Leibniz and the Possibility of God's Existence

Abstract

Toward the end of 1676 Leibniz met Spinoza a number of times. In one of those meetings Leibniz presented a proof of the possibility of God's existence. In his proof Leibniz presupposed that a proposition is necessarily true only if its truth is either demonstrable or self-evident and that the divine perfections are simple and affirmative qualities. I contend that Leibniz's presuppositions undermine, rather than establish, the necessary existence of ‘a God of the kind in whom the pious believe’. My assessment is based upon a consideration of Leibniz's argument in the context of other early papers, works written before the Discourse on Metaphysics in 1686.

Possible Worlds in the Precipice: Why Leibniz Met Spinoza?

“…As a starting point I will take the last manuscript (A81)the text which was presented to Spinoza. 15 I will not comment on the validity of the argumentation, the assuming of the opposite as a method or the procedure through definitions (more about the argumentation in Lomasky 1970;Blumenfeld 1972;Werther 1996;Nachtomy 2011, as well as in Blumenfeld 1995, 357-364); in this case, only the individual claims are important. To this end I provide a structured analysis, which follows the chronology of the exposition and distinguishes the individual steps.…”