Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the nature of the world.
Metaphysics as a discipline was a central part of academic inquiry and scholarly education even before the age of Aristotle.
Other problems that were considered metaphysical problems for centuries are now typically relegated to their own separate subheadings in philosophy, such as philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science.
Leibniz was born in 1646 in Leipzig to Friedrich Leibnütz and Catherina Schmuck.
Leibniz died in Hanover in 1716: at the time, he was so out of favor that neither George I (who happened to be near Hanover at the time) nor any fellow courtier other than his personal secretary attended the funeral.
Leibniz was the first to see that the coefficients of a system of linear equations could be arranged into arrays, now called matrices, which can be manipulated to find the solution of the system, if any.
Leibniz'smetaphysics is most profitably contrasted with that of his near contemporary Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), since the two of them come down on exactly opposite sides of many important issues (giving us something like a step in Hegelian dialectic).
Leibniz's system is also to be compared with the natural science of Isaac Newton (1642-1727), who became Leibniz's bitter enemy, not just in metaphysics, but in the argument over who had priority for the development of calculus.
Leibniz made his living mostly in the employ of German Princes, as a diplomat and even as a librarian, ending his days at the court of Hanover, dying just two years after the Elector of Hanover, George I, had become King of England.
Leibniz's rejection of materialist conceptions of the mind was coupled with a strong opposition to dualistic views concerning the relationship between mind and body, particularly the substance dualism that figured in the philosophy of Descartes and his followers.
This is why Leibniz says that, at the level of bodies (that is, for Leibniz, at the level of well-founded phenomena), all occurs according to the laws of efficient causes; whereas with respect to perceptions and appetites (or at least with some of these—interpretations differ here) all occurs according to the laws of final causes.
Although Leibniz was not the first to propose such an idea (Aquinas, for example, had a similar view), and although the view in his hands did not have the explosive quality that it did in the hands of Freud, the thesis remains an intriguing and important part of his philosophy of mind.
Leibniz is one of the first philosophers to have analyzed the importance of that which is "unconscious" in one's mental life.
Leibniz's analogy is of the roar of the waves of the beach: the seemingly singular sound of which one is conscious is in fact made up of a vast number of individual sounds of which one is not conscious--droplets of water smacking into one another.
However, Leibniz'smetaphysics was highly influential, renewing the Cartesian project of rational metaphysics, and bequeathing a set of problems and approaches that had a huge impact on much of 18th century philosophy.
www.iep.utm.edu /l/leib-met.htm (10590 words)
A (Leibnizian) Theory of Concepts(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
Concepts are first analyzed in terms of a precise background theory of abstract objects, and once concept summation and concept containment are defined, the axioms and theorems of Leibniz's calculus of concepts (in his logical papers) are derived.
This analysis of concepts is then seamlessly connected with Leibniz'smodalmetaphysics of complete individual concepts.
The fundamental theorem of Leibniz'smodalmetaphysics of concepts is proved, namely, whenever an object x has F contingently, then (i) the individual concept of x contains the concept F and (ii) there is a (counterpart) complete individual concept y which doesn't contain the concept F and which `appears' at some other possible world.
This logico-classificatory concept, I argue, is that in which Leibniz first grounds his modal theory, his method of analysis and synthesis, and what he would later call his Principle of Sufficient Reason, to mention only three.
According to the "standard" view of the historiography of logic, Leibniz's contribution to this field is basically restricted to the invention of (a preliminary version of) so-called possible-worlds-semantics.
Moreover Leibniz discovered a way to define the deontic operators in terms of their alethic counterparts provided that one additionally introduces a constant term 'b' to denote an ideally moral person ("vir bonum").
kf-hijk(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
Many metaphysical principles of Leibniz philosophy are interpreted in the modal key, such as the principle of the best, the principle of plenitude; the system of possible worlds and so on.
In meinem Beitrag versuche ich nachzuweisen, dass Leibniz mit der Lehre der prästabilierten Harmonie der intersubjektiven Konzeption von Fichte in gewisser Weise vorhergegangen ist.
In diesem Bereich sind für Leibniz sieben Merkmale für Vollkommenheit nachweisbar: Aktivität, Autonomie, Erkenntnis, Realität, Unendlichkeit, Vielfalt und Einheit.
Insofar as it is not merely historical curiosity but a test of our intuition about modalities that we are interested in the predecessors of modern modal logic, we face the urgent task of reconstructing the Scotistic system of modalities.
Now Fitch is willing to agree with Mates in that Leibniz would not allow one to have two counterparts in the same world, nor would he allow that one be the counterpart of two things in the same world.
If Leibniz's system is like canonical modal logic, there is the threat of the problem of transworld identity, which seems unavoidable due to his principle of the identity of indiscernibles.
Metaphysics Conference (MMM), University of Notre Dame, July 1998.
Midwest Metaphysics Conference (MMM), University of Notre Dame, August 1997.
"LeibnizísModalMetaphysics," forthcoming in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, December 1999.
web.ics.purdue.edu /~jacover/cv.htm (1581 words)
The Conscious Mind: The Metaphysics of Consciousness: David Chalmer's The Conscious Mind in Historical and Contemporary ...(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
The intent of the conference is to examine current theories of consciousness in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and to set these in their wider historical context.
Notable in the history of the philosophy of mind are the theories of American philosophers such as Peirce, James, and Whitehead, who had formulated their own distinctive but unduly neglected responses to the problem of consciousness--along with theories of Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Russell, and others.
The conference is supported with funds from the C.S. Peirce Professorship of American Philosophy/Univ. at Buffalo, the Department of Philosophy/Univ. at Buffalo, the Center for Cognitive Science/Univ. at Buffalo and the Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, Univ. at Buffalo).
We are dealing here with 'assumptions' in a strict sense of the word, assumptions which may, even if only in isolated instances, turn out to be false.
Interestingly, traces of this fallibilistic conception of the a priori are present in Husserl, and already Leibniz spoke of a 'methodus conjecturalis a priori', which proceeds with the aid of hypotheses: '[assumere] causas licet sine ulla probatione'.
Smith, Barry 1990 "Aristotle, Menger, Mises: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Economics", in B. Caldwell (ed.), Carl Menger and His Economic Legacy (History of Political Economy, Annual Supplement to vol.
"The Treatises On Modal Propositions and On Hypothetical Propositions by Richard Lavenham," Mediaeval Studies 35 (1973), pp.
Leibniz, Metaphysical Disputation on the Principle of an Individual, 15 pp., typescript.
Chair, Ph.D. dissertation committee for Brian Conolly (Philosophy), "Studies in the Metaphysics of Dietrich von Freiberg." Final oral defense May 18, 2004..
As Father Torelli has informed me that he has the honour to know you, I did not want him to leave here without carrying to you tokens […]
You can also find articles on his ethics, life and works, and modalmetaphysics, and ontological argument (the last, by Lawrence Nolan, is especially good).
The Clausewitz Homepage: includes, biography, commentary, and translations of his works (including On War).
