Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding: A Critical ExpositionDewey, John
Philosophy
Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding: A Critical Exposition
Dewey, John
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von, 1646-1716
In other words, Leibniz's great significance for us is the fact that,
although he accepted in good faith, and indeed as himself a master
in its methods, the results and principles of physical science, he
remained a teleological idealist of the type of Aristotle. But I have
not used the right words. It was not in spite of his acceptance of the
scientific view of the world that he retained his faith in the primacy
of purpose and reason. On the contrary, he was an idealist because of
his science, because only by the idea of an all-conditioning spiritual
activity could he account for and make valid scientific conceptions;
he was a teleologist, because natural processes, with their summing up
in the notion of causality, were meaningless except as manifesting an
immanent purpose.
There are other more technical ways of stating the bearing of Leibniz's
work. We may say that he realized that the problem of philosophy
consisted in giving due value to the notions of individuality and
universality, of identity and difference, or of the real and the
ideal. In developing these ideas, however, we should only be repeating
what has already been said, and so we may leave the matter here. On
the negative side we need only recall what was said a few pages back
regarding the incompatibility of Leibniz's method--the scholastic
formal logic--with the content of his philosophy. The attempt to
find a formal criterion of truth was hopeless; it was worse than
fruitless, for it led to such an interpretation of concrete truths
as to deprive them of their significance and as to land Leibniz in
involved contradictions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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