Heinrich
Schepers: De affectibus. Leibniz an der Schwelle zur Monadologie. Seine
Vorarbeiten zum logischen Aufbau der möglichen Welten
If we take a closer look at De affectibus we gain revealing insight into Leibniz’s
workshop of ideas. From the 20th to the 22nd of April 1679 he began to develop
ideas which at first look like an attempt to realise his long-planned Philosophia
de mente but which in fact move more
and more in the direction of his later Monadology. He entitled these studies, on which he worked again
and again, De affectibus because
he ultimately sought the reason for the mind’s occupation with particular
thoughts in the emotions which determine it. But this is only the theme in the
first part of his investigations. In the second part of De affectibus, on which my paper focuses, Leibniz’s
investigations become more abstract. He ceases to be interested in emotions and
proceeds instead to create definitions and draw principles from these with
which he is able to achieve the logico-ontological construction of possible
worlds, even if this term itself does not appear. He effectively creates laws
which would bring order into the chaos of possibilities. To this end, he
investigates between all possibilities the relations of consequence, identity
and diversity, compatibility and incompatibility. The striving of essences for
existence, limited only by incompatibility, is brought into a relational
structure and submitted to the realisation of the best possible. In these
studies we find the first explicit formulation of the principle of the
predicate being contained in the subject in respect of all its possibilities
and the particular moment now in its existence. This present moment is
constituted by everything which is, was, or will be and by so doing determines
the order of succession and thus of time. The compact sequence of definitions,
postulates, and propositions, gathered in the appendix, may be seen as the
initial stage of metaphysics as a strict science. This was a project which
Leibniz broke off and never took up again in this way. I hope to show that
these studies deserve more consideration than they have had up to now.
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