Abstract
This paper argues for an interpretation of Leibniz’s claim that physics requires both mechanical and teleological principles as a view regarding the interpretation of physical theories. Granting that Leibniz’s fundamental ontology remains non-physical, or mentalistic, it argues that teleological principles nevertheless ground a realist commitment about mechanical descriptions of phenomena. The empirical results of the new sciences, according to Leibniz, have genuine truth conditions: there is a fact of the matter about the regularities observed in experience. Taking this stance, however, requires bringing non-empirical reasons to bear upon mechanical causal claims. This paper first evaluates extant interpretations of Leibniz’s thesis that there are two realms in physics as describing parallel, self-sufficient sets of laws. It then examines Leibniz’s use of teleological principles to interpret scientific results in the context of his interventions in debates in seventeenth-century kinematic theory, and in the teaching of Copernicanism. Leibniz’s use of the principle of continuity and the principle of simplicity, for instance, reveal an underlying commitment to the truth-aptness, or approximate truth-aptness, of the new natural sciences. The paper concludes with a brief remark on the relation between metaphysics, theology, and physics in Leibniz.
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- 1.
“Tentamen anagogicum” (ca. 1696), GP VII 273; L 478–9.
- 2.
“New System” (1695), GP IV 487; WF 22.
- 3.
Writing to Remond in 1714, he recounts his conversion to the new, mechanical philosophy in the 1660s: “After finishing the Écoles Triviales I fell upon the moderns, and I recall walking in a grove on the outskirts of Leipzig called Rosental, at the age of fifteen, and deliberating whether I should keep the substantial forms. Mechanism finally prevailed and led me to apply myself to mathematics” (G III 606; L 655). In 1678, during an intense period of work in physics and optics, he writes to Hermann Conring: “everything happens mechanically in nature, that is, according to certain mathematical laws prescribed by God” (A II.1604; L 189). And to Burcher de Volder in 1703: “in phenomena… everything is explained mechanically” (GP II 250; L 529).
- 4.
Letter to de Volder, June 30, 1704, GP II 270; L 537.
- 5.
This view of the dependence of ordinary material objects on perceptions gives rise to the question of whether Leibniz can retain any place for material substance realism. The issue of the reality of material substances, however, should be kept apart from Leibniz’s realism per se. For the ideality of Leibnizian monads does not make them unreal or illusory. On the idealist reading of Leibniz, minds are the most real beings; material bodies, meanwhile, are ontologically subordinate and thus are interpreted as having derivative reality. Readings of Leibniz as an idealist in this sense include Gueroult (1967), Adams (1994), Rutherford (1995), and De Risi (2007). Garber (1985) influentially challenged the idealist interpretation as a correct account of Leibniz’s middle period, proposing instead a corporeal substance account on which bodies have reality independently of minds, and inspired others to develop broader, non-idealist readings of Leibniz. Phemister (2005), Hartz (2007), and McDonough (2016) are some of the authors to have followed Garber in defending readings of Leibniz as a material substance realist, where corporeal substances have an independent, foundational ontological status. In his 2009 Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad, Garber responds to critics, but agrees that, by the Monadology period, Leibniz has embraced a metaphysical idealism on which minds and their experiences are the only ultimately real beings.
- 6.
To Thomas Burnet, for example, he writes: “Locke did not well understand the origin of necessary truths, which do not depend on the senses, or on experiences, or on facts, but on the consideration of the nature of the soul, which is a being, a substance, having unity, identity, action, passion, duration, etc. We need not be astonished if these ideas and the truths which depend on them are found in us, although we need reflection to perceive them, and sometimes need experiences to elicit our reflection or attention, to make us notice of what our own nature provides us” (26 May, 1706; G III, 307–308).
- 7.
Antognazza (2017, 21).
- 8.
The realism I attribute to Leibniz is similar to Psillos’ (1999, 10–13) understanding of semantic realism, with the important caveat that Leibniz rejects the realist intuition of the mind-independence of theoretical entities.
- 9.
My interpretation departs, accordingly, from François Duchesneau’s, inasmuch as, on my view, Leibniz does not think that the justification of teleological principles consists in their utility or fecundity in explaining particular phenomena. I agree with Duchesneau, however, in that I see Leibniz as giving teleological principles a constitutive role in nature; see Duchesneau (1993, 260–2). I will return to Leibniz’s deeper foundations for teleological reasons in the conclusion.
- 10.
GP IV 448; L 317.
- 11.
A VI.4B 1403. The notes are titled “Definitiones cogitationesque metaphysicae” and dated by the Academy editors to 1678–80.
- 12.
GP VII 272; L 478.
- 13.
GP IV 360–1; L387.
- 14.
Cited in Antognazza (2017, 36n).
- 15.
- 16.
A VI.4B 1405.
- 17.
See McDonough (2008, 2010) for a detailed reconstruction of Leibniz’s procedure. McDonough’s translation of Leibniz’s text is available at http://philosophy.ucsd.edu/faculty/rutherford/Leibniz/unitary-principle.htm
- 18.
Cf. GM VI 243, L 442; GP VII 274ff, L 480ff; LS 24–25.
- 19.
- 20.
The question of the value of these forms of reasoning continues to be contested in contemporary philosophy of science. For recent defenses of the sufficiency of mathematical explanations of the sort rendered through variational principles, see Ginzburg and Colyvan (2004), Baker (2009), and Lange (2013).
- 21.
GP IV 431; L 306.
- 22.
GP VII 303–4; L 487–8.
- 23.
Mach (1919, 341).
- 24.
Mach (1919, 459–60)
- 25.
Leibniz famously demonstrates, against Descartes, that it is not momentum (mv) but kinetic energy (mv2), vis viva, that is conserved in collision events. For reasons of space, I cannot discuss any further Leibniz’s reasons for holding conservation laws to be contingent, and therefore as, strictly speaking, outside a purely mathematical physics. In any case, this issue is well studied in the literature. See Garber (2009, ch.6) for a detailed account.
- 26.
GP VII 273; L 479.
- 27.
GP VII 272; L 478. He expresses this thought also in “Specimen dynamicum”: “In my judgment the best answer, which satisfies piety and science alike, is to acknowledge that all phenomena are indeed to be explained by mechanical efficient causes but that these mechanical laws are themselves to be derived in general from higher reasons and that we thus use a higher efficient cause only to establish the general and remote principles” (GM VI 242; L 441).
- 28.
Leibniz insists on this virtually throughout his career. An unambiguous statement of it comes from the De Volder correspondence: “in phenomena… everything is explained mechanically” (GP II 250; L 529). It should also be borne in mind that for Leibniz the mechanistic principle encompasses the biological realm as well. In the New Essays, for instance, he writes: “I attribute to mechanism everything which takes place in the bodies of plants and animals except their initial formation” (NE 139).
- 29.
A VI.42008; L 288.
- 30.
GP VII 272; L 478.
- 31.
Leibniz indicates the equivalence of these terms in “On the Correction of Metaphysics and the Concept of Substance” (1694), where he describes metaphysics as the “primary and architectonic discipline” (GP IV 468; L 432). In early modern philosophical usage, “architectonic” connotes, following Aristotle’s usage of άρχιτεκτονικός in the Politics (III.111282a4–6), the Nicomachean Ethics (I.11094a1–26), and the Physics (II.2194a34-b8), a master science or art that supplies principles to a subordinate field in virtue of knowing the latter’s goal of production. Aristotle’s conception of an architectonic discipline as one that regulates and orders others, and for whose sake special disciplines are practiced, was alive in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his Lexicon of 1652, for example, Johann Micraelius notes Aristotle’s extension of the classical, architectural sense of the term as scientia bene aedificandi, to the science of politics through which cities are properly ordered and governed. The idea of architectonic as the art of constructing intellectual systems becomes general in the eighteenth century, finding its most self-conscious expression in J.H. Lambert’s Anlage zur Architectonic, oder Theorie des Einfachen und des Ersten in der philosophischen und mathematischen Erkenntniß (1771). Kant’s notion of an “architectonic of pure reason” preserves this conception of a governing science of principles, which he identifies with his critique of the cognitive faculties.
- 32.
“Praefatio ad libellum elementorum physicae”, A VI.41994; L 280.
- 33.
Locke (1975, III.vi.37).
- 34.
Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, 1705 (1998, 149). Cf. Clarke’s Second Reply to Leibniz, GP VII 359; L 680. Other notable figures in this tradition include John Ray and William Derham. Gascoigne (1989) speaks of a “holy alliance” between Anglican natural theology and Newtonian science at Cambridge at the turn of the century.
- 35.
“Praefatio ad libellum elementorum physicae”, A VI.41994; L 280.
- 36.
A II.1B 391; L 154.
- 37.
GP VII 320; L 364.
- 38.
Adams (1994, 257).
- 39.
“Specimen dynamicum”, GM VI 250, L 447–8; cf. “Reply to Malebranche”, G III 52–3, L 352.
- 40.
- 41.
“Specimen dynamicum”, GM VI 250, L 447. Compare Herbert Feigl on unification as a virtue: “The aim of scientific explanation throughout the ages has been unification, i.e., the comprehending of a maximum of facts and regularities in terms of a minimum of theoretical concepts and assumptions” (1970, 12).
- 42.
- 43.
To be sure, Tycho had important defenders in the seventeenth century, such as the Jesuit astronomer Giambattista Riccioli. In his monumental Almagestum Novum (1651), Riccioli defended a modified version of the Tychonic system, with its stationary Earth, and two separate centers at the Sun and the Earth, against both the Copernican and Ptolemaic. Riccioli’s main targets were the justification of Galileo’s condemnation, and a defense of a geostatic cosmology, for which he found the Tychonic model better on astronomical grounds. Leibniz, for his part, accepts both Galilean relativity and the hypothesis of a mobile Earth. In what follows, the contrast between the geocentric (and geostatic) versus the heliocentric models will be treated at a higher degree of abstraction, and will exclude the specific differences between the Tychonic and Ptolemaic models.
- 44.
See Omodeo (2014) for a wide-ranging study of the reception of Copernicanism in the broader cultural and intellectual debates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
- 45.
- 46.
“New System” G IV, 486–87, L 459.
- 47.
GM II 199; L 419.
- 48.
Garber (2009, 112).
- 49.
Lodge (2003, 299–300); GM II 199; L 419; GM VI 248; L 445.
- 50.
C 590–1; AG 91: “since… people do assign motion and rest to bodies, even to bodies they believe to be moved neither by a mind, nor by an internal impulse, we must look into the sense in which they do this, so that we don’t judge that they have spoken falsely. And on this matter we must reply that the truth of a hypothesis is nothing but its intelligibility.”
- 51.
Rutherford (1995, 241).
- 52.
The text is edited and translated in De Risi (2006, 58–63).
- 53.
C 591–2; AG 92. Bertoloni Meli (1988, 25–9) establishes the context of this piece. Leibniz reiterates this position some years later as part of a general defense of the use of teleological principles in the “New System”: “it is reasonable to attribute true motions to bodies if we follow the assumption which explains the phenomena in the most intelligible way” (GP IV 487; L 459).
- 54.
In fact, even the construction of modern planetariums in the early twentieth century began by self-consciously emulating the Ptolemaic model in their use of gears and motors to simulate a uniformly rotating celestial sphere passing before a stationary observer. See Bigg (2017) for a case study of the construction of projection planetariums in interwar Germany.
- 55.
Kuhn (1957, 172). Copernicus emphasizes harmony and symmetry in Bk 1, Ch 10 of De revolutionibus: “So we find underlying this ordination an admirable symmetry in the Universe, and a clear bond of harmony in the motion and magnitude of the Spheres [Invenimus igitur sub hac ordinatione admirandam mundi symmetriam, ac certum harmoniae nexum motus et magnitudinis orbium]” (translation in Kuhn 1957, 180).
- 56.
“Harmoniam diversitatem identitate compensatam.” Letter to Arnauld, November 1671, A II.1B 279; L 149.
- 57.
“ordo, regularitas, harmonia eodem redeunt. Posses etiam dicere esse gradum essentiae, si essentia ex proprietatibus harmonicisi aestimetur, quae ut sic dicam faciunt essentiae pondus et momentum.” 18 May, 1715, LW 172; AG 234.
- 58.
Bertoloni Meli (1993) gives a translation of the text in GM VI 144–161 and a commentary on its genesis and significance.
- 59.
In another, related text from the same year, “Tentamen de Physicis motuum coelestium Rationibus,” Leibniz expresses hope for the possibility of being able to “explain the physical causes of planetary motion” (A VI.4C 2041).
- 60.
C 592–3; AG 93.
- 61.
Bertoloni Meli (1988, 27), for instance, interprets Leibniz here as an “equilibrist”.
- 62.
NE 515.
- 63.
In his Système de Philosophie, the Cartesian Pierre Sylvain Regis, for instance, concludes his responses to the standard objections to the Earth’s mobility as follows: “the hypothesis of the mobility of the Earth, which is now so common that it can be asserted that between all the various opinions which are found in Astronomy, it has more supporters, not only than any other, but even than all others together” (1691, 226).
- 64.
GM VI 242; L 441.
- 65.
Chakravartty (2007, 206). Expressing a similar thought, William Bechtel (1986, 40) casts the rationalist element in science as teleological, inasmuch as it conveys the explanatory aims of science: “All science is implicitly teleological, insofar as it adopts a semantics for its models—it doesn’t let every activity or process in a target system enter into its model, but picks those it deems as causally relevant to explain the phenomenon.”
- 66.
See Jolley (2005) for a systematic interpretation of Leibniz centered on the thesis of human subjects as mirrors of God.
- 67.
GP III 353; WF 211.
Abbreviations
- A:
-
Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe. 1923-. Edited by Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Berlin: de Gruyter. (Cited by series, volume, and page)
- AG:
-
Philosophical Essays. 1989. Edited and translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis: Hackett.
- C:
-
Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz: extraits des manuscrits de la Biblothèque Royale de Hanovre. 1903. Edited by Louis Couturat. Paris: Felix Alcan.
- GM:
-
Leibnizens mathematische Schriften. 1849–1863. Edited by C.I. Gerhardt. Berlin: A. Asher & Comp. (Cited by series, volume, and page)
- GP:
-
Die philosophischen Schriften, 7 vols. 1875–1890. Edited by C.I. Gerhardt. Hildesheim: George Olms. (Cited by series, volume, and page)
- L:
-
Philosophical Papers and Letters. 1969. Edited and translated by Leroy E. Loemker. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
- LS:
-
The Leibniz-Stahl Correspondence. 2016. Edited and translated by Justin E.H. Smith and Francois Duchesneau. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- LW:
-
Briefwechsel zwischen Leibniz und Christian Wolff. 1860. Edited by C.I. Gerhardt. Halle: H.W. Schmidt.
- NE:
-
New Essays on Human Understanding. 1996. Edited and translated by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- UP:
-
“Unicum opticae, catoptricae et dioptricae principium”. 1682. Acta eruditorum, 1:185–190. Translated by Jeffrey McDonough. http://philosophy.ucsd.edu/faculty/rutherford/Leibniz/unitary-principle.htm.
- WF:
-
Leibniz’s ‘New System’ and Associated Contemporary Texts. 1997. Edited and translated by R.S. Woolhouse and Richard Francks. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Karen Detlefsen, Gary Hatfield, Vincenzo De Risi, and three referees for Springer for invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Versions of this paper were presented at workshops at Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Turku, and I thank those audiences for their feedback.
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Hamid, N. (2019). Teleology and Realism in Leibniz’s Philosophy of Science. In: De Risi, V. (eds) Leibniz and the Structure of Sciences. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 337. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25572-5_8
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