Reading that was assigned:

 

More on Modality;  Free Will; Transworld Identity;  Life and Machine

1. We now can try to modally classify a number of claims that Leibniz makes.

*     Principle of Contradiction: metaphysically necessary. 

*     Principle of Sufficient Reason: metaphysically necessary.  Why?  L. doesn’t seem to give a reason.  He suggests that it has something to do with the nature of truth.  This might be due to his notion that truth always involves a predicate being found in a subject: A is B means that the concept B is somewhere in A, though it might take an infinite analysis to find it.

*     Identity of Indiscernibles: metaphysically necessary.  L. thinks it follows directly from the PSR, though his argument was unclear.  Hence it will be metaphysically necessary, he thinks.

*     The Existence of God: metaphysically necessary.

*     Principle of Optimality: metaphysically necessary.  Discussed above: God must choose the best.  But what the best is is metaphysically contingent.

*     The Existence of a World beyond God: probably only morally necessary.  One can’t prove in a finite number of steps that there is a best possible world, and if there weren’t, then God wouldn’t have created anything according to Leibniz.

*     Principle of Pre-Established Harmony: probably only morally necessary.  Each monad reflects every other monad representationally: it has perceptions of all the other monads.  But it would presumably take an infinite number of steps to prove that this is best. 

*     But: There is a logical version of the Principle of Pre-Established Harmony which says that each monad’s complete individual concept contains information about everything else in the universe.  This, according to Leibniz, is a logical principle and hence is metaphysically necessary.

*     The Existence of Leibniz: only morally necessary.  In sub-optimal worlds, Leibniz doesn’t exist, but it takes an infinite number of steps to show that the world containing Leibniz is best.  Especially since Leibniz’s concept includes everything else.

2. Divine foreknowledge does not change the modal status of the things foreknown.  It yields certainty but not necessity.  (Cf. Aquinas’ analogy of a person on a hill.)  

·        Sloth’s syllogism.

o       If it is foreseen that I’ll do something, it’s foreseen that I’ll prepare for it.  If I lazily fail to prepare for it, it’s foreseen that I shan’t prepare for it.

o       Should do our task without “pausing over the useless question” of what outcome God foresees.  (What if we knew the outcome?  Would that affect our freedom?  Well, God knows the outcome of his own actions.)

3. Transworld identity and theodicy.  It is plausible Leibniz himself might never have written a word of philosophy.  He had free will, and anyway he might have died in infancy.  However, on L.’s view, the complete individual concept of Leibniz includes all facts about L.  So no one who had that concept could have failed to write philosophy.  And since this concept is definitory of Leibniz, it follows that no one who failed to satisfy this concept would have been Leibniz—even if that was his name.

*     There is a joke: Homer didn’t write the Iliad and Odyssey, but someone else with the same name did.  This seems funny to us, because we use “Homer” just to mean the person who wrote the Iliad and Odyssey.  We know almost nothing else about him.  However, the supposition in the joke makes sense: It was possible for someone other than Homer, though with the same name, to have written books just like the Iliad and the Odyssey.  Just imagine that one of Homer’s contemporaries, also named Homer, bumped off our Homer, and wrote these books. 

*     Imagine a different possible world—i.e., an idea in the mind of God—where my parents have no children, and where Julia’s parents have one more child than they did, and they happen to name him “Alexander Pruss.”  Would we say that then I would have been Julia’s brother?  No: the fellow named “Alexander Pruss” would not have been me.  He would have been someone else by the same name.  Thus, someone in a different possible world who has the same name as I do can count as a different person.

*     What do we need for him to count as the very same person as I?  We might say things like: He has to have roughly the same genes, or maybe the same parents.

*     But L. is much more extreme.  He thinks that he has to be exactly the same in all qualities: he has to satisfy the very same complete individual concept (CIC).  But no one in a different possible world has the same complete individual concept, because each CIC includes in itself the description of everything else: it contains statements like “Being seven feet from Sergio at such-and-such a time,” and hence draws in everything there is about everything.  Hence, if somebody in some world has the same CIC as I do, everything else in that world is the same as in this world, and hence the two are the same world.

*     This, of course, depends crucially on L.’s view that we are defined by our complete individual concepts.

*     If this is right, then there is only one possible world where I exist.  If anything had gone differently, then I wouldn’t have existed.  Someone very much like me would have existed, but it wouldn’t have been I.  Everything that ever happens to me is a part of who I am.  I wouldn’t have been myself without it. 

*     We can now see something about how God creates someone who freely sins.  A part of my complete individual concept is that I stole a paper airplane from another kid’s locker in pre-school.  That was a sin.  God looks at my concept as a whole, and says: Yes, I will make this fellow.  Now, doesn’t this look like God is the one who makes me sin?  No.  Rather, as L. notes in the appendix, my sin is a part of me, it is a part of my essence, my CIC.  It is not something that depends on God’s will: God can no more make an Alex who doesn’t steal the paper airplane than he can make a three-sided square.  Being four-sided is part of the concept of the square, eternally so, and God knows this, and being a thief is a part of the concept of Alex.  Sure, God could have made someone almost like me who wasn’t a thief.  But it wouldn’t be me.  Somehow, in God’s infinite plan, it was better that I be created rather than the non-sinning pseudo-Alex.  Why?  We can’t know because our minds are not infinite.

*     And note this interesting corollary.  I have no right to complain that God should have stopped me from my thievery.  For if God had stopped me, I wouldn’t have existed: then it wouldn’t have been I that he stopped, but someone else.  So, if things happened as I wish, I would be much worse off: non-existent, indeed.  So, I have no right to complain about anything.  For if anything had been different, I would not have existed!

*     The non-Leibnizian cannot make use of this theodicy.  But she might be able to make use of it in a limited way.  There are things that I can’t complain about because if they didn’t happen, I might well not have existed.  For instance, were it not for World War II, I would not have existed, because my grandmother might never have met my grandfather.  Of course, other people can complain about World War II, but when they complain about it, they are neglecting me: their preferred world is one where I probably wouldn’t exist.  And perhaps we should not prefer a world where someone real doesn’t exist?

3. Life and machine

4. Speculation.  There may be infinitely small things (relative to us) and infinitely large things (relative to us).  Ergo, boundedness ≠ infinity, pace what was commonly thought (and what the etymology says).