Leibniz on Divine Foreknowledge of Future Contingents and Human Freedom

Abstract

The issue of freedom and contingency as it appears in the works of Leibniz is one that has frustrated and fascinated students of Leibniz beyond measure. Since the publication of Bertrand Russell's A Critical Exposition of Leibniz's Philosophy in 1900, English-language discussions on this issue have focused on how Leibniz can have freedom and contingency as part of his given the logical, metaphysical, and modal doctrines he wants to defend. These discussions usually begin with an exposition of some set of logical, metaphysical, or modal doctrines that Leibniz endorsed and proceed through a protracted attempt to reconcile the set with some notion of freedom or contingency. In addition, these discussions have often taken for granted, and in fact modelled, the popular notion, endorsed and promoted by Russell, that Leibniz begins his philosophizing with a certain set of logical or metaphysical doctrines he wishes to defend, and then proceeds to build a system around them. However, as more of Leibniz's work becomes available to us this model of Leibniz's work seems less and less accurate. It is now becoming clear that for Leibniz, as for most figures in the history of philosophy, numerous factors were responsible for leading him to the claims he endorsed. One of these factors which has received surprisingly little attention in the English-language literature on Leibniz is the role that his theological commitments played in the development of his views. In this essay I would like to look at one facet of Leibniz's theological agenda in order to show that his thoughts on this matter profoundly impacted his views on freedom. The air in the seventeenth century was surely filled with as many theological disputes of central importance as any other prior to it or since. The Reformation had taken full hold and the theological factionalism that arose in its wake left the Catholic Church with more than just Luther and his progeny to worry about. One of the central disputes which raged, not only between Catholics and Protestants, but within Catholicism and Protestantism them-

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 36 citations exist upstream.