The Philosophy of Leibniz

by Nicholas Rescher

168 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1967

Reviews

[Joey Z]

Rescher, a bona fide Pittsburgh philosophy legend (RIP), seems to spend most of his time in here arguing against the ridiculous interpretations of Bertrand Russell. Yes, this is also an excellent secondary piece of literature that explicates the sheer scope and ambition of Leibniz’s system of philosophy in very short form, and Rescher does a great job at this. But it still is really funny how often Russell’s bad interpretations came up, which Rescher quickly dispels. Russell seems to not only have not understood Leibniz, but he also could not help his cynicism from obscuring the purity from which Leibniz wrote.

I’ll have to read some of my other books that I own on Leibniz by Rescher to see how this one is in comparison, but in respect to his translation, commentary, and analysis on the Monadology, this is also excellent.

[Jonathan Hockey]

This book is a good overview of Leibniz, and makes for a nice complimentary perspective to that of Bertrand Russell in his Critical Exposition of Leibniz. I don't agree with the approach of linking Leibniz too strongly to the principle of Perfection and with God as a Monad. This is liable to collapse into Spinoza-style Monism, rather than Monadology. I personally think it is required to extract a more fully secular Rationalism from out of Leibniz's work, by taking the principle of sufficient reason as primary, rather than principle of identity or the predicate in subject principle. These latter lead down the root of monads containing their complete concept, being incorruptible, and also being connected to each other only through illusory forms and relations of space-time, lost in a labyrinth of pathways that can never be properly connected or continuous without the arbitrary imputation of a pre-established harmony. When we build from the principle of sufficient reason and link it to the Principle of identity of indiscernibles, we have a more workable basis for realistic unique monads that do not need to have an interaction with each other accounted for, because they are in direct connection to their surrounding and reasonable reality. The monad is then a rigidly designated entity not mirroring a representation of the world, but gripping onto a direct relationship to the world that is part presentation and part projection. The monad is not a being we can list the attributes of so that its predicates can be contained in it as subject, anymore than a name of subject can be reduced to an attendant set of descriptions, as in Russell's theory of descriptions. It is the focal point at the center of all our discourse that we cannot do without, it precedes any description, it is like a black hole as source, in which we cannot penetrate the event horizon, yet we know it is there and all our actions are oriented relative to it, akin to aspects of Kants approach with the unity of apperception, and with a unknowable noumenal self, rather than a noumenal god or thing in itself. In which its descriptive unknowability does not stop it from being intuitively self-evident.