2020/10/15 by Martha Brandt Bolton
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Philosophy and Science #Classical Philosophy and Thought
paper · doi:10.1093/oso/9780198844983.003.0008
openalex publication_date 2020/10/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract New Essays explicates Leibniz’s doctrines in response to John Locke’s Essay. The Preface anticipates the most important disagreements. The body of the work is a dialogue between an admirer of Locke, who retells the Essay and his friend who is impressed with Leibniz’s system. They compare views under somewhat artificial rules, with the result that many of Locke’s doctrines discredited in favour of Leibniz’s. I argue that these results have modest but legitimate rational ground. New Essays is tailored to readers influenced by Locke, stressing the inseparable connection between sense perception and intellect. It maintains in detail that the nature of substances is best understood by considering them as concrete individuals that are metaphysically complete down to their spatial and temporal relations to everything in the universe. However, New Essays also contains a wealth of philosophical views regarding language, logic, mathematics, physics, morals, persons, society, history, and more.