The Logic of Leibniz’s Borrowed Reality Argument

Abstract

Leibniz argues that there must be a fundamental level of simple substances because composites borrow their reality from their constituents and not all reality can be borrowed. I contend that the underlying logic of this ‘borrowed reality argument’ has been misunderstood, particularly the rationale for the key premise that not all reality can be borrowed. Contrary to what has been suggested, the rationale turns neither on the alleged viciousness of an unending regress of reality borrowers nor on the Principle of Sufficient Reason, but on the idea that composites are phenomena and thus can be real only insofar as they have a foundation in substances, from which they directly ‘borrow’ their reality. The claim that composites are phenomena rests in turn on Leibniz's conceptualism about relations. So understood, what initially looked like a disappointingly simple argument for simples turns out to be a rather rich and sophisticated one.

Philosophy's past: Cognitive values and the history of philosophy

“…Furthermore, the question whether grounding in ancient philosophy lends the contemporary discussion novel or conservative value cannot be separated from an appreciation of the question of grounding's presence or absence from the long history of philosophy that connects us to antiquity. And historians working on periods after ancient philosophy discuss grounding in medieval philosophy (Cameron 2020, Ward forthcoming), modern philosophy (Embry 2017, Schechtman 2018, Cameron 2020, Puryear 2020), Bolzano (Roski 2017, Roski 2019, Roski and Schnieder 2019, Roski 2020) and Austro‐German phenomenology (Mulligan 2020). Notice, however, that the potential influence of historical scholarship on the contemporary discussion of grounding is not limited to historical work that explicitly references grounding.…”