The Philosophy of Leibniz: Metaphysics and Language

by Benson Mates

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) is one of the most imposing figures in the history of Western thought. In this definitive treatment of his wide-ranging philosophical ideas, Benson Mates has brought his own formidable abilities to bear on the unwieldy--and virtually inaccessible--corpus of Leibniz's work. The result is an elegantly written and meticulously reasoned exegesis of the fundamental Leibniz, one that is destined to be a cornerstone of Leibniz scholarship for years to come.

Genres: Philosophy

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[Jonathan Hockey · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some informative parts of this account of Leibniz, but unfortunately, the further it develops and the more he tries to say something of his own in critique of Leibniz, rather than just expounding Leibniz' views, the weaker it becomes and the more he exposes his own poor and now outdated philosophical views of logical positivism. While that early 20th century philosophy will die out quickly, people will still be talking about some of Leibniz' principles and his monadological metaphysics for centuries to come. Not enough appreciation of the depth of Leibniz ideas is shown in this study, and often he obfuscates Leibniz's positions, talking of him as being close to suggesting a verifiability criterion (which he is purely him reading into it as a simplistic logical positivist take) and talking of Leibniz as a nominalist, when by nominalist he means only that Leibniz is not a realist in a very specific modern sense that had no relevance back then, while in relation to its true contrary, essentialism, there is a much more interesting and relevant debate to be had about Leibniz's views.

He shows a weak understanding of Leibniz's relational view on space and time and only says well on Leibniz's principles like that of sufficient reason and identity of indiscernibles when he is either quoting Leibniz directly or faithfully interpreting his ideas. When it comes to the author giving his own interpretations of Leibniz he largely relies on weak judgments of Leibniz relative to his own weaker philosophy of logical positivism.

It is good for some of the background and history and context of Leibniz and in the early chapters in the exposition of Leibniz' views and the choice of quotes from Leibniz is a rich range and from good scholarship into his works, but don't expect much from the critique, given the poor philosophical perspective of Logical positivism that this critique comes from.