This article discusses Leibniz’s claim that every substance is endowed with the property of perception in connection with Platonism, rationalism and the problem of substance monism. It is argued that Leibniz’s ascription of perception to every substance relies on his Platonic conception of finite things as imitations of God, in whom there is ‘infinite perception’. Leibniz’s Platonism, however, goes beyond the notion of imitation, including also the emanative causal relation and the logical (i.e. definitional) priority of the absolute over the limited. It is proposed that Leibniz’s endorsement of Platonism, in conjunction with some rationalist elements of his philosophy, implies a monistic conception of particulars as modifications of a single substance. Following some scholars and opposing others, the article offers evidence that Leibniz accepted this implication during the last years of his Paris period. However, it is further argued that it was precisely the idea of perception as a property of every substance that allowed Leibniz to find a way out of monism after that period. More specifically, the article defends the view that what made room for ontological pluralism within Leibniz’s rationalist and Platonic outlook was the idea that perception is the property which constitutes the very being of substances: substances are their perceptions.
This article argues that Kant’s argument from incongruent counterparts in his essay, Directions in Space (1768) yields not the conclusion that space is an objective reality, but rather that it is an absolute and dynamical framework that grounds spatial properties, a view which is neutral with respect to the objective/subjective nature of space. It is suggested that, so construed, Kant’s argument in this essay can be made consistent with his later employment in support of transcendental idealism with regard to space.
A long-standing problem in Aristotelian scholarship concerns the question of how to reconcile Aristotle’s twofold description of metaphysics as ontology (the universal science of being qua being) and theology (the science of the changeless and separate substance). An important attempt to answer this question (advanced first by G. Patzig) consists in saying that the changeless and separate substance is focally prior to (or the focal meaning of) substance and therefore to being in general (since substance is focally prior to being in general). This article aims to refute this kind of approach to the problem of the unity of Aristotle’s metaphysics by arguing that (i) relations of focal meaning entail the logical (definitional) priority of the prior items over the dependent items standing in such relations; (ii) the changeless and separate substance is not logically prior to the other types of substances distinguished by Aristotle; and, therefore, (iii) the changeless and separate substance is not focally prior to (the focal meaning of) substance.
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