Müürsepp, Peeter (Author)
As an idealist, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz could not recognize anything corporeal as substantial. However, under the influence of Cartesian terminology, he devoted considerable effort to analysing the corporeal world, while not recognizing its real substantiality of course. Leibniz took the concept of substance from Plato, Aristotle and the scholastics, but developed it in two ways. It is a well-known fact that Leibniz introduced the term ‘corporeal substance’ in his letter to Antoine Arnauld dated to October 1687. In the letter, Leibniz understands an object of nature, like an animal or a plant, as ‘corporeal substance’. In the very same letter, Leibniz introduces the terms ‘indivisibility’ and ‘phenomenon’. Every corporeal substance can be real only as a unity, i.e. by being indivisible. Such entity must have a soul or at least an entelechy. In an opposite case, that entity would not be a real unity but just a phenomenon. No corporeal entity is indivisible and therefore not a substance. The paper aims at introducing Leibniz’s distinction between substances and phenomena and taking a closer look at the historicalphilosophical influences Leibniz experienced while developing his views of the corporeal world. Aristotle and Descartes will receive most of the attention, of course, as the concepts of ‘entelechy’ and ‘hylomorphism’ were introduced by the former, and the understanding of corporeal substance as determined by extension alone is part of the latter. The core of the original critique by Leibniz takes off from the properties of the continuum as well as the nature of shape, motion and extension. The case of continuum will receive special attention. It is analysed with the help of the novel approaches by Samuel Levey and Vassil Vidinsky. Leibniz was critical about our poor understanding of the continuum but his own interpretation of it was not fully consistent either. Although the new developments enable us to take a fresh look that has not been possible so far, the issue remains open for further study.
...More
Article
Federico Raffo Quintana;
(2018)
Leibniz on the Requisites of an Exact Arithmetical Quadrature
(/isis/citation/CBB986988543/)
Article
Joaquim Berenguer i Clarià;
(2018)
Simpson i Cerdà: esborrant fronteres entre Leibniz i Newton (Simpson and Cerdà: Erasing Borders between Leibniz and Newton)
(/isis/citation/CBB591954444/)
Article
Hartmut Hecht;
(2016)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the Origin of the Principle of Least Action – a Never Ending Story
(/isis/citation/CBB198666566/)
Article
Schröcker, Alfred;
(1977)
Gabriel d'Artis, Leibniz und das Journal de Hambourg
(/isis/citation/CBB000017646/)
Article
Duchesneau, François;
(1994)
Leibniz on the principle of continuity
(/isis/citation/CBB000033546/)
Article
Peter R. Anstey;
(2016)
The Coherence of Cohesion in the Later Leibniz
(/isis/citation/CBB522015706/)
Book
Davide Crippa;
(2019)
The Impossibility of Squaring the Circle in the 17th Century: A Debate Among Gregory, Huygens and Leibniz
(/isis/citation/CBB805052525/)
Book
Dennehy, Myriam;
Ramond, Charles;
(2009)
La Philosophie naturelle de Robert Boyle
(/isis/citation/CBB000951736/)
Article
Volker Bauer;
(2016)
Stamm, Land, Fluss. Schele, Leibniz und die Kartographie der Geschichte
(/isis/citation/CBB398606236/)
Book
David M. Bressoud;
(2019)
Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas
(/isis/citation/CBB135916087/)
Article
Miguel Escribano-Cabeza;
(2021)
Chemistry and dynamics in the thought of G.W. Leibniz II
(/isis/citation/CBB725308590/)
Book
Hartbecke, Karin;
(2008)
Zwischen Fürstenwillkür und Menschheitswohl: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz als Bibliothekar
(/isis/citation/CBB000951089/)
Article
Rey, Anne-Lise;
(2013)
The Status of Leibniz' Medical Experiments: A Provisional Empiricism?
(/isis/citation/CBB001213581/)
Book
Lloyd Strickland;
Harry R. Lewis;
(2022)
Leibniz on Binary: The Invention of Computer Arithmetic
(/isis/citation/CBB215936036/)
Article
Oscar M. Esquisabel;
Federico Raffo Quintana;
(2021)
Fiction, possibility and impossibility: three kinds of mathematical fictions in Leibniz’s work
(/isis/citation/CBB813371353/)
Article
M. Rosa Massa-Esteve;
(2022)
Leibniz, Peter the Great and the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences and Arts (Leibniz, Peter the Great and the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences and Arts)
(/isis/citation/CBB048456663/)
Book
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm;
Leibniz-Archiv der Niedersächsischen Landesbibliothek, Hannover, ;
(2003)
Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe. III. Reihe, Band 5, Mathematischer, naturwissenschaftlicher und technischer Briefwechsel: 1691--1693
(/isis/citation/CBB000651716/)
Article
Pauline Phemister;
(2017)
Substance and Force: Or Why It Matters What We Think
(/isis/citation/CBB667612088/)
Book
Menze, Clemens;
(1980)
Leibniz und die neuhumanistische Theorie der Bildung des Menschen
(/isis/citation/CBB000013935/)
Article
Kulstad, Mark;
(1981)
Leibniz, animals, and apperception
(/isis/citation/CBB000017014/)
Be the first to comment!