Leibniz on Scotus and Aquinas

The following quotation is from Leibniz's Theodicy.  It is a section in which Leibniz discusses the idea of equipoise in the will, the Buridan's ass scenario in which the ass is confronted by two equally enticing piles of hay on each side of the road and is unable to choose between them.  Eventually, the Molinist controversy comes up, the immediate context of what follows.

Leibniz, Theodicy, tr. Huggard, p 324.

330. If the Scotists and the Molinists appear to favour vague indifference (appear, I say, for I doubt whether they do so in reality, once they have learnt to know it), the Thomists and the disciples of Augustine are for predetermination. For one must have either the one or the other. Thomas Aquinas is a writer who is accustomed to reason on sound principles, and the subtle Scotus, seeking to contradict him, often obscures matters instead of throwing light upon them. The Thomists as a general rule follow their master, and do not admit that the soul makes its resolve without the existence of some predetermination which contributes thereto. But the predetermination of the new Thomists is not perhaps exactly that which one needs. Durand de Saint-Pourcain, who often enough formed a party of his own, and who opposed the idea of the special co-operation of God, was nevertheless in favour of a certain predetermination. He believed that God saw in the state of the soul, and of its surroundings, the reason for his determinations.

331. The ancient Stoics were in that almost of the same opinion as the Thomists. They were at the same time in favour of determination and against necessity, although they have been accused of attaching necessity to everything. Ciecero says in his book De Fato that Democritus, Heraclitus, Empedocles and Aristotle believed that fate implied necessity; that others were opposed to that (he means perhaps Epicurus and the Academicians); and that Chrysippus sought a middle course. I think that Cicero is mistaken as regards Aristotle, who fully recognized contingency and freedom, and went even too far, saying (inadvertently, as I think) that propositions on contingent futurities had no determinate truth; on which point he was justifiably abandoned by most of the Schoolmen. Even Cleanthes, the teacher of Chrysippus, although he upheld the determinate truth of future events, denied their necessity. Had the Schoolmen, so fully convinced of this determination of contingent futurities (as were for instance the Fathers of Coimbra, authors of a famous Course of Philosophy), seen the connexion between things in the form wherein the System of General Harmony proclaims it, they would have judged that one cannot admit preliminary certainty, or determination of futurition, without admitting a predetermination of the thing in its causes and in its reasons.

Leibniz on Parsimony

Theodicy, Essays on the Justice of God... pt. 2, n. 124:

To multiply one and the same thing only would be superfluity, and poverty too. To have a thousand well-bound Vergils in one's library, always to sing the airs from the opera of Cadmus and Hermione, to break all the china in order only to have cups of gold, to have only diamond buttons, to eat nothing but partridges, to drink only Hungarian or Shiraz wine--would one call that reason?

Leibniz on the Will and Possible Worlds

Another Leibniz post. Apologies to all the hardcore medievalists out there.  Leibniz strikes me as having a pretty weak account of the will in general (mainly, he is pretty vague whether the will is a power or appetite/inclination and is unclear on the relation between the will and acts of willing; plus, if, as is his wont, the soul just is thinking, what is the relation between willing and thinking?). I found the following quote interesting, mainly because he was so uncharacteristically explicit.

Theodicy, p. 151:

 51. As for the volition itself, to say that it is an object of free will is incorrect. We will to act, strictly speaking, and we do not will to will; else we could still say that we will to have the will to will, and that would go on to infinity. Besides, we do not always follow the latest judgement of practical understanding when we resolve to will; but we always follow, in our willing, the result of all the inclinations that come from the direction both of reasons and passions, and this often happens without n express judgement of the understanding.

52. All is therefore certain and determined beforehand in man, as everywhere else, and the human soul is a kind of spiritual automaton, although contingent actions in general and free action in particular are not on that account necessary with an absolute necessity, which would be truly incompatible with contingency. Thus neither futurition in itself, certain as it is, nor the infallible prevision of God, nor the predetermination either of causes or of God's decrees destroys this contingency and this freedom; That is acknowledged in respect of futurition and prevision, as has already been set forth. Since, moreover, God's decree consists solely in the resolution he forms, after having compared all possible worlds, to choose what one which is the best, and bring it into existence together with all that this world contains, by means of the all-powerful word Fiat, it is plain to see that this decree changes nothing in the constitution of things: God leaves them must as they were in the state of mere possibility, that is, changing nothing either in their essence or nature, or even in their accidents, which are represented perfectly already in the idea of this possible world. Thus that which is contingent and free remains no less so under the decrees of God than under his prevision.

Scotus, and his Sequelae, would ask what the origin of these possible worlds is.  Do they originate in the divine intellect, or are they eternally represented by the essence, or what? Elsewhere Leibniz made the odd claim that the divine ideas are represented by the divine intellect, but what could that mean? If the divine intellect does the representing, what is perceiving the representation? Generally, ideas, or the things that there are ideas of, are represented to the intellect, that is, if one is going to use representation at all in conjunction with the divine ideas. One question we might want to ask Leibniz is if the essences of possible things are eternal, since God does not alter their essences or apparently generate them. But if they are eternal, are they then divine or necessary, and doesn't this posit a plurality, indeed an infinity, of eternal beings?

Leibniz on the History of the Faith-Reason Problem

From his Theodicy, preliminary discourse, p. 76-77 (Newhaven 1952):

The question of the conformity of faith with reason has always been a great problem. In the primitive Church the ablest Christian authors adapted themselves to the ideas of the Platonists, which were the most acceptable to them, and were at that time most generally in favor. Little by little Aristotle took the place of Plato, when the taste for systems began to prevail, and when theology itself became more systematic, owing to the decisions of the General Councils, which provided precise and positive formularies. St. Augustine, Boethius and Cassiodorus in the West, and St. John of Damascus in the East contributed most towards reducing theology to scientific form, not to mention Bede, Alcuin, St. Anselm and some other theologians versed in philosophy. Finally came the Schoolmen. The leisure of the cloisters giving full scope for speculation, which was assisted by Aristotle's philosophy translated from the Arabic, there was formed at last a compound of theology and philosophy wherein most of the questions arose from the trouble that was taken to reconcile faith with reason. But this had not met with the full success hoped for, because theology had been much corrupted by the unhappiness of the times, by ignorance and obstinacy. Moreover, philosophy, in addition to its own faults, which were very great, found itself burdened with those of theology, which in its turn was suffering from association with a philosophy that was very obscure and very imperfect. One must confess, notwithstanding, with the incomparable Grotius, that there is sometimes gold hidden under the rubbish of the monks' barbarous Latin. I have therefore oft times wished that a man of talent, whose office had necessitated his learning the language of the Schoolmen, had chosen to extract thence whatever is of worth, and that another Petau or Thomasius had done in respect of the Schoolmen what these two learned men had done in respect of the Fathers. It would be a very curious work, and very important for ecclesiastical history, and it would continue the History of Dogmas up to the time of the Revival of Letters (owing to which the aspect of things has changed) and even beyond that point. For sundry dogmas, such as those of physical predetermination, of mediate knowledge, philosophical sin, objective precisions, and many other dogmas in speculative theology and even in the practical theology of cases of conscience, came into currency even after the Council of Trent.

Leibniz on the Soul-Body Relation

The following is a snippet from Leibniz.  Note Leibniz here discards a scholastic commonplace held by both Scotus and Aquinas, to wit, that the soul is present in every part of the body. Not a surprising claim, if one knows about hylemorphism, nor one that has any direct bearing on the celebrated controversy regarding the unicity of substantial form.

From Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, 326 (the letters to Clarke):

12. God is not present to things by situation but by essence; his presence is manifest by his immediate operation. The presence of the soul is quite of another nature. To say that it is diffused all over the body is to make it extended and divisible. To say it is, the whole of it, in every part of the body is to make it divisible of itself. To fix it to a point, to diffuse it all over many points, are only abusive expressions, idols of the tribe.

Leibniz's complaint is clear enough. He thinks that the scholastic claim that the soul is in every part of the body amounts to saying that the soul is extended and divisible in itself.  What is the A-T or A-S philosopher to say in response? First recall the basic hylemorphic theory: a human being is a composite of matter, generally interpreted as a potential principle, and substantial form, generally interpreted as a principle of actuality. Apart from giving actuality and being to the composite, substantial forms also support accidents. A scholastic philosopher would think of extension and divisibility as accidents, probably falling under the category of quantity. Leibniz wants to argue that since the body is divisible the soul must also, by its very nature, be divisible.  But a scholastic would deny this inference, and hold instead that for the soul to be in every part of the body means that, as the subject to the accident of quantity, it is accidentally extended and divisible.

Men Great and Mediocre

"I wish I could make clear from the very beginning that in criticizing great men, as I shall do, I am very far from forgetting what made them truly great. No man can fall a victim to his own genius unless he has genius; but those who have none are fully justified in refusing to be victimized by the genius of others. Not having made the mathematical discoveries of Descartes and Leibniz, we cannot be tempted to submit all questions to the rules of mathematics; but our very mediocrity should at least help us to avoid such a mistake. There is more than one excuse for being a Descartes, but there is no excuse whatever for being a Cartesian."

—Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Scribners, 1937), 7.

Leibniz: Theorist of Spiritual Matter?

From a letter of Leibniz to Johann Bernoulli (Philosophical Essays, p. 169-70):

"You rightly judge that the passive is never actually separated from the active in creatures. What God could have done, I don't venture to say. The passive alone and the vacuum seem, at least, incompatible with his wisdom, even if they aren't incompatible with his power. Neither is it certain that there are intelligences completely separated from bodies except for God. Many Church Fathers have also inclined to the contrary, attributing bodies to angels."