Leibniz's Philosophical System

This raised serious problems with guess to contingency and unembellished will since it might be argued that upon universe created a middle (e.g., an single(a) human soul) already contained all(a) the predicates (e.g. all the thoughts, exploits, decisions) of that substance and that none of them is, therefore, the result of contingency or slack will.

Leibniz did not actually find a gist of getting around this problem that was convincingly consistent with his system, shut out insofar as his distinction regarding the multiplicity of substances did so. But it for sure represented an 'advance' over Spinoza in whose Ethics (1675) the pantheist argument was that there was just one substance, and that substance was God, which leftover no room for contingency or free will. In Spinoza's view the impression of contingency was merely created by the inadequacy of the human mind to grasp the comp alloweness of creation. Since "we terminate have but a very inadequate knowledge" of our own minds and bodies, let alone of other things, even the fact that "each individual thing must be determined to existence and action by another individual thing in definite and determinate look . . . and so on ad infinitum" we can only know that all things atomic number 18 subject to depravity and this is the only contingency (560). It is a contingency

Spinoza, Baruch. Ethic. Classics of Philosophy. Ed. Louis J. Pojman. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 532-77.

In looking at creation, however, there atomic number 18 those who argue that "God might have made things wear out than he has" (581). Being perfect, however, God cannot act with less god than he has and, therefore, everything he does must be perfect. The reason such(prenominal) objections atomic number 18 raised is "based upon the too slight conversancy which we have with the general harmony of the universe and with the reasons for God's conduct" (582). Leibniz goes on to establish, via the principle of sufficient reason, that energy God does lacks order and that nothing can talk place within creation that does not conform to that order. If they transgress the "subordinate regulations which we call the nature of things" (i.e.

, if they are miracles) they merely reflect God's " assorticular" intentions. Everything in creation is part of his general intention, and any departure from the subordinate regulations is the result of a particular intention--of which God is perfectly capable since creation is the influence result of his general intentions.

There is, of course, no individual substance that can be fully comprehended in this manner by any human mind. In itself this claim seems resembling to Spinoza's contention that the human mind is simply incapable of taking into custody that which appears to be contingencies. Acts of free will, then, are merely ideas -- substitutes developed because of the unfitness to see the infinite chain of causation that has produced the apparently free activities.

, however, simply because we are incapable of knowing it. The mind is "a certain and determinate mode of thought and cannot be the free cause of its own actions, or have an absolute mental faculty of willing or not willing" (566). All volitions are merely ideas to which the mind is determined by an infinite serial publication of causes that are beyond human comprehension.

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