Immortal Animals, Subtle Bodies, or Separated Souls: The Afterlife in Leibniz, Wolff, and Their Followers

In eighteenth-century post-Leibnizian German philosophy, the debate on immortality did not concern only the fate of the soul after death but also the fate of the body. Leibniz had famously maintained that no animal ever dies, for the soul is never entirely deprived of its living body. In spite of Bilfinger’s almost isolated defense, this doctrine never became dominant, even among Leibniz’s followers. Christian Wolff, long considered a mere popularizer of Leibniz’s philosophy, departed from this account of immortality and replaced it with the traditional Platonic model, based on the survival of separated souls. After reconstructing Leibniz’s, Wolff’s, and Bilfinger’s positions, this paper considers how the debate evolved within the so-called Wolffian school during the 1730s and 1740s. Both partisans and detractors of separated souls diverged from Leibniz on a crucial point: namely, they argued that another key Leibnizian doctrine, pre-established harmony, entails that the soul need not be forever united to its body. Furthermore, the cases of Johann Heinrich Winckler, Johann Gustav Reinbeck, Israel Gottlieb Canz, and even Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten show that the post-Leibnizian detractors of separated souls drew, in fact, more inspiration from the neo-Platonic and esoteric doctrine of the subtle body than from Leibniz’s original immortalism

Ens imaginarium: Kant e Wolff

The present article clarifies Kant's use of the expression ens imaginarium by confronting this use, on the one hand, with the traditional (which is still present in Leibniz), and, on the other hand, with Wolff's use. After considering the revival of the debate on the distinction between "imaginary" and "real" after the publication of the correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke ( 1), the article illustrates Wolff's transformation of the traditional concept of ens imaginarium, a transformation carried out through the theory of imaginary notions ( 2). Contrary to the fictitious ens, Wolff's ens imaginarium can work as a surrogate of the real ens, and thus play a heuristic function. In Kant, however, the expression ens imaginarium keeps the more traditional sense of "not real": space and time are imaginary beings if we conceive them as contents of the representation, rather than as pure forms of it ( 3). Thereby, Kant aims to oppose precisely the changes introduced by Wolff, which he considers incompatible with the a priori character of the concepts of space and time ( 4)

Leibniz and the Perfection of Clocks

Throughout his life, Leibniz showed serious interest in the construction of clocks and actively contributed to their technical improvement. He described the mechanical and especially the pendulum clock as a paradigmatic kind of machine, and therefore as a suitable model for exploring the nature and boundaries of mechanistic philosophy. After an overview on Leibniz‟s technology and physics of clocks (Section 1), this paper reviews the main occurrences of the clock analogy in his philosophical writings. Section 2 considers the epistemological use of the clock analogy and its evolution from an early stress on the hypothetical component of natural science to a later concern with the full inspectability and intelligibility of natural processes. Section 3 details the manifold uses of the clock analogy in metaphysics to illustrate features of the world, of both inanimate and living bodies, and even of God, the soul, and the soul-body union. The possibility of construing machine metaphors in terms of either structure or function solves the apparent ambivalence of Leibniz‟s approach to the clock analogy. It also explains his persistent reference to perfection and standards of perfection, thereby bringing to the fore the teleological strand of this concept

Preface

Leibniz’s investigations into the structures of both natural and artificial languages, and into the impact of language use on human cognition, are widely acknowledged to have achieved real breakthroughs with respect to the standard early modern assumptions about these topics. Leibniz linked his linguistic interests with his views on mental activity by expounding the idea that language plays a fundamental role not only in communication but also in human cognition, insofar as words and signs in general serve as the indispensable thread for human thought. He used this insight into the linguistic component of thought to approach semantic phenomena such as metaphorical speech and ‘empty’ words or phrases, as well as psychological phenomena such as cognitive errors and the weakness of the will. Furthermore, his views on psycho-physical parallelism led him to explore the hypothesis that even abstract, conceptual representations have a physical counterpart in the human brain insofar as they are necessarily verbalized in a language or expressed in any other system of perceptible symbols

Lambert on Eternal Truths and the Existence of God

In Lambert's "Neues Organon", the doctrine of the suppositum intelligens is inextricably linked to one of the most controversial issues of post-Cartesian metaphysics: the doctrine of eternal or necessary truths, which was still intensely debated by eighteenth-century German philosophers. In Lambert’s work, however, this doctrine appears to be relegated to the margins, along with all other theological concerns. Its rather infrequent mentions in both the Neues Organon and the Architectonic can strike the reader more as residues of earlier debates than serious investigations of a current topic. In the earlier essay "Über die Methode die Metaphysik, Theologie und Moral richtiger zu beweisen", by contrast, eternal truths indisputably play a prominent role. Their existence is the pivot of Lambert’s main argument to the effect that even rational theology can attain the degree of perfect certainty that is already enjoyed by geometry and logic. Starting from an analysis of "Über die Methode", I argue that the theological implications of the doctrine of eternal truths remain decisive for Lambert even in the "Architectonic". In particular, the development of this doctrine provides essential clues to understanding Lambert’s theory of modalities and its radical departure from Wolff’s modal framework

Perfection as Harmony: Leibniz’s 1715 Doctrine and Wolff’s Teleological Reformulation

In his German Metaphysics, Christian Wolff defines perfection as “the agreement of the manifold”, which is clearly reminiscent of Leibniz’s concept of harmony as unity in multiplicity. Indeed, in his letter to Wolff of 18 May 1715 Leibniz characterizes perfection as “the harmony of things” and applies to it the same phrase with which he usually clarifies his concept of harmony: perfection is “agreement or identity in variety”. Thus, it was Leibniz himself who suggested or possibly authorized the clear identification of perfection with harmony. On the other hand, it was Wolff who urged Leibniz to refine and clarify his view on this topic. The reasons behind Wolff’s interventions have generally been neglected by scholars, but as the present reconstruction aims to show, they prove to be perfectly relevant to a fuller understanding of both the historical background and theoretical implications of the perfection-as-harmony doctrine. Leibniz’s remarks led Wolff to realize that perfection is intimately tied to a finalistic framework and could thus serve as a fundamental concept of both ethics and teleology. This discussion reveals the essentially teleological character of Leibniz’s concepts of perfection and possibly harmony

Infinite Regress: Wolff's Cosmology and the Background of Kant's Antinomies

Wolff’s relation to Leibniz and Kant’s relation to both are notoriously vexed questions. First, this paper argues that Wolff’s most serious departure from Leibniz consists in his (so far overlooked) rejection of the latter’s infinitism. Second, it contends that the controversies that surrounded Wolff’s early acceptance of infinite causal regress and prompted his conversion to finitism played a prominent role in shaping the theses of Kant’s Antinomies. Whereas Leibniz and the early Wolff considered infinite regress to provide support for the contingency of the world and the existence of God, Wolff’s enemies condemned it as Spinozistic. After Wolff, the claim that an infinite chain of causes is impossible became the standard view among both Wolffian and anti-Wolffian metaphysicians

Counterfactual Hypotheses, Fictions, and the Laws of Nature: The Arguments for Contingency and Possible Worlds in Leibniz, Wolff, and Bilfinger

How can we know that our world is not the only possible one? Leibniz’s claim that this world is the best of all possible worlds obviously presupposes the modal thesis that more than one world is possible. Moreover, the possibility of alternative worlds is also the crucial premise for Leibniz’s most popular defence of contingency. Even if this commitment to possible worlds may appear unproblematic to us, Leibniz’s immediate followers felt that the pluralist assumption about possible worlds required some justification. Aim of this paper is to reconstruct Leibniz’s arguments for possible worlds and contingentism, as they are stated in the Theodicy, by taking into consideration Wolff’s and Bilfinger’s critical (albeit sympathetic) discussion. Following Bilfinger’s classification, three main arguments are explored: the argument from the conceivability of counterfactual situations, the argument from fiction, and the argument from the contingency of natural laws