GottfriedLeibniz

The best of all possible web pages,we have WindowlessMonads? as well as Monads with a view.

Yet, in the 'best of all possible web pages' Monads can

well afford not to have windows: They know anyway what

is going on elsewhere, or atually, they have always

known it. (By means of that 'PrestabilizedHarmony'

Leibniz avoids the problem to explain how mind affects

matter and vice versa. "Car je ne trouvois aucun moyen

d'expliquer comment le corps fait passer quelque chose

dans l'ame , ou vice versa, ny comment une substance

peut communiquer avec une autre substance creee."

Systeme Nouveau de la Nature etc.(12). Descartes'

followers had introduced the "Systeme des Causes

occasionelles" to solve the problem: God creates

movements according to our will to move, and

thoughts according to movements of exterior things.

The idea of a God permanently busy to maintain

the harmony of the universe seemed much less

attractive to Leibniz then the harmony established

once for all. --- )

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a

philosopher, scientist, mathematician, diplomate

and lawyer. Independently of Isaac Newton he

'invented' the infinitesimal calculus (and also

the notation df/dx still used.) His philosophical

contribution to metaphysics is based on the

Monadology, which introduces MonaDs as 'substancial

forms of being. They are a kind of spiritual atoms,

eternal, indecomposable, individual. In the way

sketched above the notion of a monad solves the problem

of the interaction of mind and matter that arises

in Descartes' system, as well as the individuation

that seems problematic in Spinoza's system, which

represents individual creatures as mere accidental

modifications of the one and only substance.

The "theodicee" claims to justify the

apparent imperfections of the world by its

being optimal among all possible worlds.