81:4 October 1998
Rethinking Leibniz 

Advisory Editor: P. J. Phemister, Liverpool

In this collection of essays, scholars familiar with the Leibniz corpus will treat this corpus, not as an archive to be gleaned for purely historical information, but rather as a treasure chest of ideas and views, some of which are as alive and relevant now as they were in the seventeenth century. The contributors will make use of core Leibnizian concepts to shed fresh light on current debates. On some topics, for instance in modal logic and identity theory, the debt to Leibniz has long been explicitly acknowledged. In other areas, the value of Leibniz's contributions has only recently been recognised. For instance, current work on the nature of space has shown that Leibniz's views can be fruitfully applied in a twentieth-century context. Reappraisals of Leibniz's metaphysics of the mind and of the natural world have much to offer to current debates also in the philosophy of mind, both with respect to the nature of the mind and its relation to the body. Papers are invited on these and other areas of philosophy for which Leibniz's work is pertinent.

Table of Contents:

T. L. S. Sprigge

Has Speculative Metaphysics a Future?

Hidé Ishiguro

Unity without Simplicity: Leibniz on Organisms

Marc Bobro and Paul Lodge 

Stepping Back inside Leibniz's Mill 

Stuart Brown 

Soul, Body and Natural Immortality

Nicholas Jolley

Causality and Creation in Leibniz

Christina Schneider

Leibniz's Theory of Space-Time: an approach from his metaphysics

G. H. R. Parkinson

Moral Luck, Freedom and Leibniz

Stephen Grover

Incommensurability and the best of all possible worlds

Daise Radner and Michael Radner

Optimality in Biology: Pangloss or Leibniz?