Geometry and Monadology: Leibniz's Analysis Situs and Philosophy of Space

by Vincenzo De Risi

This book reconstructs, from both historical and theoretical points of view, Leibniz’s geometrical studies, focusing in particular on the research Leibniz carried out in his final years. The work’s main purpose is to offer a better understanding of the philosophy of space and in general of the mature Leibnizean metaphysics. This is the first ever, comprehensive historical reconstruction of Leibniz’s geometry.

678 pages, Hardcover

First published May 21, 2007

Reviews

[Jonathan Hockey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough and interesting treatment of Leibniz's notions of space. However, I found it to underplay some of Leibniz's more rationalist concerns with Principles such as PIID, and it seemed to overestimate the extent of an absolute view of space in Leibniz, by demarcating a metaphysical account of space from a phenomenological one, and putting all of Leibniz's relational ideas in a phenomenological domain, in a quite typical empiricist manner, where one tries to partition off a representational shadow realm of phenomena, from the real world behind those phenomena, but I don't think Leibniz's rationalism fits well into such an approach. And neither do I think this style of approach can do full justice to the extent of Leibniz's relationalism about space. A different direction, in my opinion, is to see space as relational in the sense of subject-dependent, rather than contained in some subject or in some phenomenal domain, in this sense the relational aspect of space is already involving the real notion of space, and so we cannot hypostatise some absolute view of space independently of this subject-relation.