Haecceitism and anti-haecceitism in Leibniz's philosophy

Nous

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 1-30

  O'Leary Hawthorne, John ^a   Cover, J A ^b  

^a ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b PURDUE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 40849131292     PISSN: 00294624     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2216301     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. From pp. 722-23 of David Kaplan, "How to Russell a Frege-Church," Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975), 716-29
2. The super-essentialist reading of Leibniz might go back as far as Antoine Arnauld, who in 1686 expressed shock at a summary of Leibniz's Discours de Métaphysique: that the individual concept of every substance should "contain once for all everything that can ever happen to it . . . ." is to understand substances as governed by a "nécessité plus que fatale" (G, II, 15:M, 9)
3. The super-essentialist reading has in our own day been defended by Fabrizio Mondadori in "Reference, Essentialism and Modality in Leibniz's Metaphysics," Studia Leibnitiana 5 (1973), 74-101
4. and in "Leibniz and the Doctrine of Inter-World Identity," Studia Leibnitiana 8 (1975), 21-57)
5. by Benson Mates, most recently in The Philosophy of Leibniz: Metaphysics and Language (Oxford, 1986), pp. 92, 251-53, and Chapter VIII
6. and (with reservation) by Baruch Brody in Identity and Essence (Princeton NJ: 1980), p. 125
7. See Ch. 4 of Robert C. Sleigh, Jr., Leibniz and Arnauld (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)
8. J. A. Cover and John O'Leary-Hawthorne, "Leibniz on Superessentialism and World-Bound Individuals," Studia Leibnitiana 22 (1990), 175-83
9. and also "Leibnizian Essentialism, Transworld Identity, and Counterparts," History of Philosophy Quarterly 9 (1992), 425-45. Sleigh distinguishes between superessentialism and superintrinsicalism. Both concern the modality of the connection between a substance and its properties: the latter, but not the former, is by Sleigh's lights best attributed to Leibniz. Whether or not the distinction between superessentialism and superintrinsicalism can be successfully made out, we concur with Sleigh's explicit recognition of de re modality in Leibniz
10. The game changes a somewhat if we allowed (as David Lewis does, and Leibniz does not) that non-actual individuals and worlds exist in the same way that the physical cosmos exists. This would provide another way of understanding transworld identity claims at face value (and of dismissing them all as false). A discussion of Lewis's idiosyncratic modal realism would take us too far afield here: for a brief comparison of Leibniz and Lewis on this issue see p. 275 (n. 28) of J. A. Cover, "Reference, Modality and Relational Time," Philosophical Studies 70 (1993), pp. 251-77
11. The following abbreviations are used in the text and footnotes: A = Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Academy Edition (Darmstadt and Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1923-)
12. AG = G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. R. Ariew and D. Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989)
13. C = Opuscles et fragments inédits de Leibniz, ed. L. Couturat (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1903)
14. G = Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875-90)
15. Textes inédits, ed. G. Grua (Paris, 1948)
16. H = G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy, ed. and trans. E. M. Huggard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952
17. L = Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. and trans. L. Loemker ( Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 2nd ed. 1969)
18. LA = The Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence, ed. and trans. H. T. Mason (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1967)
19. PLP = Leibniz: Logical Papers, ed. and trans. G. H. R. Parkinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966)
20. S = Fragmente zur Logik, ed. F. Schmidt (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1960)
21. Two refreshing but undeveloped exceptions are at pp. 262-64 of Robert M. Adams' important paper "Leibniz's Theories of Contingency" (in M. Hooker, ed., Leibniz: Critical and Interpetive Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 243-83)
22. On this desideratum of Leibniz's rationalism, cf. note 17 above, and the picture emerging from J. A. Cover, "Reduction and Relations in Leibniz," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 70 (1989), 185-211
23. See, for example, R. M. Adams, "Actualism and Thisness," Synthese 49 (1981), 3-41
24. and G. W. Fitch, "The Nature of Singular Propositions" in D. F. Austin (ed.). Philosophical Analysis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), pp. 281-97
25. God's scientia visionis concerning this actual created world is, for Leibniz, a species of a priori scientia simplicis intelligentiae, differing from such eternal knowledge of all other abstractly possible worlds only in containing "the reflexive knowledge he has of his own decrees" (Causa Dei, §16)
26. The primitive de re modal locutions suffice to define existence at worlds (rather than defining de re notions in terms of worlds). See Roderick M. Chisholm, "Possibility without Haecceity" in Peter A. French et. al., eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy XI (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 157-63
27. In De libertate, Leibniz does not dispute that part of a critic's summary that "In his intellect, God has a perfect concept or idea of possible Peter containing all truths about Peter, of which the objective reality constitutes the full nature or essence of Peter" (Grua, 311). A similar reaction occurs later in §13 of the Discourse, to the claim that "[Caesar's] nature or form corresponds to [his individual] concept. . . ." Concepts are perhaps too closely associated with forms or natures in the draft for a letter of 8 December 1686 to Arnauld, where Leibniz says of an individual substance that "its concept, idea, essence or nature envelope everything that is to happen to it" (G,II,68-9)