Yale Leibniz Series – serie

This volume contains papers that represent Leibniz’s early thoughts on the problem of evil, centering on a dialogue, the Confessio philosophi, in which he formulates a general account of God’s relation to sin and evil that becomes a fixture in his thinking.How can God be understood to be the ultimate cause, asks Leibniz, without God being considered as the author of sin, a conclusion incompatible with God’s holiness? Leibniz’s attempts to justify the way of God to humans lead him to deep discussion of related topics: the nature of free choice, the problems of necessitarianism and fatalism, the nature of divine justice and holiness. All but one of the writings presented here are available in English for the first time.

This volume is a critical edition of the ten-year correspondence (1706-1716) between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of Europe’s most influential early modern thinkers, and Bartholomew Des Bosses, a Jesuit theologian who was keen to bring together Leibniz’s philosophy and the Aristotelian philosophy and religious doctrines accepted by his order. The letters offer crucial insights into Leibniz’s final metaphysics and into the intellectual life of the eighteenth century.Brandon C. Look and Donald Rutherford present seventy-one of Leibniz’s and Des Bosses’s letters in the original Latin and in careful English translation. Few of the letters have been translated into English before. The editors also provide extensive annotations, deletions, and marginalia from Leibniz’s various drafts, and a substantial introduction setting the context for the correspondence and analyzing the main philosophical issues.

This book gathers together for the first time an important body of texts written between 1672 and 1686 by the great German philosopher and polymath Gottfried Leibniz. These writings, most of them previously untranslated, represent Leibniz’s sustained attempt on a problem whose solution was crucial to the development of his thought, that of the composition of the continuum.The volume begins with excerpts from Leibniz’s Paris writings, in which he tackles such problems as whether the infinite division of matter entails “perfect points,” whether matter and space can be regarded as true wholes, whether motion is truly continuous, and the nature of body and substance. Comprising the second section is Pacidius Philalethi, Leibniz’s brilliant dialogue of late 1676 on the problem of the continuity of motion. In the selections of the final section, from his Hanover writings of 1677–1686, Leibniz abandons his earlier transcreationism and atomism in favor of the theory of corporeal substance, where the reality of body and motion is founded in substantial form or force. Leibniz’s texts (one in French, the rest in Latin) are presented with facing-page English translations, together with an introduction, notes, appendixes containing related excerpts from earlier works by Leibniz and his predecessors, and a valuable glossary detailing important terms and their translations.

This volume is a critical edition of the eight-year correspondence (1698–1706) between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Burcher de Volder, professor of philosophy and mathematics at Leiden University.Containing the surviving correspondence between Leibniz and De Volder, the volume also presents a generous selection from the letters between Leibniz and his friend Johann Bernoulli, through whose intercession the correspondence began. Bernoulli acted as intermediary throughout, and the often candid discussions between Leibniz and Bernoulli provide illuminating background to the correspondence proper. Each of the selections appears both in the original Latin and in English translation.