MICHEL SERRES’S LEIBNIZIAN STRUCTURALISM

Abstract

In this article I examine Michel Serres’s seminal study of Leibniz: Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques (1968), a book which, in spite of its significance, has never been discussed at length. I analyse Serres’s structural reconstruction of Leibniz’s philosophy by focusing on the way in which the notion of structure operates in his reading, simultaneously at the level of method and at a metaphysical level (through a general theory of multiplicities). I then argue that Serres foregrounded expression and analogy as the keystones of Leibniz’s systematicity and formalized Leibniz’s perspectivism as a general heuristics into his oeuvre. I finally contrast Serres’s conception with Jean-Claude Milner’s, and contend that Serres’s contribution to 1960s French structuralism does not lie in his emphasis on mathematics so much as in his reformulation of the entire structuralist project through epistemological pluralism and translation.

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