PHILOS 25B Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Phenomenalism
Document Summary
Descartes doesn"t account for composition and reality of body: options: Mathematical points not extended, so can"t make up extended things. No reality at all: leibniz doesn"t spend much time discussing this possibility. If so, it must be: genuinely one, able to serve as a ground of force. Force in order to make sense of natural phenomena, we need to attribute force to body. But descartes does not acknowledge force as an intelligible modification of extension. Descartes can"t individuate states of the world. Monads: leibniz finds that a cartesian mind satisfies the conditions for substance, because it is indivisible, has force, etc. So a mind can be a model for a possible thing to make up bodies: monads are modeled after cartesian minds. The world outside is not actually extended. In a letter to volder, leibniz says bodies are phenomena of perceivers: matter and motion are not substances, they exist in the mind, they result from simple substances (monads)
