PHILOS 25B Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Monadology, Individuation
Document Summary
Recap: studying leibniz is difficult for several reasons, there is no single canonical text like descartes" meditations or spinoza"s. Ethics: the best we have are monadology and discourse on metaphysics, which are not comprehensive or systematic. It seems as if leibniz changes his mind between discourse (earlier) and. It is hard to know what his primary arguments/motivation/concerns are. Leibniz"s criticisms of descartes: three problems, reality and composition, force. Reality and composition: from leibniz"s correspondence with cartesian philosopher arnaud: 2: any being by aggregation requires and explanation of its composition (i. e. we should be able to explain its constituents) For descartes, a body is a collection of parts, and those parts are collections of parts, ad infinitum. So under leibniz"s view, these cannot be real. March 9, 2015: meanwhile, leibniz rejects it because, atoms were often taken to all have the exact same shape.
