Famously lampooned for his theological optimism by Voltaire, after whom the latter modeled his farcical Professor Pangloss, and overshadowed by Isaac Newton, to whom the greater portion of credit went for the invention of calculus, the work of polymath Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz has experienced a belated renaissance. Gilles Deleuze found in Leibniz the grounds of a Baroque philosophy of art and science, while cybernetician Norbert Wiener deemed Leibniz “the patron saint of cybernetics” on account of his “counting machine” that is reputed to have anticipated modern computing. Two riddles, or “labyrinths of the human mind,” preoccupied Leibniz’s entire mathematical, philosophical, and theological undertakings: “one concerning the composition of the continuum”—or, how a finite segment of line could comprise an infinite number of discrete points; and “the other concerning the nature of freedom”—or, how a universe governed by necessity could allow for spontaneous and voluntary activity of infinite variety. For Leibniz, both labyrinths converge on a single problem: the nature of infinity—a successful elaboration of which, he proposed, would result in nothing less than a single unified theory of the sciences, human freedom, and God’s ultimate benevolence. What, for Leibniz, are the metaphysical implications of infinity? How can we understand, and continue to think with, Leibniz’s systematic philosophy—of everything?
In this course, we will embark on a systematic investigation of Leibniz’s philosophical oeuvre, its logical and epistemic premises, and its lasting effect on contemporary philosophical debates on mind, truth, meaning, and modality, the nature of possibility and necessity. We begin with Leibniz’s reception of his rationalist predecessors, Descartes and Malebranche, the avant garde of a radically new rationalist approach to philosophical inquiry. From there we will turn to the key texts of Leibniz’s philosophical work, including A New System of the Nature and Communication of Substances, Discourse on Metaphysics, and the correspondence with Antoine Arnauld, taking careful note of how early considerations of the nature of substance, unity, and truth culminate in the elaborate metaphysics of Leibniz’s most famous philosophical treatise, the Monadology. Finally, we will consider Leibniz as a dialectical thinker, responding in particular to the monumental work of the empiricist John Locke in the New Essays on Human Understanding.
