Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad
Daniel Garber
Language: English
Pages: 456
ISBN: 0199693099
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Daniel Garber presents an illuminating study of Leibniz's conception of the physical world. Leibniz's commentators usually begin with monads, mind-like simple substances, the ultimate building-blocks of the Monadology. But Leibniz's apparently idealist metaphysics is very puzzling: how can any sensible person think that the world is made up of tiny minds? In this book, Garber tries to make Leibniz's thought intelligible by focusing instead on his notion of body. Beginning with Leibniz's earliest writings, he shows how Leibniz starts as a Hobbesian with a robust sense of the physical world, and how, step by step, he advances to the monadological metaphysics of his later years. Much of the book's focus is on Leibniz's middle years, where the fundamental constituents of the world are corporeal substances, unities of matter and form understood on the model of animals. For Garber monads only enter fairly late in Leibniz's career, and when they enter, he argues, they do not displace bodies but complement them. In the end, though, Garber argues that Leibniz never works out the relation between the world of monads and the world of bodies to his own satisfaction: at the time of his death, his philosophy is still a work in progress.
dissertation written under the supervision of his professor, Jacob Thomasius, required for his bachelor’s degree at the University of Leipzig. Might Leibniz’s later interest in unity and individuality be traced back to this very first philosophical exercise? The ‘‘Disputatio’’ treats a classical problem in scholastic philosophy, the ‘‘principle of the individual’’: what is it that differentiates individuals ¹ A6.4.1988 (L 278–9). ² A6.4.1398–9 (RA 245). ³ A6.1.5–19. 56 reforming mechanism:
texts, Leibniz had a very different conception of indivisibility, as the planarian example shows. ¹¹⁶ G II 122. For Arnauld’s question, see G II 108. Leibniz was deeply interested in the microscopy of his day, which he found quite relevant to a number of metaphysical issues. On this see Wilson (1997) and Fouke (1989). ¹¹⁷ G II 123. See also G II 100. ¹¹⁸ This is certainly connected with Leibniz’s earlier speculations starting in 1671 about the resurrection of the body, discussed above in Ch. 1.
a substance is a consequence of its preceding state.’’³⁵ But the phrase ‘‘that is to say, the derivative force, of which it is a consequence’’ is not in the text Arnauld received, and is considered to be a later addition.³⁶ The earliest reliably datable text I know of where Leibniz explicitly contrasts primitive and derivative forces is the first draft of the ‘‘Specimen dynamicum,’’ probably written in 1694.³⁷ Though the distinction between primitive and derivative forces may be new to the
complete substance, but it is not merely passive; primary matter is merely passive, but it is not a complete substance. And so, we must add a soul or a form analogous to a soul, or a first entelechy, that is, a certain urge [nisus] or primitive force of acting, which itself is an inherent law, impressed by divine decree.⁴² Here primary matter, an incomplete entity, the passive principle in substance, is contrasted with secondary matter, a complete substance, presumably the corporeal substance,
interpretations of the day. vi preface Meanwhile the evidence slowly gathered as the volumes of the Vorausedition to series 6 of the Akademie Edition came out, one by one every year. The texts were published together in A6.4 in 1999, arranged by topic in chronological order, philosophical writings from 1677 to 1690. I became more and more convinced that I had been on to something, and that the monadology was simply the wrong framework in which to understand Leibniz’s philosophy in this period,