Necessity and Contingency in Leibniz

Appetimus sub ratione boni: Kant’s Practical Principles between Crusius and Leibniz

For Leibniz, freedom cannot consist in an ability to act without any sufficiently determining cause. That would violate the principle of reason, replacing God’s omniscience and omnipotence with “the chance of the Epicureans” 1 . But, of course, Leibniz is equally concerned to avoid the necessitarianism represented by Spinoza and the “the sect of new Stoics” 2 , and to this end he argues for the...

On the Necessity and Nature of Simples : Leibniz , Wolff , Baumgarten , and the Pre - Critical Kant eric watkins

Almost Necessary

A formula is contingent if it is possibly true and possibly false. A formula is noncontingent if it is not contingent, i.e., if it is necessarily true or necessarily false. In an epistemic setting, ‘a formula is contingent’ means that you are ignorant about its value, whereas ‘a formula is non-contingent’ means that you know whether it is true. Although non-contingency is definable in terms of ...

Purposiveness, Necessity, and Contingency

This paper investigates the relationship between Kant's analytics of biology, and the metaphysical conceptions of contingency and necessity in §§76–7 of the CPJ. In general, the connection between purposiveness and contingency is attested within the very project of a critique of a power of judgment. Indeed, the many particular, empirical laws of nature seem contingent regarding the universal la...

Leibniz's Optics and Contingency in Nature

In the late 1670’s to early 1680’s, Leibniz came to hold that the laws of nature are paradigmatically contingent, that they provide the basis for a new argument from design, and that they presuppose the existence of active, goal-directed powers reminiscent of Aristotelian entelechies. In this essay, I argue that the standard view according to which Leibniz forges these signature theses in the d...