Leibniz: Force as the Essence of Substance

Abstract

Everyone who addresses the controversy surrounding the concept of living force discusses Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, or rather, his legacy. In fact we owe both the definition of the term and the beginning of the controversy to Leibniz.² One might consider a less emphatic view of his importance, if one took only the superficial and one-sided transmission of Leibniz’s philosophy in the eighteenth century into account. Many of the physicists from that period, even those who were sympathetic to his ideas, had a caricatured picture of Leibniz’s system.

The creation of modern dynamics was a matter, not of experimentation and new discovery, but of drawing consequences from accepted conclusions, of clarifying ambiguities and resolving conceptual tangles, above all of breaking through the rigidity of received intuitive conceptions of dynamic action.

Richard S. Westfall¹