Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

Leibniz and the Science of Happiness

Roger Caldwell is happy to introduce Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716).

For Bertrand Russell, Leibniz was something of an enigma. Although Russell thought he could see how Leibniz’s logical principles entailed his grand metaphysical system, he was unable to square this with the doctrines outlined in many of Leibniz’s published writings. His Theodicy of 1708, for example, whilst bland enough to be acceptable to nearly all, made no mention of doctrines such as that of contingency requiring an infinite analysis – that is, what appears contingent to us is logically necessary to the mind of God. Accordingly, Russell distinguished between ‘secret’ doctrines which Leibniz largely kept to himself as being unacceptable to the religious age in which he lived, and his ‘public’ philosophy, in which he dissembled and fudged for his own self-protection. One can understand Russell’s suspicions: after all, Leibniz himself once stated that “He who knows me only by my published writings does not know me at all.

…