Doctor of Philosophy / The main issue to be articulated in this thesis is the proposition that Leibniz’s mature philosophy is best, or preferably, presented as a double-aspect ontology. All the arguments to be furnished herein support this case; however, their intrinsic weight and extent far exceeds that of the principal contention, so that the whole of Leibniz’s natural philosophy and metaphysics will be seen to be involved and to undergo some measure of re-orientation away from more traditional interpretive concerns. Part I follows Leibniz in his emendation of Aristotelian-Scholastic notions as a result of his need for a “higher, metaphysical principle” to remedy the defects of the ‘modern’ account of motion. From this flowed his new conception of substance. The fundamental premise of Leibniz’s metaphysics is that spirit and body lie in series. The cosmos presents itself as aspects of an unbroken continuum. Ineluctably our conclusions as to the ‘whole’ is therefore an intellectual reconstruction of the perspectives delivered to us by these aspects. This emerges most clearly from the phenomenotaxis which has been collated in this part of the thesis – apparently the first such exercise in the scholarly literature. All this involves a separation of domains which require appropriate levels of description to explain their autonomous features. A double-aspect theory seems indispensable to account for the one world to which these levels nonetheless refer. In Part II we engage with Leibniz’s conception of substance as a unit of force. From this protean idea (aka monad) the whole material and spiritual cosmos is derived. The basis of this theory is that to act is to be. Accordingly we arrive at an ontology of agency. The nature of a monad is to exert Daseinstreben, the equivalent of individuation. Included in its definition is an absolute freedom to act. God’s “concession” of existence therefore refers to the autonomous collectivisation of monads into universes eligible for actualisation. Accordingly Leibniz arrives at a theory of a self-constructing universe. Post-Arnauld, Leibniz discarded the complete concept, having realised that contingency breaks open the system of determinism. Accordingly Leibniz replaced the ‘sum of predicates’ doctrine with the law of the series. In this conception monads collect the asymmetrical and irreversible information relevant to their internal states; for it transpires that freely executed choices guarantee avoidance of indiscernibles. The section therefore presents a schema of the ten main issues entangled in the conception of agency as well as an analytical chart of the structure of monads. In Part III, the “Labyrinth of the Continuum” resolves the perspectives on the world. Leibniz declares his colours unambiguously – realism concerns the world of facts, idealism the realm of foun-dations. The Principle of Continuity covers a vast range of indeterminate parts which serve as the foundations of real parts. We investigate some case studies, e.g. petites perceptions and especially the Pacidius, in which the conception of an agent-in-motion is studied in depth to reveal Leibniz’s extraordinary conclusions on change. We also consider Shapes, Limits and Boundaries which are relevant to the theory of the self-constructing universe (infolding and unfolding order); and finally his models of self-similarity and scale invariance. PART IV is concerned with grounding existents from the principle of sufficient reason. The virtue claimed here for the double-aspect theory is the possibility of penetrating into the thought of an exceptionally complex thinker through more than one portal. It yields a greater variety of facets, an inner coherence and a much richer texture of thought than the traditional insistence on just one primary aspect reveals.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/181636 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | LAWRENZ, JURGEN |
| Publisher | University of Sydney., Arts. School of Philosophy |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | The author retains copyright of this thesis., http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/copyright.html |
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