Leibniz on Causation and Agency This book presents a comprehensive examination of Gottfried Leibniz'sviews on the nature of agents and their actions. Julia Jorati offers a fresh look at controversial topics including Leibniz's doctrines of teleology, the causation of spontaneous changes within substances, divine concurrence, freedom, and contingency, and also discusses widely neglected issues such as his theories of moral responsibility, control, attributability, and compulsion. Rather than focusing exclusively on human agency, she explores the activities of nonrational substances and the differences between distinctive types of actions, showing how the will, appetitions, and teleology are key to Leibniz'sdi sc u ssions of agency. Her book reveals that Leibniz has a nuanced and compelling philosophy of action that has relevance for present-day discussions of agency. It will be of interest to scholars and students of early modern philosophy as well as to metaphysicians and philosophers of action. julia jorati is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University. She has published numerous articles on Leibniz's metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and ethics, in publications including the Journal of the History of Philosophy, The Leibniz Review, Philosophy Compass, and several edited volumes.
Leibniz holds that created substances do not causally interact with each other but that there is causal activity within each such creature. Every created substance constantly changes internally, and each of these changes is caused by the substance itself or by its prior states. Leibniz describes this kind of intrasubstance causation both in terms of final causation and in terms of efficient causation. How exactly this works, however, is highly controversial. I will identify what I take to be the major interpretive issues surrounding Leibniz's views on causation and examine several inf luential interpretations of these views. In 'Leibniz on Causation -Part 2' I will then take a closer look at final causation.
The Ohio State University Leibniz's famous Principle of the identity of indiscernibles (Pii) states that no two things are exactly alike. The Pii is commonly thought to be metaphysically necessary for Leibniz: the coexistence of two indiscernibles is metaphysically impossible. This paper argues, against the standard interpretation, that Leibniz's Pii is metaphysically contingent. in other words, while the coexistence of indiscernibles would not imply a contradiction, the Pii is true in the actual world because the Principle of Sufficient reason rules out violations of the Pii. God could have created indiscernibles but he did not because he is wise and does nothing without a sufficient reason. Because it is plausible that all Leibnizian possible worlds are unified by a wise plan, this means that the Pii is true in all possible worlds. God could create indiscernibles, but the resulting creation would not be a world. To argue for this conclusion, the paper carefully examines Leibniz's mature account of metaphysical contingency. it shows that for Leibniz, only states of affairs that imply logical contradictions are metaphysically impossible. next, it argues that the coexistence of indiscernibles would not imply a logical contradiction; it would merely imply what Leibniz calls a "moral absurdity," that is, a violation of the Principle of Sufficient reason. This means that the Pii is true contingently and-since God can do whatever is metaphysically possible-that God can create two things that are exactly alike. 1. See for instance Gonzalo rodriguez-Pereyra's recent monograph on the Pii (rodriguez
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