Leibniz Rewritten

Two pages of unsigned notice: Peirce reviewing a French attempt to redo Leibniz's monadology, and describing his own published position as though it belonged to somebody else.

by Charles Sanders Peirce9 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1899(aged 60)
Original language: English

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Overview

After he left the Coast Survey in 1891, Peirce lived partly by reviewing: dictionary entries, translations for the Smithsonian, notices for The Nation. This is one of the notices — two pages in that paper on 3 August 1899, unsigned, as its reviews were. The book is La Nouvelle Monadologie, 546 pages published in Paris earlier that year. Its author, Charles Renouvier, was by then in his eighties; he wrote it with a younger collaborator, Louis Prat. They undertake to rewrite Leibniz's Monadologie in a Kantian spirit. The monads survive, and so does pre-established harmony. But the principle of sufficient reason is dropped, and with it, as Peirce notes, the bottom falls out of optimism; the identity of indiscernibles gives way to the doctrine of the medieval logician Duns Scotus, that individual existence is an irrational act; and actual infinite multitude, and therefore continuity, is thrown out as self-contradictory. Peirce is generous about the labour and unsparing about the logic, which he says was formed before anyone had digested De Morgan and Boole, who founded modern formal logic and cannot be accepted now. His deepest objection is that a philosophy which turns continuity and generality into illusions leaves the philosopher nothing worth hoping for. The real Leibniz, he ends, is the one who invented the differential calculus; his law of continuity would have dissolved the isolated monads altogether. Partway through, setting out the five opinions on determinism then current, he describes one of them as the position maintained a few years earlier in The Monist — by Peirce, named in the third person like any other author.

Key concepts

What is a monad?

Leibniz's name for a simple substance with no parts and no windows — nothing enters it or leaves it, and its whole history unfolds from within. Renouvier and Prat keep the monads when they rewrite the "Monadologie" in a Kantian spirit, which is why Peirce's notice is mostly about what they discarded instead.

What is pre-established harmony?

Leibniz's solution to how windowless substances can agree: each unfolds on its own, but all were set going in advance so that their states correspond, like clocks synchronised at the start rather than connected. Renouvier and Prat keep this too. Peirce calls it extravagant and unverifiable, and holds that Leibniz's own law of continuity would make it superfluous.

What does dropping the principle of sufficient reason cost?

Optimism — on Peirce's phrase, the bottom falls out of it. Sufficient reason says that nothing is so without a reason why it is so rather than otherwise, and it is what underwrites Leibniz's claim that this world is the best available. Remove it and the pre-established harmony survives with nothing left to recommend it.

What is the identity of indiscernibles, and what replaces it here?

Leibniz's principle that two things differing in no respect are one thing. Renouvier and Prat give it up for the doctrine of the medieval logician Duns Scotus that individual existence is an irrational act — that what makes this thing this one is no character it possesses and admits of no explanation at all.

Why does Peirce say the book's logic is out of date?

Because it was formed before anyone had digested De Morgan and Boole, who founded modern formal logic in the middle of the century. Peirce is generous about the labour behind a 546-page system and unsparing here: a logic predating the algebra of relations cannot be accepted now, whatever else the book may have achieved.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A System Judged by What It Discards

Renouvier and Prat rebuild the monadology in a Kantian spirit, and Peirce records what they throw out — sufficient reason, the identity of indiscernibles, actual infinite multitude — pressing hardest on the last, because continuity goes with it.

Drop sufficient reason and the bottom falls out of optimism; replace indiscernibles with the Scotist doctrine that individual existence is an irrational act; discard infinite multitude and continuity goes with it. Generous about the labour, Peirce is unsparing about a logic formed before anyone had digested De Morgan and Boole. His deepest objection is not technical: a philosophy that makes continuity and generality illusions leaves the philosopher nothing worth hoping for. The real Leibniz, he ends, invented the calculus.

monadology
leibniz
renouvier
metaphysics
continuity
nominalism
kantianism
haecceity
infinity
causation
determinism
history of philosophy
philosophical interpretation
logic

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Within this work

passages held: 9
distinct concepts: 26
by passages held, corpus-wide: #817

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1867 On a New List of Categories
The earliest item on this shelf, and the root of everything after it: the three-part scheme of quality, relation and representation reappears in the logic papers of 1877–78 and again in the evolutionary cosmology of the 1890s.
EN
1868 Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man
Where Peirce clears the ground. The four denials reached here — no intuition, no introspection, no thought without signs, no conception of the incognizable — are restated as premisses at the head of the sequel.
EN
1868 Some Consequences of Four Incapacities
The sequel, and where the argument arrives. The preceding article asked whether we have certain faculties; this one takes its four denials as premisses and follows them out to a theory of reality and of the self.
EN
1877 The Fixation of Belief
Written for readers with no philosophy behind them: the first instalment of a six-part course in the logic of science, serialised in a general-interest monthly. Everything the other 1877–78 papers do rests on the account of doubt, belief and inquiry set out here.
EN
1878 Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis
The paper that ends the series. Its central idea — guessing, treated as an inference with rules of its own rather than as a lack of them — is what Peirce kept working at for the rest of his life.
EN
1878 How to Make Our Ideas Clear
The second instalment of the 1877–78 series, nominally about a dead distinction in the logic textbooks. Two decades after it was printed, the American pragmatists took it as their charter.
EN
1878 The Doctrine of Chances
Third in the series, and the point where the account of inquiry acquires a price. Half of it is arithmetic — card packs, whist hands, insurance offices — and the other half asks whether a creature who never lives to complete a run of trials may reason from probabilities at all.
EN
1878 The Order of Nature
The religious instalment of the 1877–78 series. It reaches forward to the essay Peirce published at the end of his life: both ask what a scientific habit of mind is entitled to say about God, and they give different answers.
EN
1878 The Probability of Induction
A general magazine's readers are asked here to check a table of black and white balls for themselves. It is the most technical stretch of the 1877–78 series, and the one that takes on the probability textbooks directly.
EN
1891 The Architecture of Theories
A prospectus rather than a treatise, and the first of the five articles of Peirce's metaphysical series in Paul Carus's Monist, 1891–93 — the run in which the cosmology it sketches was built.
EN
1892 Man's Glassy Essence
Three things that do not obviously belong together — the constitution of matter, the chemistry of living tissue, and the question whether a church or a crowd can think — joined by the argument that mind and matter differ only in which side you look from.
EN
1892 The Doctrine of Necessity Examined
It stands second in the series, and it is the one that started a quarrel: Carus attacked it twice in his own journal and Peirce defended it once, so that the argument about chance occupied The Monist for fifteen months.
EN
1892 The Law of Mind
Where tychism acquires its partner. The chance of the April paper needed continuity to work in, and continuity gets its name and its defence here — the idea Peirce came to regard as the one his philosophy could least do without.
EN
1893 Evolutionary Love
Here the cosmology turns into an argument about how people ought to live: chance, necessity and love applied to the history of ideas, and to the ethics of a commercial century. It closed the Monist series.
EN
1893 What is Christian Faith?
Addressed past the theologians to two audiences at once — churchmen keeping their membership narrow, and the scientifically educated, shut out of the churches, who were talking about founding one of their own.
EN
1899 Leibniz Rewritten you are here EN
1908 A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God
Thirty years after the logic papers and fifteen after the cosmology, Peirce turns the machinery of hypothesis on the question the 1878 series had left open.
EN

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