LEIBNIZ: WHAT KIND OF RATIONALIST?

LOGIC, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND THE UNITY OF SCIENCE

VOLUME 13

EditorsShahid Rahman, University of Lille III, FranceJohn Symons, University of Texas at El Paso, U.S.A.

Editorial BoardJean Paul van Bendegem, Free University of Brussels, BelgiumJohan van Benthem, University of Amsterdam, the NetherlandsJacques Dubucs, University of Paris I-Sorbonne, FranceAnne Fagot-Largeault, College de France, FranceBas van Fraassen, Princeton University, U.S.A.Dov Gabbay, King’s College London, U.K.Jaakko Hintikka, Boston University, U.S.A.Karel Lambert, University of California, Irvine, U.S.A.Graham Priest, University of Melbourne, AustraliaGabriel Sandu, University of Helsinki, FinlandHeinrich Wansing, Technical University Dresden, GermanyTimothy Williamson, Oxford University, U.K.

Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science aims to reconsider the question of the unity ofscience in light of recent developments in logic. At present, no single logical, semantical ormethodological framework dominates the philosophy of science. However, the editors of thisseries believe that formal techniques like, for example, independence friendly logic, dialogi-cal logics, multimodal logics, game theoretic semantics and linear logics, have the potentialto cast new light no basic issues in the discussion of the unity of science.

This series provides a venue where philosophers and logicians can apply specific technicalinsights to fundamental philosophical problems. While the series is open to a wide variety ofperspectives, including the study and analysis of argumentation and the critical discussionof the relationship between logic and the philosophy of science, the aim is to provide anintegrated picture of the scientific enterprise in all its diversity.

For other titles published in this series, go towww.springer.com/series/6936

Leibniz: What Kindof Rationalist?

Edited by

Marcelo DascalTel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

123

EditorProf. Marcelo DascalDepartment of PhilosophyTel Aviv University69978 Tel AvivIsraelmarcelodascal@gmail.com

ISBN: 978-1-4020-8667-0 e-ISBN: 978-1-4020-8668-7

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Cover image: Adaptation of a Persian astrolabe (brass, 1712–13), from the collection of the Museum ofthe History of Science, Oxford. Reproduced by permission.

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The pulleys of thought?

Referring to manuscript XXXVII, the art historian Horst Bredekamp (2004: 194;see below, Introduction, p. 12) writes: “If ever there was a window into Leibniz’sthinking world, it is offered by these Miro-reminding scribbles inscribed in card-board, which in their confusion of clashing and reflecting lines seem to faithfullymirror Leibniz’s mental theater”. He further suggests that these, along with otherfeatures of his thought, grant Leibniz a particular actuality in our days, as a thinkerwho permits to escape the dichotomy calculation vs. intuition. “Leibniz – Bre-dekamp writes – immunizes against the theologians of the computer as well asagainst those who are disenchanted by looking for meaning in the digital world”(ibid.). Whatever one’s view about its nature and consequences, Leibniz’s thoughtis certainly pulled by forces, pulleys, and connecting lines whose interaction is stillfar from our comprehensive grasping.

Marcelo DascalTel Aviv, May 2008

Contents

A puzzling Leibniz manuscript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi

The pulleys of thought? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi

Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Marcelo Dascal

Part I Reinterpreting Leibniz’s Rationalism?

1 Leibniz’s Rationalism: A Plea Against Equating Soft and StrongRationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17Heinrich Schepers

2 Leibniz’s Two-Pronged Dialectic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37Marcelo Dascal

3 Leibniz’s Rationality: Divine Intelligibility and Human Intelligibility 73Ohad Nachtomy

Part II Natural Sciences and Mathematics

4 De Abstracto et Concreto: Rationalism and Empirical Sciencein Leibniz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85Philip Beeley

5 Leibniz Against the Unreasonable Newtonian Physics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99Laurence Bouquiaux

6 Some Hermetic Aspects of Leibniz’s Mathematical Rationalism . . . . . 111Bernardino Orio de Miguel

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viii Contents

7 Symbolic Inventiveness and “Irrationalist” Practices in Leibniz’sMathematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125Michel Serfati

8 The Art of Mathematical Rationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141Herbert Breger

Part III Epistemology

9 Ramus and Leibniz on Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155Andreas Blank

10 Locke, Leibniz, and Hume on Form and Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167Emily Rolfe Grosholz

11 Leibniz’s Conception of Natural Explanation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183Marta de Mendonca

12 The Role of Metaphor in Leibniz’s Epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199Cristina Marras

13 What Is the Foundation of Knowledge? Leibniz and theAmphibology of Intuition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213Marine Picon

Part IV Law

14 Leibniz: What Kind of Legal Rationalism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231Pol Boucher

15 On Two Argumentative Uses of the Notion of Uncertainty in Law inLeibniz’s Juridical Dissertations about Conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251Alexandre Thiercelin

16 Contingent Propositions and Leibniz’s Analysis of JuridicalDispositions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267Evelyn Vargas

17 Leibniz on Natural Law in the Nouveaux essais . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279Patrick Riley

Part V Ethics

18 Authenticity or Autonomy? Leibniz and Kant on PracticalRationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293Carl J. Posy

19 The Place of the Other in Leibniz’s Rationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315Noa Naaman Zauderer

Contents ix

20 Morality and Feeling: Genesis and Determination of the Willin Leibniz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329Adelino Dias Cardoso

21 Leibniz and Moral Rationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343Martine de Gaudemar

Part VI Decision Making

22 Leibniz’s Models of Rational Decision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357Markku Roinila

23 The Specimen Demonstrationum Politicarum Pro EligendoRege Polonorum: From the Concatenation of Demonstrationsto a Decision Appraisal Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371Jeremie Griard

24 Declarative vs. Procedural Rules for Religious Controversy:Leibniz’s Rational Approach to Heresy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383Frederic Nef

25 Apology for a Credo Maximum: On Three Basic Rules in Leibniz’sMethod of Religious Controversy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397Mogens Laerke

Part VII Religion and Theology

26 Convergence or Genealogy? Leibniz and the Spectre of PaganRationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411Justin E.H. Smith

27 “Paroles Entierement Destituees de Sens”. Pathic Reason in theTheodicee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423Giovanni Scarafile

28 The Authority of the Bible and the Authority of Reason in Leibniz’sEcumenical Argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441Hartmut Rudolph

29 Leibniz on Creation: A Contribution to His Philosophical Theology . . 449Daniel J. Cook

Part VIII The Metaphysics of Rationality

30 For a History of Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason. FirstFormulations and Their Historical Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463Francesco Piro

x Contents

31 Innate Ideas as the Cornerstone of Rationalism: The Problem ofMoral Principles in Leibniz’s Nouveaux Essais . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 479Hans Poser

32 Causa Sive Ratio. Univocity of Reason and Plurality of Causes inLeibniz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 495Stefano Di Bella

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511

Abbreviations

1 Leibniz’s Works

A = Samtliche Schriften und Briefe. Edited since 1923 by various Leibniz ResearchCenters in Germany. Currently published by Akademie Verlag, Berlin.B = Der Briefwechsel von G. W. Leibniz mit Mathematikern. Edited by C.I.Gerhardt. Berlin, 1899 (repr. Hildesheim, 1962).C = Opuscules et fragments inedits. Edited by L. Couturat. Paris, 1903 (repr.Hildesheim, 1966).D = Opera Omnia. Edited by L. Dutens. Geneve, 1767 (repr. Hildesheim, 1989).E = Opera Philosophica quae exstant latina gallica germanica omnia. Edited byJ.E. Erdmann. Berlin, 1840.FC = Oeuvres de Leibniz. Edited by A. Foucher de Careil. Paris 1859–1875 (repr.Hildesheim, 1969).GM = Leibnizens Mathematische Schriften. Edited by C.I. Gerhardt. Halle, 1849–1863 (repr. Hildesheim, 1962).GP = Die Philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz. Edited by C.I. Gerhardt.Berlin, 1875–1890 (repr. Hildesheim, 1965).GR = Textes inedits. Edited by G. Grua. Paris, 1948.K = Die Werke von Leibniz. Edited by O. Klopp. Leipzig, 1864–1884.LH = Leibniz-Handschriften, Niedersachsischen Landesbibliothek Hannover.M = Rechstfphilosophisches aus Leibnizens ungedruckten Schriften. Edited byG. Mollat. Leipzig, 1885.NE = Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain. In A VI 6 and in GP 5.

2 English Translations

A&G = Philosophical Essays. Translated by R. Ariew and D. Garber. Indianapolis,1989.CH = The Early Mathematical Manuscripts of Leibniz. Translated by J.M. Child.Chicago, 1920.DA = The Art of Controversies. Translated by M. Dascal, with the cooperation ofQ. Racionero and A. Cardoso. Dordrecht, 2006.

xi

xii Abbreviations

L = Philosophical Papers and Letters. Translated by L.E. Loemker. Dordrecht, 2nd

ed., 1969.P = Logical Papers. Translated by G.H.R. Parkinson. Oxford, 1966.R = The Political Writings of Leibniz. Translated by P. Riley. Cambridge, 1972.R&B = New Essays on Human Understanding. Translated by P. Remnant andJ. Bennett. Cambridge, 1996.SR = De Summa Rerum – Metaphysical Papers 1675-1676. Translated by G.H.R.Parkinson. New Haven, 1992.

Contributors

Philip Beeley, a former member of the Leibniz-Forschungstelle at Munster andlecturer in History of Science at the University of Hamburg, is Fellow of LinacreCollege and researcher on the Wallis Project at the Centre for Linguistics, Universityof Oxford. He is co-editor of the projected eight volumes of the Correspondenceof John Wallis (1616–1703) (Oxford 2003ff.) and author of numerous studies onLeibniz and the history of early modern science and philosophy, including Konti-nuitat und Mechanismus (Stuttgart 1996). He is currently preparing in collaborationan edition of Wallis’s Treatise of Logick.

Andreas Blank has been Lecturer at the Philosophy Department of the HumboldtUniversity in Berlin, Visiting Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at theUniversity of Pittsburgh, USA, and Visiting Fellow at the Cohn Institute for theHistory and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He iscurrently a researcher at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbuttel, where heinvestigates the late medieval background of Leibniz’s thought. He also pursues re-search in metaphysics, early modern philosophy, and analytic philosophy. He is theauthor of Der logische Aufbau von Leibniz’ Metaphysik (2001), Leibniz: Metaphi-losophy and Metaphysics, 1666–1686 (2005), and of numerous articles on Leibniz,early modern thinkers, and Wittgenstein.

Pol Boucher teaches philosophy in Rennes, France, and is Associate Researcherat the Institut de l’Ouest, Droit et Europe (IODE). His scholarly work spans thehistory of law and jurisprudence in Europe, particularly in late Scholasticism, theRenaissance, and early modern thought. Leibniz’s juridical work and ideas occupy aspecial place in Boucher’s research and publications. He has translated into French,with enlightening introductions and notes, a series of fundamental juridical writ-ings by the young Leibniz, including so far the Doctrina Conditionum (1995), theDe Conditionibus (2002), the De Casibus Perplexis in Jure (2008). The Academiedes Sciences Morales et Politiques awarded him the “Lucien Dupont Prize” forthe second of these publications, and the “Emile Girardeau Prize” for the third.From the city of Rennes he received in 2008 the “Prix de la Ville de Rennes” forthe ensemble of his already published work. We should expect soon the publica-tion of his translations of Leibniz’s Specimen quaestionum philosophicarum ex jure

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xiv Contributors

collectarum and of the comprehensive juridical treatise of 1667, the Nova MethodusDiscendae Docendaeque Jurisprudentiae, a new edition of which Leibniz began toprepare in the 1690s.

Laurence Bouquiaux is Professor of Philosophy and department chair at theUniversity of Liege, Belgium. She specializes in the history of modern philosophyand the philosophy of physics. She is the author of several papers on Descartes,Spinoza and Leibniz.

Herbert Breger is director of the Leibniz Archive in Hanover, Germany, and ausser-planmaßiger Professor at the Institute for Philosophy at the University of Hanover.He is editor of the journal Studia Leibnitiana. His areas of interest are Leibniz,philosophy of mathematics, history of science. A joint research project with EmilyGrosholz resulted in the book The Growth of Mathematical Knowledge (2000).

Adelino Dias Cardoso is a researcher at the Centre of Philosophy of Lisbon Univer-sity, Portugal. In addition to his work on Leibniz and his contemporaries, he is thedirector of a research project on “Philosophy, Medicine and Society”. His authoredbooks include Leibniz segundo a expressao (1992), Fulguracoes do eu (2001), OTrabalho da mediacao no pensamento leibniziano (2005), Vida e percepcao desi. Figuras da subjectividade no seculo XVII (2008). He cooperated with MarceloDascal in the publication of the collection of Leibniz’s texts The Art of Controversies(2006), co-edited Descartes, Leibniz e a Modernidade (1998), and published severalPortuguese translations of Leibniz’s works.

Daniel J. Cook is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy from Brooklyn College of theCity University of New York. He has been a visiting Professor at the Hebrew, TelAviv, and Bar-Ilan Universities in Israel. He published extensively in comparativephilosophy and the history of modern philosophy, primarily on Hegel and Leibniz.His books include Language in the Philosophy of Hegel and G.W. Leibniz: Writingson China (co-edited with Henry Rosemont). He is currently co-editing Leibniz’s Re-lation to Jews and Judaism and an English translation of Leibniz’s correspondencewith Joachim Bouvet, the French missionary in Beijing.

Marcelo Dascal is Professor of Philosophy and former Dean of Humanities at TelAviv University, Israel. He is president of the New Israeli Philosophical Associationand of the International Association for the Study of Controversies. His researchactivities include pragmatics and the philosophy of language, epistemology and thephilosophy of science, cognitive sciences and the philosophy of mind, controversiesand the history of ideas, with special interest in Leibniz and his contemporaries andfollowers. In addition to several edited and co-edited volumes, his books includeLa Semiologie de Leibniz (1978), Pragmatics and the Philosophy of Mind (1983),Leibniz. Language, Signs, and Thought (1987), Interpretation and Understanding(2003), G. W. Leibniz: The Art of Controversies (2006, 2008). He is the founder

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and editor of the journal Pragmatics & Cognition and of the book series “Contro-versies”. For his research achievements he was awarded the Humboldt Prize (2002)and the Argumentation Award of the International Society for the Study of Argu-mentation (2004).

Stefano Di Bella is research fellow in the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy.His main areas of interest are history of philosophy, early modern philosophy(especially Descartes and Leibniz), and metaphysics. He has published Le Medi-tazioni metafisiche di Cartesio, Introduzione alla lettura (1997) and The Science ofthe Individual. Leibniz’s Ontology of Individual Substance (2005).

Martine de Gaudemar graduated in philosophy (Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris),in sociology, economics, mathematics (Institut d’Histoire des Sciences et des Tech-niques, Paris-Sorbonne, and Institute Henri Poincare). She obtained her Doctoratd’Etat (1989) with a dissertation on The notion of power in Leibniz, after whichshe studied and practiced psychopathology. To her early interest in logical formshe added a concern with forms of life. At present she works on the constitution ofindividuality on both sides of a material living body and of forms of life in language.She uses Leibniz’s philosophy as a tool-box, which enables her to develop the notionof a living person and a cultural character as united in the leibnizian concept of “per-sona”. In 1994 she was appointed Professeur des Universites, teaching first at theUniversite de Strasbourg and thereafter at the Universite de Paris-Ouest (Nanterre).She is a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (Chair: Philosophy,Ethics and Humanities).

Jeremie Griard, PhD in History of Philosophy, Universite de Paris-Sorbonne(2003), held a post-doctoral position as a researcher at the Department of Philos-ophy and the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales of the Universitede Montreal (CERIUM), Canada. Since 2007, he has been a research fellow ofthe Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Leibniz-Archiv in Hanover. Hisresearch areas include Leibniz’s political thought, the concept of sovereignty, andthe notion of Europe, with special interest in the stakes of a quasi-contractual socialtheory for the European Union project. He co-edited with Francois DuchesneauLeibniz selon les Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (2006).

Emily Grosholz is Professor of Philosophy and Fellow of the Institute for Artsand Humanities at the Pennsylvania State University; Corresponding Member ofREHSEIS / Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique / University of Paris 7;Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge; and Associate of the Centerfor Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh. She is author of Representationand Productive Ambiguity in Mathematics and the Sciences (2007) and CartesianMethod and the Problem of Reduction (1991), and co-author, with Elhanan Yakira,of Leibniz’s Science of the Rational (1998), as well as co-editor, with HerbertBreger, of The Growth of Mathematical Knowledge (1999).

xvi Contributors

Mogens Laerke, PhD in History of Philosophy (University of Paris–Sorbonne,2003), is currently a Harper Fellow at the University of Chicago. He was awardeda post-doctoral scholarship by the Carlsberg Foundation (2004–2007) and workedas a post-doctoral researcher in the Leibniz-Locke Research Project at Tel AvivUniversity (2007). He is the author of Leibniz lecteur de Spinoza. La genese d’uneopposition complexe (2008). Apart from extensive work on Leibniz and Spinoza,Laerke has written on Biblical exegesis and theological politics in the 17th Cen-tury. He has published a book in Danish on the influence of Jewish Mysticism onearly modern philosophy, and written several articles on the contemporary Frenchphilosopher Gilles Deleuze.

Cristina Marras, PhD in philosophy (Tel Aviv University, 2004), ‘Laurea’ in aes-thetics and in pedagogy (University of Cagliari, Italy), is currently a researcher atthe Instituto per il Lessico Intelletuale Europeo e la Storia delle Idee (ILIESI-CNR,Roma), where she is a member of the project Discovery (Digital Semantic Corporafor Virtual Research in Philosophy). She also teaches “Theory of Communication”at the Faculty of Philosophy, University “La Sapienza”, Roma. Her main researchinterests include philosophy of language, early modern philosophy, rhetoric and me-diation, controversies, and Leibniz. Her recent research has addressed the relationsbetween metaphor and philosophy. She wrote the entry “scientific metaphors” forthe Enciclopedia Italiana di Filosofia (2005) and published several articles in jour-nals and collective volumes.

Marta Mendonca is a Professor at the Department of Philosophy of the New Uni-versity of Lisbon, Portugal. Her PhD dissertation, on The Doctrine of Modalities inthe Philosophy of Leibniz, is scheduled to be published in 2008. She is a memberof the National Council for the Ethics of the Sciences of Life, a member of theCentre of the History of Culture (New University of Lisbon), and a member of theInternational Association for the Study of Controversies. She has published articleson modalities, particularly on the Aristotelian and Leibnizian doctrines of modalitiesand their relations with determinism.

Noa Naaman Zauderer, PhD in philosophy (Tel Aviv University, 2002), is a Lec-turer in the Department of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University, Israel. Her main researchinterests are early modern philosophy (especially Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz),the history of ideas, the epistemology of error, and early modern conceptions ofrationality. She published several papers in journals and collective volumes and herbook Descartes: The Loneliness of a Philosopher has been published in Hebrew byTel Aviv University Press in 2007.

Ohad Nachtomy, PhD Columbia University (1998), is a Senior Lecturer in theDepartment of Philosophy, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. He also teachesat Tel-hai Academic College, near the Lebanese border. Before concluding his doc-toral dissertation, which discusses Leibniz’s approach to possibility, he spent a yearof research (1996–1997) on Leibniz and Spinoza at the Ecole Normale Superieure,

Contributors xvii

Paris. His recent publications include the book Possibility, Agency and Individualityin Leibniz’s Metaphysics (2007) and several articles on Leibniz in journals and col-lective volumes.

Frederic Nef is Directeur d’Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en SciencesSociales, Paris, and is a member of the Institut Jean-Nicod (Ecole NormaleSuperieure/CNRS). His philosophical research touches on several fields, some ofwhich he deals with in an interdisciplinary way. They include, among others, philo-sophical logic, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, formal and social ontology, andhistory of philosophy, with a special interest in Leibniz and Austrian philosophy.Among his recent books: L’Objet Quelconque (1997), Leibniz et le langage (2001),Qu’est-ce que la metaphysique? (2004), Leibniz et les Puissances du Langage (co-edited with Dominique Berlioz, 2005), and Les Proprietes des Choses (2006).

Bernardino Orio de Miguel has been a teacher of philosophy in Spanish secondaryschools from 1974 to 2001. His interest in Leibniz’s thought and its connection withhermetic thought developed and deepened thanks to research grants at the HerzogAugust Bibliothek, Wolfenbuttel (1980) and at the Leibniz-Archiv, Hanover (1984),and culminated with his PhD dissertation (Universidad Complutense de Madrid,1988) on “Leibniz y la tradicion teosofico-kabbalıstica: F.M.van Helmont”, pub-lished in two volumes and containing unpublished Leibniz’s texts on van Helmont.With a grant of the March Foundation (1996–1998) he has published Leibniz y elpensamiento hermetico: a proposito de los “Cogitata in Genesim” de F.M. vanHelmont (2 vols., 2002) and edited Lady Conway’s “Principia Philosophiae”: LaFilosofıa de Lady Anne Conway: un ‘Proto-Leibniz’ (2004). At present, he is work-ing on Leibniz’s correspondence with the Bernoulli brothers, with B. de Volder andwith Jacob Hermann.

Marine Picon is a former student of the Ecole Normale Superieure de la Rue d’Ulm,Paris. She has taught philosophy at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and at the EcoleNormale Superieure. In 2002, she was awarded a research scholarship by the Fon-dation Thiers (Institut de France, CNRS). Her current research bears on Leibniz’searly metaphysics and epistemology.

Francesco Piro is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Salerno, Italy.His main research interests are the philosophy and psychology of action, practicalreason, the philosophy of language, and the history of philosophy, especially theearly modern philosophical controversies in the domains mentioned. His works onLeibniz include two books, Varietas identitate compensata (1990) and Spontaneitae ragion sufficiente (2002). He edited an Italian translation of Leibniz’s philosoph-ical and scientific dialogues, G. W. Leibniz: Dialoghi Filosofici e Scientifici (2007),co-edited Monadi e monadologie. Il mondo degli individui in Bruno, Leibniz, Husserl(2005), and published several papers on Leibniz in collective volumes and journals.He worked also on the psychology of imagination and its history, and he has publishedIl retore interno. Immaginazione e passioni all’alba dell’eta moderna (1999).

xviii Contributors

Hans Poser is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Technische UniversitatBerlin and currently (Spring 2008), visiting professor at the Humanities ResearchCenter of Rice University, Houston, USA. His areas of research include the philoso-phy of science and technology and the history of philosophy, and he has contributedmuch to Leibniz research. He served for nearly three decades as the Vice Presidentof the International Leibniz Society, besides being a former president of the Ger-man Philosophical Society. Poser’s books on Leibniz include a classical study onLeibniz’s modal logic, Zur Theorie der Modalbegriffe bei G. W. Leibniz (1969) anda recent introduction to his thought, G. W. Leibniz zur Einfuhrung (2005).

Carl J. Posy is a Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,Israel. He holds a B.A. in Mathematics and Philosophy and a PhD in Philosophyfrom Yale University. Before coming to Israel in 1998 he taught philosophy in theUnited States. He is a well-known Kantian scholar, as well as a philosopher and his-torian of mathematics and logic. His current research includes Leibnizian influenceson Kant’s pre-critical as well as his critical period.

Patrick Riley is Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Govern-ment, Harvard University. He was formerly Oakeshott Professor of Political andMoral Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1972–2007). He hasmade Leibniz’s political and juridical views known throughout the English speak-ing world thanks to his selection and translation of The Political Writings of Leibniz(1972, 1988); his more recent volume, Leibniz’s “Universal Jurisprudence”: Justiceas the Charity of the Wise (1996), provides a synthetic and well argued view of theuniversalistic side of Leibniz’s theory of justice.

Markku Roinila, PhD University of Helsinki (2007), has done research on Leibniz’stheory of rational decision-making and philosophy of mind. He is currently study-ing Leibniz’s views on emotions and the perfectibility of man, and is a ResearchDoctor in the research unit Philosophical Psychology, Morality and Political The-ory, led by Simo Knuuttila and funded by the Academy of Finland. His disser-tation, Leibniz on Rational Decision-Making (2007), is volume 16 of the seriesPhilosophical Studies of the University of Helsinki. Roinila is also editing a col-lection of translations of Leibniz’s texts into Finnish (forthcoming in 2009) andmaintains a web-page of Leibniz resources and a discussion forum on Leibniz athttp://www.helsinki.fi/∼mroinila/leibniz.htm

Hartmut Rudolph, Dr. theol. (University of Heidelberg), published monographson the history of the Prussian military church from the 18th century to World War I,about the German Protestant churches and their meaning for the integration of therefugees into the West-German society 1945–1972, several articles on the history ofthe Reform period in early modern Germany, on the relation of public and churchlaw, on Leibniz, and on subjects of contemporary German church history. He col-laborated with the historical-critical edition of the works of Paracelsus (since 1976)and Martin Bucer (since 1983). From 1993 to 2007 Hartmut Rudolph was Director

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of the Leibniz Edition Potsdam of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Humanitiesand Sciences, and since his recent retirement he continues to contribute to the editionof the theological and political writings.

Giovanni Scarafile, PhD in philosophy (Lecce, 2001) is a Lecturer of philosophyat the University of Salento (Lecce, Italy), where he is in charge of the disciplineEthics of Communication. Co-founder of Sapere aude!, a research community con-cerned with the relation between faith and reason, he is also a member of the In-ternational Association for the Study of Controversy. His research interests includeLeibniz’s theodicy, the philosophy of languages (pragmatics, rhetoric, cinema), andthe relation between pathologies and theories of language. He is the author of themonographs Proiezioni di senso. Sentieri tra cinema e filosofia, (2003), La vita chesi cerca. Lettera ad uno studente sulla felicita dello studio (2005), and In lottacon il drago. Male e individuo nella teodicea di G.W. Leibniz (2007), as well asthe co-editor of La governance dello sviluppo: etica, economia, politica, scienza(2004), Liberta e persona (2004), Liberta e comunita (2005), Liberta, evento e sto-ria (2006), and Liberta e dialogo tra culture (2007).

Heinrich Schepers, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Munster,Germany, was for many years head of the Leibniz Forschungstelle Munster, respon-sible for the edition of the philosophical writings. His contribution to the AcademyEdition is invaluable, both for his profound familiarity with the manuscripts andability to decipher them and for the technical and substantive innovations he intro-duced in the laborious procedure of edition. From 1982 to 1991 he made available toa group of Leibniz scholars a printed pre-edition (in 10 volumes) of volume 4 of thePhilosophical Writings, whose final edition was published only in 1999. In this wayhe not only enlarged the worldwide scholarly collaboration with and interest in theeditorial work, but also allowed a new generation of researchers to advance Leibnizresearch at a pace and quality that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Besideshis incomparable devotion to Leibniz scholarship, Schepers is also a philosopherand historian of ideas whose work is widely acknowledged.

Michel Serfati is Honorary Professor holding the Higher Chair of Mathematics inParis. He has been for many years the head of the seminar on epistemology and his-tory of mathematical ideas held at the Institut Henri Poincare, Universite de Paris 7.He has organised many conferences on the history and philosophy of mathematics,and is the author and editor of works in both disciplines. His most recent books areLa Revolution symbolique. La constitution de l’ecriture symbolique mathematique(2005) and De la Methode (2003), as well as the co-edited volume Mathematiciensfrancais du XVIIeme siecle. Descartes, Fermat, Pascal (2008). He holds doctoratesin mathematics and philosophy. In mathematics, his research concerns the alge-braic support of multiple-valued logics (i.e, Post algebras). In philosophy, his workfocuses on the philosophy of mathematical symbolic notation as a part of the phi-losophy of language. His research also deals with various aspects of the history ofmathematics, especially in the 17th century, as a specialist in Descartes and Leibniz.

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He also worked in the history and philosophy of contemporary mathematics (e.g.,Category Theory and Stone’s theorem).

Justin E. H. Smith, PhD Columbia University, is Associate Professor of Philoso-phy at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. His main research interest is theintersection and interconnection between the rise of the empirical sciences and thatof ‘modern’ philosophy in the 17th century. He is the author of numerous articleson Leibniz and early modern philosophy, and is the editor of the recent volume TheProblem of Animal Generation in Modern Philosophy (2006) in Cambridge Studiesin Philosophy and Biology.

Alexandre Thiercelin is a graduate student at the University of Lille 3, wherehe works on the relationship between logic and law. He organized with ProfessorShahid Rahman the international conference “Argumentation and Law”, which washeld in Lille on November 2005. The doctoral dissertation he is preparing bearsthe title “Meaningfulness of the expression ‘juridical logic’ in the perspective ofLeibniz’s works concerning the use of conditions in law – mainly his Disputationesjuridicae de conditionibus (1665) and his Specimen certitudinis seu demonstra-tionum in jure exhibitum in doctrina conditionum (1667–1669)”.

Evelyn Vargas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of La Plata, Argentina,and a researcher in epistemology and the history of science for the National Councilof Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET). She has written articles onLeibniz’s natural philosophy as well as on Peirce.