Compossibility and Creation

Abstract

In Chapter One, I argued that Leibniz’s doctrine of complete concepts does not entail a denial of counterfactual identity, and that it would be necessary to appeal to other of Leibniz’s principles to justify the interpretive dogma that God has only one complete concept of any given individual. Commentators have appealed to Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernables. More accurately, they have appealed to sundry picturesque illustrations that Leibniz provides of that principle. I have argued in Chapter 3 that the interpretations of those illustrations are very speedy and biased. In particular, the interpretations presuppose that it is not possible for a Leibnizian individual to be persons other than the person it actually is. I have seen no substantial arguments advanced by commentators to support this presupposition, and there is much more than enough textual evidence to motivate the interpretation that Leibniz meant by an individual’s being different persons its having different complete concepts.