Compossibility, Harmony, and Perfection in Leibniz

Abstract

I assume that the reader has some acquaintance with the standard interpretation of Leibniz's account of creation: God has chosen to create the best of all possible worlds, where each possible world is taken to be a maximal of mutually compossible complete individual concepts.' (Compossibility of concepts is standardly taken to mean logical consistency of concepts.2) Moreover, in choosing a particular world God has not only actualized a set of individuals, but he has also, and by that very act, established a set of physical laws; this is so because as there exists an infinite number of possible worlds, there exists also an infinite number of laws, some peculiar to one world, some to another, and each possible individual of any one world contains in the concept of him the laws of his world.3 Fur-

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