PHILOSOPHY 352: LEIBNIZ (AND LOCKE)

Final Assignment

 

Write an essay of about 3000 words (maximum 3500) on one of the following topics.  Due in the instructor’s Philosophy Department mailbox by 3:30 PM Friday April 12th.  The main bulk of your paper should be preceded by an abstract, in italics, just a few sentences long, that explains what your paper is about, the main point or line of argument that it makes. If for some reason you anticipate not making this deadline, you must notify the instructor in advance and state your reasons.  Since this course does not have a final exam, final grades are due in the following Friday.  So, no late papers will be accepted without appropriate documentation, such as to justify a grade of DE.  Worth 40% of your final grade.  No handwritten assignments please.  And no vinyl folders or other covers.  Just staple the pages together in the upper left hand corner, making sure that you full name and student number appear.  You are encouraged to explore the secondary literature in connection with the topic you choose, not only material that may be mentioned in class but stuff that isn’t but that you have come across on your own.  But please give proper credit to all your sources for quotations and ideas.  Plagiarism is a serious offence, with serious penalties.)

 

 

  1. Explain, elaborate and critically discuss the following passages from the Monadology, concerning the impossibility of a ‘compositional’ account of apperception, perception, and thought.  Leibniz seems to suppose that to seek a compositional (e.g., neurological) account of thought involves a confusion of levels tantamount to a category mistake.

 

We ourselves experience a multitude in a simple substance when we find that the least thought that we apperceive involves variety in its object….moreover, we must confess that the perception, and what depends on it, is inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons, that is, through shapes and motions.  If we imagine that there is a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that we could enter into it, as one enters a mill.  Assuming that, when inspecting its interior, we will only find parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception.  And so, we should seek perception in a simple substance and not in the composite or in the machine….

….each organized body of a living thing is a kind of divine machine or natural automaton, which infinitely surpasses all artificial automata.  For a machine constructed by a man’s art is not a machine in each of its parts.  For example, the tooth of a brass wheel has parts or fragments which, for us, are no longer artificial things, and no longer have any marks to indicate the machine for whose use the wheel was intended.  But natural machines, that is, living bodies, are still machines in their least parts, to infinity.  That is the difference between nature and art, between divine art and our art. (cf. paras. 16, 17, 64).

  1. Leibniz argues for a relational view of space in the following passage from his 3rd letter to Samuel Clarke.

 

I have many demonstrations to confute the fancy of those who take space to be a substance, or at least an absolute being.  But I shall only use, at the present, one demonstration, which the author here gives me occasion to insist upon.  I say, then, that if space was an absolute being, there would something happen for which it would be impossible that there should be a sufficient reason.  Which is against my axiom,  And I prove it thus.  Space is something absolutely uniform; and, without the things placed in it, one point of space does not absolutely differ in any respect whatsoever from another point of space.  Now from hence it follows, (supposing space to be something in itself, besides the order of bodies among themselves), that ‘tis impossible that there should be a reason, why God, preserving the same situations of bodies among themselves, should have placed them in space after one certain matter and not otherwise; why everything was not placed the quite contrary way, for instance, by changing East into West.  But if space is nothing else, but that order or relation; and it is nothing at all without bodies, but the possibility of placing them; then those two states, the one such as it now is, the other supposed to be the quite contrary way, would not at all differ from one another.  Their difference therefore is only to be found in our chimerical supposition of the reality of space itself.  But in truth the one would exactly be the same thing as the other, they being absolutely indiscernible; and consequently there is no room to enquire after a reason of the preference of one to the other.

 

In the latter part of this passage, Leibniz seems to be arguing from the relationality of space to its ideality.  There are also passages in the New Essays in which Leibniz suggests that space and time, being merely relational, exist only in the imagination or understanding.  How are these views supposed to connect?  Does the ideality of space follow from its relationality , or vice versa?  What is behind these views of Leibniz?  And how is it that possibility enters in?

 

  1. In his “New System” Leibniz characterizes the nature of individual substances in terms of primitive forces, which he takes to be an intrinsic denomination of potentialities (or possibilities) of action for the substance (p. 139).  Shades of Arnauld!  In “On Nature itself” Leibniz suggests that the notion of inherent force is an idea of the intellect, not of the imagination, thus suggesting that he takes it to be a simple innate idea, like or idea of infinity (i.e., ‘innate2’, following Robert Adams’ terminology) (p. 159)..  He suggests that the very nature of substance consists in a force for acting or being acted upon, using such terms as ‘energeia’ and ‘potentia’.  Action is successive, but potential or power or force is persistent, and it is only the latter that can ground the conservation of identity over time (p. 160).  But Leibniz also uses other language.  Harking back to the Discourse, he speaks of organic ‘unfolding’ through a predetermined plan (p. 156), and later in the Monadology he suggests that while bodies act through efficient causes (or motions), souls act through final causes (or reasons) (para. 79).  Can these seemingly disparate ideas about the basis of the activity of things be somehow bent and stretched into a coherent, unified conception?  Explore.

 

  1. In his late correspondence, especially  with De Volder and Des Bosses, Leibniz struggles to find a way to accommodate the idea of corporeal substances – e.g., living things -- into his metaphysics of substance.  If living things are to be regarded as substances, then they cannot be mere phenomena.  What, then is the source of their status as substances? Phenomena arise from aggregations of monads.  It would seem that a genuine corporeal substance cannot arise in the same way from monads.  We would have to tell a different story.  Explain and critically discuss Leibniz’s admittedly speculative idea of invoking “substantial chains”, and “dominant monads”  while hanging on to his previous commitment to the thesis that substances cannot naturally either arise nor perish.