Ideas and Ideals

The article is devoted to the anniversary of the birth (370 years ago) and the date of death (300 years ago) of the outstanding German philosopher, mathematician, physicist, jurist, historian, linguist, and diplomat Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz undertake a creative synthesis of science, philosophy and theology, producing a unique philosophical system. The foundation of this system is constituted by the doctrine of preestablished harmony. In all areas in which he worked, Leibniz made great discoveries. It inherited the gift of synthesizing the disparate views of different thinkers on the basis of the original methodological principle based on the universality and rigor of philosophical arguments in their logical sequence. Leibnitz is also a great theologian and originator of the profound ethical system. Ethical optimism of Leibniz's teleology has Christian religious worldview as its basis.

In this paper the author tries to look at Leibniz from the topos of Indian philosophy. François Jullien called such a strategy “dépayser la pensée” – to withdraw a thought from its habitat and to see it through the lens of different culture. She refers to Indian philosophy, especially to some Buddhists systems, and highlights – in a more general intercultural perspective – continualistic and atomistic approaches in Leibniz’s thought. The author argues that despite Leibniz’ consistent criticism, predominantly from the continualistic position, of the ancient and the contemporary atomism, Leibniz in his own metaphysics remained a convinced atomist - his monads are the only final causes of things, substances, or "true atoms of nature". In this paper, Leibniz’ mereological arguments are examined with the help of some principles and conceptualizations developed in Indian philosophy. In particular, the author compares the whole-parts models in monadology and in Nyāya, as well as the Buddhist schools of Abhidharma and Yogācāra. The article also shows that because of their atomistic approach both Leibniz and Buddhists confronted a problem of how to give an account for a complex substance, and proposed different strategies of dealing with its continuity. If we evaluate the position of Leibniz, for example, from a Buddhist point of view, its main drawback consists in theism, in an attempt to shift responsibility for the universe from human beings to God, and instead of investigating causal relations between things to recourse to the theistic principle of pre-established harmony.

The article deals with the mathematization of thinking program proposed by Leibnitz, and the program of Mathematics foundations by Hilbert. The author argues that modern symbolic and mathematical logics were created on the basis of these programs. The article examines which aspects and meanings of thinking and reasoning had to be sacrificed, why modern symbolic logics are continuously reproducing, and what is the relationship of symbolic logics to the traditional Aristotelian one. Defending the pointed out statements, the author refers to the works of Aristotle and Schopenhauer, Ya. Lukasevich, A. Vasilyev, A. Karpenko, A. Anisov, S. Pavlov. The article states that the formation of symbolic logic required philosophical reflection of the conditions of conceivable solutions of symbolic logic creators and the need to distinguish between the two types of historical logics, to resolve the contradictions between the sense of autonomy of symbolic logic and the sense of its dependence on the traditional logic. According to the author’s opinion, Ludwig Wittgenstein, then Lukasevich, and the other Russian philosophers tried to respond to the mentioned above challenges in their works.

The author analyzes five aspects of ontological teachings of Leibniz and Spinoza and identifies commonalities and differences in the positions of these two philosophers. The first aspect is adherence to rationalism. The god is an essentially rational being, and so is the world. However for Leibniz the god is outside of the rational world he created, but for Spinoza the rational god is the world itself. The second aspect is acceptance by both philosophers of predeterminism of everything in the world. For Leibniz this is the result of the god’s choice to create the best out of the many possible worlds, but for Spinoza the world is not the result of the god’s choice. The third aspect is the answer to the question about the freedom of the god. They both accept this freedom, but for Leibniz this is freedom of the god as a subject making a conscious choice out of many possible choices, while for Spinoza freedom is self-determination of activity of impersonal substance. The fourth aspect is acceptance by both philosophers of objective necessity. For Spinoza the god and necessity is the same thing. For Leibniz absolute necessity is mightier than the god. The fifth aspect is acceptance by both philosophers of multiple components of the universe and their mutual isolation and consistency of elements at the same time. The god is the source and reason of this consistency for both philosophers, but for Leibniz the god is outside of the world of multiple monads, while for Spinoza it is the unity of multiple attributes of the god itself.

The author analyzes the Leibniz’s idea of “uniqueness of objects”, i.e. his conclusion that every possible object is present in one and only one possible world. The article reveals the role of the principle of indistinguishability of identity in this conclusion, referring to the discussions in modern philosophy, which are generated by similar conclusions. Leibniz treats any possible world as a holistic system. This places his reasoning in the context of disputes about the validity of various holistic approaches. Leibniz accepts the “Holistic Assumption”, according to which all objects of one possible world are determined through each other. The article also shows how Leibniz’s “uniqueness of objects” logically connects his teaching with certain statement of the problem of intentional identity, as well as with ongoing discussions about mental holism. The author demonstrates that Leibniz did something more than the developing of the theory of metaphysical possible worlds – which, thanks to the works of S. Kripke, became the “canonical” semantics for modal logic. In addition, Leibniz stood at the beginning of understanding the possible worlds as corresponding to the subject of cognition’s perceptions. Thus, Leibniz also made a step towards the development of the semantics of epistemic logic that was proposed by J. Hintikka. The interpretation of the problem of intentional identity in E. Saarinen’s works is based on the accepting of the “uniqueness of objects” for many worlds, which are open to certain subject, and not for one and only one possible world, as in Leibniz’s works. The author concludes that the ways of generating the problem of intentional identity for Leibniz’s semantics and the ones for Saarinen’s semantics are similar. All this shows that the problems stated by Leibniz’s possible worlds semantics have been still discussed.