Bøger af Gottfried Leibniz

La Monadología (1714) es una de las obras que mejor resume la filosofía de Gottfried Leibniz. Escrita hacia el final de su vida para sustentar una metafísica de las sustancias simples, la Monadología, trata de átomos formales que no son físicos, sino metafísicos. El texto se presenta de forma tal que el lector puede hacerse preguntas que le ayudan a avanzar en su saber. Así, por ejemplo, se puede aceptar que lo compuesto es un derivado, extensión, fenómeno o repetición de lo simple (lo que Kant más tarde vendría a expresar en la dicotomía fenómeno-noúmeno). ¿Es el alma una mónada? Si la respuesta es sí, entonces el alma es simple. Si el alma es un agregado, entonces el alma no puede ser una mónada.

Noted German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz was one of the most important philosophers of the Enlightenment era. A contemporary of Isaac Newton, Leibniz is today best remembered for independently developing a system of differential and integral calculus. As a philosopher he ranks as one of three great proponents of rationalism, along with Rene Descartes and Baruch Spinoza. Unpublished until the middle of the 19th century, Leibniz's "Discourse on Metaphysics" is a philosophical work in which the author argues that "God is an absolutely perfect being" and therefore our world is the best possible one in which a perfect being could create. Also included in this volume is the "Monadology". Written near the end of Leibniz's life and published posthumously, the "Monadology" is a collection of elementary principles or "monads", in which the philosopher seeks answers to the nature of reality and tries to address the problems that arise from mind-body dualism. Both admired and ridiculed by his contemporaries, Leibniz's works remain as an important part of the canon of Enlightenment era philosophy. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper and follows the translation of George R. Montgomery.

In order to be truly free, must you act arbitrarily? If an event did not happen, could it have happened? Since there is evil, and God could have made the world without evil, did God fail to pick the best course? Grappling with such simple--yet still intriguing--puzzles, Leibniz was able to present attractively his new theories of the real and the phenomenal, freewill and determinism, and the relation between minds and bodies. Theodicy was Leibniz's only book-length work to be published in his lifetime, and for many years the work by which he was known to the world. Fully at home with the latest scienctific advances, Leibniz ultimately rejected the new atomistic philosophies of Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes, and drew upon the old cosmology of Aristotelian scholasticism. There could be no conflict, he argued between faith and reason, freedom and necessity, natural and divine law. Ingeniously defending his postulate of pre-established harmony, Leibniz made important advances in the precise analysis of concepts.