Category: Leibniz
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The Modified Leibniz Question: The Debate So Far
What follows is a guest post by Peter Lupu with some additions and corrections by BV. 'CCB' abbreviates 'concrete contingent being.' The last post in this series is here. Thanks again to Vlastimil Vohamka for pointing us to Maitzen's article, which has proven to be stimulating indeed. So far as I can see…
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The Modified Leibniz Question, Maitzen’s Critique of its Meaningfulness, and My Response
It is the thesis of Stephen Maitzen's Stop Asking Why There's Anything that the Leibniz question, 'Why is there anything, rather than nothing at all?' is ill-posed as it stands and unanswerable. Maitzen's point is intended to apply not only to the 'wide-open' formulation just mentioned but also to such other formulations as 'Why are there…
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Second Thoughts: A Philosophy Blog
Readers who have stuck with me over the years will remember commenter 'Spur' whose comments were the best I received at the old Powerblogs site. Safely ensconced in an academic position, he now enters the blogosphere under his real name, Stephen Puryear. His weblog is entitled Second Thoughts. I recently reposted from the old blog Hume's Fork…
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Hume’s Fork and Leibniz’s Fork
No doubt you have heard of Hume's Fork. 'Fork,' presumably from the Latin furca, suggests a bifurcation, a division; in this case of meaningful statements into two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes, the one consisting of relations of ideas, the other of matters of fact. In the Enquiry, Hume writes: Propositions of this…
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A Question about Leibniz on Free Choice
Leibniz's Theodicy consists of two parts, the first on faith and reason, the second on the freedom of man in the origin of evil. I am trying to understand paragraph #37 (p. 144 of the Huggard translation): . . it follows not that what is foreseen is necessary, for necessary truth is that whereof the…