Abstract
I began this book by stating that its main thesis would be to demonstrate the persistence in Leibniz’s mature philosophy of his premodern theory of individuals and the principle of their individuation, by showing how both theory and principle have their roots in later or “second” scholastic sources of his earliest philosophy. The most influential of these, negatively, were surely the Scotists, while the most influential, positively, were equally surely the nominalists, chief among them Suarez. I submit that I have been able to demonstrate this thesis in detail. In this final chapter I want to explore (a) some of the implications of this reading of Leibniz for scholarship on Leibniz, (b) how we should understand Leibniz to be a “modern” philosopher, and (c) how the “modern” in modern philosophy and the “postmodern” in cultural analysis should be understood. These topics arise naturally from the claim that premodern philosophical ideas and methods persist in — indeed, shape fundamentally — Leibniz’s philosophy.
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Notes
Benson Mates, The Philosophy of Leibniz: Metaphysics and Language ( New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986 ).
Hide Ishiguro, LeibnizIs Philosophy of Logic and Language (London: Duckworth, 1972); Hide Ishiguro, Leibniz’s Philosophy of Logic and Language, 2nd. ed. ( Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1990 ).
Hans Burkhardt, Logik und Semiotik in der Philosophie von Leibniz (Munich, Federal Republic of Germany: Philosophia Verlag, 1980 ).
Mates, The Philosophy of Leibniz,p. 7.
I first posed, but did not answer this question in Laurence B. McCullough, “Leibniz and Traditional Philosophy,” Studia Leibnitiana X /2 (1978), 254–270.
Stuart Brown, Leibniz (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 20, emphasis original.
Stuart Brown, “The Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Background,” in Nicholas Jolley (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 63 n. 48.
Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism: The Paul Carus Lectures (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, 1987), p. 29. I am grateful to George Agich for alerting me to the importance of Putnam’s work in this respect.
W.V.O. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays ( New York, NY: Columbia Uni-versity Press, 1969 ), p. 9
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G.E.M. Anscombe (trans.), 2nd. ed. ( New York: The Macmillan Company, 1958 ).
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Preface to an Edition of Nizolius,” in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, trans., Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1969 ), pp. 121–130.
ibid., p. 128, emphasis original.
Stuart Brown, “Leibniz: Modern, Scholastic, or Renaissance Philosopher?,” in Tom Sor-rell (ed.), The Rise of Modem Philosophy: The Tension Between the New and Traditional Philosophies from Machiavelli to Leibniz ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993 ), p. 219.
ibid., p. 220.
ibid.
Leibniz, “Preface to an Edition of Nizolius,” p. 128.
Ex hac jam regula Nominales deduxerunt, omnia in rerum natura explicari posse, etsi unversalibus et formalitatibus realibus prorsus careatur “Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Dissertatio Praeliminaris: De alienorum operum editione, de Scopo operis, de Philo-sophica dictione, de lapsidus Nizoli,” in C.I. Gerhardt (ed.), Die Philosophische Schriften von Leibniz (Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1965), Vol. 4, p. 158, emphasis added. That `formalitatibus’ could be mistaken and misread as `formis’, which it would have to be to support Loemker’s translation, is an example of what Angelel-li calls “acrobatic” translation. See Ignacio Angelelli, “The Scholastic Background of Modern Philosophy: Entitas and Individuation in Leibniz,” in Jorge J.E. Gracia (ed.), Individuation in Scholasticism: The Later Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation, 1150–1650 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 535–542. In effect, Brown is misled in his reading of Leibniz by this acrobatic translation.
ibid.
ibid.
Stuart Brown, “Leibniz: Modern, Scholastic, or Renaissance Philosopher?,” p. 220.
Christia Mercer, and R.C. Sleigh, Jr., “Metaphysics: The Early Period to the Discourse on Metaphysics,” in Nicholas Jolley (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz,pp. 66123. The authors of this chapter explain that Mercer is the author of the first three sections of this chapter, to which I make reference here.
ibid., p. 80.
Nicholas Jolley, “Introduction,” in Nicholas Jolley (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz,p. 6.
Christia Mercer and R.C. Sleigh, Jr., “Metaphysics,” pp. 72–73.
Christia Mercer, “The Vitality and Importance of Early Modern Aristotelianism,” in Tom Sorrell (ed.), The Rise of Modern Philosophy,p. 64.
Christia Mercer and R.C. Sleigh, Jr., “Metaphysics,” pp. 72–73.
Richard Schacht, Classical Modern Philosophers: Descartes to Kant ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984 ), p. 5.
Harry Redner, The Ends of Philosophy: An Essay in the Sociology of Philosophy and Rationality ( London: Croom Helm, 1986 ).
ibid., p. 252.
Rene Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in Elizabeth Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (trans.), The Philosophical Works of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), Vol. I, p. 158. The Latin text is the following: “... ac proinde jam videor pro regula generali posse statuere, illud omne esse verum, quod valde dare et distincte percipio.” Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (eds.), Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, in Oeuvres de Descartes (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1904), Vol. VII, p. 35, 1. 13–15.
Tom Sorrell, “Introduction,” in Tom Sorrell (ed.), The Rise of Modern Philosophy,p. 8.
John Deely, Early Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Thought ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994 ).
Jorge J.E. Gracia, Philosophy and Its History: Issues in Philosophical Historiography (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992 ).
Ignacio Angelelli has made this case forcefully for Frege. See Ignacio Angelelli, Studies on Gottlob Frege and Traditional Philosophy (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1967 ). My debt to Ignacio Angelelli for this reading of the history of philosophy should be now be plain.
Thomas Percival, Percival’s Medical Ethics, ed., Chauncey D. Leake ( Baltimore: Williams zhaohuan Wilkins, 1927 ).
Richard T. Vann, “Theory and Practice in Historical Study,” in Mary Beth Norton and Pamela Gerardi (eds.), The American Historical Association’s Guide to Historical Literature, 3rd. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995 ), p. 1.
Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993 ).
ibid., p. 176.
ibid., p. 177.
ibid., p. 178.
ibid., p. 179.
Nozick can be read, I believe, as simply systematizing Williams James’ dictum that we create truth. Nozick’s two principles are thus prescriptive guides for this task. His contribution to the history of philosophy is thus somewhat more modest than the claims made by him for it.
In a way, I am arguing for a variant of Alasdair MacIntyre’s view that philosophical texts are embedded in and limited by what he calls “traditions.” I read MacIntyre to hold that there is a givenness to those traditions and that the historian’s job is to discover the given traditions. My own view is that philosophical and intellectual traditions are post-hoc constructions and so I have used the more modest terms ‘trends’ and ‘groupings’ rather than the more august ‘traditions’. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). The intellectual rules or principles that should guide the formation of trends or groupings of texts in the history of philosophy is a topic beyond the confines of this book.
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McCullough, L.B. (1996). Leibniz and the “Modern” in Modern Philosophy. In: Leibniz on Individuals and Individuation. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8684-9_7
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