the principle of sufficient reason, the preestablished harmony of mind and body, philosophical optimism, and the doctrine of monads. While many if not all of these ideas have fallen out of favor, it is nevertheless the case that Leibniz’s arguments are deep and important and worth taking very seriously. Leibniz was an eclectic philosopher; he sought to draw out views that he thought were close to the truth and combine them in new ways to arrive at the most plausible picture of the world. It is for this reason that, while he is sympathetic to parts of the “modern” philosophy of René Descartes (b. 1596–d. 1650), Thomas Hobbes (b. 1588–d. 1679), and Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza (b. 1633–d. 1677), he offers criticisms of it at the same time through the language and ideas of ancient and medieval philosophy. He was not just a philosopher, however, but was also a mathematician, natural philosopher, engineer, historian, lawyer, and diplomat of the first rank. As this bibliography is intended principally for students of philosophy, his other work will largely be ignored, as well as scholarship on it.
This chapter examines Kant’s understanding of Leibniz’s philosophy and the philosophy of the Leibnizian-rationalist tradition in eighteenth-century Germany. It details the reception of Leibniz’s philosophy after his death in 1716 and the ways in which various figures—Christian Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten, and others—took on and modified Leibniz’s views. And it gives an account of Leibniz’s published works available to Kant at various points in his life. The claim ultimately is that there are details and subtleties in Leibniz’s philosophical views that were simply not available to Kant, and this fact to some degree undermines the strength of Kant’s argument against Leibniz.
One of the more interesting topics debated by Leibniz and Locke and one that has received comparatively little critical commentary is the nature of essences and the classification of the natural world. 1 This topic, moreover, is of tremendous importance, occupying a position at the intersection of the metaphysics of individual beings, modality, epistemology, and philosophy of language. And, while it goes back to Plato, who wondered if we could cut nature at its joints, as Nicholas Jolley has pointed out, the debate between Leibniz and Locke has very clear similarities to the topic that has dominated the philosophy of language from the 1970s on: namely, the challenge mounted by Kripke, Kaplan, Putnam, and others against Russellian and Fregean descriptivist accounts of meaning. Yet, this topic is also, as Jolley writes, one of the "most elusive" in the debate between Leibniz and Locke. 2 The purpose of this paper is to examine in detail Leibniz's critique of Locke's distinction between real and nominal essences. In doing so, I hope to show certain virtues in Leibniz's account of metaphysics and philosophy of language that usually escape notice. While I wish to provide a general account of Leibniz's disagreement with Locke, I also plan to focus on the nature of species and natural kinds. In my opinion, those who have treated this topic have not paid sufficient attention to Leibniz's claims that "Essence is fundamentally nothing but the possibility of the thing under consideration" (A VI, vi, 293) and "essences are everlasting because they only concern
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