Individuals, Minds and Bodies: Themes from Leibniz

Individuals, Minds and Bodies: Themes from Leibniz
Author: Massimiliano Carrara
Publisher: Franz Steiner Verlag
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2004
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9783515083423

Is analytic metaphysics the kind of metaphysics that contemporary analytic philosophers study? One of the aims of this special issue of the Studia Leibnitiana is to demonstrate that it would be misleading to think so. The reason is simply that some important past metaphysicians also adopted an analytic style and G. W. Leibniz is surely one of them. His analysis on the notion of identity and individuality, on the difference between artifacts and biological entities are pieces of analytic metaphysics. The other aim of the volume is to show that there is a close semantic connection between the concepts of individual, mind and body in Leibniz. The book tried to demonstrate it from both an analytical and a historical point of view. .

Persons

Persons
Author: Antonia LoLordo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2019-08-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190634413

What is a person? Why do we count certain beings as persons and others not? How is the concept of a person distinct from the concept of a human being, or from the concept of the self? When and why did the concept of a person come into existence? What is the relationship between moral personhood and metaphysical personhood? How has their relationship changed over the last two millennia? This volume presents a genealogy of the concept of a person. It demonstrates how personhood--like the other central concepts of philosophy, law, and everyday life--has gained its significance not through definition but through the accretion of layers of meaning over centuries. We can only fully understand the concept by knowing its history. Essays show further how the concept of a person has five main strands: persons are particulars, roles, entities with special moral significance, rational beings, and selves. Thus, to count someone or something as a person is simultaneously to describe it--as a particular, a role, a rational being, and a self--and to prescribe certain norms concerning how it may act and how others may act towards it. A group of distinguished thinkers and philosophers here untangle these and other insights about personhood, asking us to reconsider our most fundamental assumptions of the self.

Leibniz's Key Philosophical Writings

Leibniz's Key Philosophical Writings
Author: Paul Lodge
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2020-10-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0192583581

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the modern period. He offered a wealth of original ideas in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophical theology, among them his signature doctrines on substance and monads, pre-established harmony, and optimism. This volume contains introductory chapters on eleven of Leibniz's key philosophical writings, from youthful works ("Confessio philosophi", "De summa rerum"), seminal middle-period writings ("Discourse on Metaphysics", "New System"), to masterpieces of his maturity ("Monadology", "Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese"). It also covers his two main philosophical books (New Essays on Human Understanding and Theodicy), and three of his most important philosophical correspondences with Antoine Arnauld, Burcher De Volder, and Samuel Clarke. Written by internationally-renowned experts on Leibniz, the chapters offer clear, accessible accounts of the ideas and arguments of these key writings, along with valuable information about their composition and context. By focusing on the primary texts, they enable readers to attain a solid understanding of what each text says and why, and give them the confidence to read the texts themselves. Offering a detailed and chronological view of Leibniz's philosophy and its development through some of his most important writings, this volume is an invaluable guide for those encountering Leibniz for the first time.

Handbook of Potentiality

Handbook of Potentiality
Author: Kristina Engelhard
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2018-04-18
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9402412875

This volume congregates articles of leading philosophers about potentials and potentiality in all areas of philosophy and the empirical sciences in which they play a relevant role. It is the first encompassing collection of articles on the metaphysics of potentials and potentiality. Potentials play an important role not only in our everyday understanding of objects, persons and systems but also in the sciences. An example is the potential to become an adult human person. Moreover, the attribution of potentials involves crucial ethical problems. Bioethics makes references to the theoretical concept "potential" without being able to clarify its meaning. However, despite its relevance it has not been made subject of philosophical investigation. Mostly, potentials are regarded as a subspecies of dispositions. Whilst dispositions are a flourishing field of research, potentials as such have not come into focus. Potentials like dispositions are modal properties. But already a first glance at the metaphysics of potentials shows that concerning their ascription potentials are more problematic than dispositions since "potential" means that an entity has the potential to acquire a property in the future. Therefore, potentials involve a time structure of the entities in question that is much more complex than those of dispositions. This handbook brings this important concept into focus in its various aspects for the first time. It covers the history of the concept as well as contemporary systematic problems and will be of special interest for philosophers in the fields of general metaphysics, philosophy of science and ethics, especially bioethics. It will also be of interest to scientists and persons concerned with bioethical problems.

Tercentenary Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Leibniz

Tercentenary Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Leibniz
Author: Lloyd Strickland
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2016-11-15
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 3319388304

This book presents new research into key areas of the work of German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). Reflecting various aspects of Leibniz’s thought, this book offers a collection of original research arranged into four separate themes: Science, Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Religion and Theology. With in-depth articles by experts such as Maria Rosa Antognazza, Nicholas Jolley, Agustín Echavarría, Richard Arthur and Paul Lodge, this book is an invaluable resource not only for readers just beginning to discover Leibniz, but also for scholars long familiar with his philosophy and eager to gain new perspectives on his work.

Representation

Representation
Author: Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 475
Release: 2024-06-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231561032

What makes historical writing distinctive? In Representation, Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit—the preeminent figure in the philosophy of history today—offers a deeply original way of understanding the practice of historical writing and a powerful vindication of history as an empirical discipline. Based on a new reading of the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz, Ankersmit constructs a rigorous framework for understanding the nature of historical argument. Representation argues that while previous states of affairs have left evidence that can be used to formulate true statements, the past itself is irretrievably lost. A condition of historical writing is that the past as such does not exist. Historical texts are best understood as complex signs that mutually criticize one another to compose a historical reality fundamentally distinct from common-sense notions of the past. Representation casts an entirely new light on fundamental concepts such as historical truth, historical debate, and historical rationality. Cogent, forceful, and provocative, this book is the most ambitious work in the philosophy of history in many years.

Leibniz's Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles

Leibniz's Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles
Author: Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2014-08-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191021288

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra presents an original study of the place and role of the Identity of Indiscernibles in Leibniz's philosophy. The Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles rules out numerically distinct but perfectly similar things; Leibniz derived it from more basic principles and used it to establish important philosophical theses. Rodriguez-Pereyra aims to establish what Leibniz meant by the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles, what his arguments for and from it were, and to assess those arguments and Leibniz's claims about the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles. He argues that Leibniz had a very strong version of the principle, according to which no possibilia (whether or not they belong to the same possible world) are intrinsically perfectly similar, where this excludes things that differ in magnitude alone. The book discusses Leibniz's arguments for the Identity of Indiscernibles in the Meditation on the Principle of the Individual, the Discourse on Metaphysics, Notationes Generales, Primary Truths, the letter to Casati of 1689, the correspondence with Clarke, as well as the use of the Identity of Indiscernibles in Leibniz's arguments against the Cartesian conception of the material world, atoms, absolute space and time, the Lockean conception of the mind as a tabula rasa, and freedom of indifference. Rodriguez-Pereyra argues that the Identity of Indiscernibles was a central but inessential principle of Leibniz's philosophy.

Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz

Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz
Author: Justin E. H. Smith
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2011-01-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9400700415

In recent decades, there has been much scholarly controversy as to the basic ontological commitments of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). The old picture of his thought as strictly idealistic, or committed to the ultimate reduction of bodies to the activity of mind, has come under attack, but Leibniz's precise conceptualization of bodies, and the role they play in his system as a whole, is still the subject of much controversy. One thing that has become clear is that in order to understand the nature of body in Leibniz, and the role body plays in his philosophy, it is crucial to pay attention to the related concepts of organism and of corporeal substance, the former being Leibniz's account of the structure of living bodies (which turn out, for him, to be the only sort of bodies there are), and the latter being an inheritance from the Aristotelian hylomorphic tradition which Leibniz appropriates for his own ends. This volume brings together papers from many of the leading scholars of Leibniz's thought, all of which deal with the cluster of questions surrounding Leibniz's philosophy of body.

The Oxford Handbook of Leibniz

The Oxford Handbook of Leibniz
Author: Maria Rosa Antognazza
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 928
Release: 2018-10-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190913649

The extraordinary breadth and depth of Leibniz's intellectual vision commands ever increasing attention. As more texts gradually emerge from seemingly bottomless archives, new facets of his contribution to an astonishing variety of fields come to light. This volume provides a uniquely comprehensive, systematic, and up-to-date appraisal of Leibniz's thought thematically organized around its diverse but interrelated aspects. Discussion of his philosophical system naturally takes place of pride. A cluster of original essays revisit his logic, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of nature, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. The scope of the volume, however, goes beyond that of a philosophical collection to embrace all the main features of Leibniz's thought and activity. Contributions are offered on Leibniz as a mathematician (including not only his calculus but also determinant theory, symmetric functions, the dyadic, the analysis situs, probability and statistics); on Leibniz as a scientist (physics and also optics, cosmology, geology, physiology, medicine, and chemistry); on his technical innovations (the calculating machine and the technology of mining, as well as other discoveries); on his work as an 'intelligencer' and cultural networker, as jurist, historian, editor of sources and librarian; on his views on Europe's political future, religious toleration, and ecclesiastical reunification; on his proposals for political, administrative, economic, and social reform. In so doing, the volume serves as a unique cross-disciplinary point of contact for the many domains to which Leibniz contributed. By assembling leading specialists on all these topics, it offers the most rounded picture of Leibniz's endeavors currently available.

The Aftermath of Syllogism

The Aftermath of Syllogism
Author: Marco Sgarbi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2018-01-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350043532

Syllogism is a form of logical argument allowing one to deduce a consistent conclusion based on a pair of premises having a common term. Although Aristotle was the first to conceive and develop this way of reasoning, he left open a lot of conceptual space for further modifications, improvements and systematizations with regards to his original syllogistic theory. From its creation until modern times, syllogism has remained a powerful and compelling device of deduction and argument, used by a variety of figures and assuming a variety of forms throughout history. The Aftermath of Syllogism investigates the key developments in the history of this peculiar pattern of inference, from Avicenna to Hegel. Taking as its focus the longue durée of development between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, this book looks at the huge reworking scientific syllogism underwent over the centuries, as some of the finest philosophical minds brought it to an unprecedented height of logical sharpness and sophistication. Bringing together a group of major international experts in the Aristotelian tradition, The Aftermath of Syllogism provides a detailed, up to date and critical evaluation of the history of syllogistic deduction.