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The Leibniz-Des BossesCorrespondenceMaria Rosa Antognazza aa King's College London,Published online: 24 Apr 2009.

To cite this article: Maria Rosa Antognazza (2009) The Leibniz-Des BossesCorrespondence, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 17:2, 424-428, DOI:10.1080/09608780902763600

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09608780902763600

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had become what they call a ‘semi-detached’ member of the Shaftesburyhousehold, and was away from London at the time of the plotting, althoughhe may have known about it (Philip Milton evaluates the evidence ofLocke’s involvement in an article published in The Historical Journal, in2000). In August 1683, Locke went into exile in Holland, where he remaineduntil the Glorious Revolution in 1689.

The other short excerpts receive less attention – and much of thediscussion is devoted to verifying their authenticity. Students of Locke willlearn about the history and organization of Locke’s Commonplace Booksfrom which several selections on religious topics are included. Locke’santiclericalism and anti-Catholicism receive considerable attention. Welearn that Locke was willing to make political compromises on the Catholicissue – proposing, for example, toleration of Catholic laymen, although notof priests – presumably because of their differing attitudes towards thepolitical power of the papacy.

This carefully edited, erudite and informative book is a distinguishedcontribution to an ambitious scholarly enterprise. While its price isprohibitive, anyone interested in Locke’s political or religious thought, orin seventeenth-century English politics will find it invaluable.

Paul E. SigmundPrinceton University

ª 2009, Paul E. Sigmund

The Leibniz-Des Bosses Correspondence, translated, edited and with anIntroduction by Brandon C. Look and Donald Rutherford [The YaleLeibniz]. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007, lxxixþ 477pp. £60.00. ISBN 978-0-300-11804-9

The correspondence between Leibniz and the learned Jesuit theologian,Bartholomew Des Bosses (1668–1738) punctuated the last decade ofLeibniz’s life (1706–16). In the younger man, who wrote to him for thefirst time on 25 January 1706, Leibniz found a congenial intellectual partner,a lucid mind, and, above all, a friend with whom he could be more open anddaring in experimenting with philosophical ideas than with most of hishundreds of correspondents. The result was an extensive correspondence ofoutstanding philosophical value shedding light, as well as posing fresh andpuzzling questions, on Leibniz’s mature thought. Despite having beingregarded for some time as one of the key Leibnizian epistolary exchanges,the Leibniz–Des Bosses correspondence has never previously been edited tomodern standards, and only few letters from it have been translated intoEnglish. The present volume by Look and Rutherford constitutes one of themost important contributions to Leibniz studies of the past few decades,offering for the first time a critical edition and accurate translation of a body

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of texts crucial not only to the last phase of Leibniz’s philosophy but also fora deeper understanding of his thought and intellectual priorities as a whole.

As Look and Rutherford point out in their note on the texts andtranslation, their work did not aspire to be the complete edition of theLeibniz–Des Bosses correspondence that will eventually be included inReihe II of the ongoing Akademie Ausgabe of Leibniz’s writings. Spaceconstraints have limited them to the publication of 71 of the 138 lettersknown to have been exchanged between Leibniz and Des Bosses. Theirselection has been guided by judicious criteria aiming at the inclusion of allthe letters discussing philosophical issues and most of the letters oftheological relevance, as well as maintaining the intelligibility of theepistolary conversation by matching questions with answers. The Latinoriginal text has been established through the careful study of all theavailable manuscript material, namely the two main collections of lettersheld at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris (Leibniz’s letters as received byDes Bosses) and at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek in Hanover(Des Bosses’s letters and Leibniz’s drafts and copies of his own letters),supplemented by a few additional manuscripts held in Leipzig, Halle,Harvard and the British Library. Once again, the editorial choice of givingas primary text the final version of the letters as received by the twocorrespondents seems appropriate, especially since the editors have alsocollated Leibniz’s sent versions with the drafts and copies preserved inHanover, recording significant variations, additions and deletions ofphilosophical relevance. Although Look and Rutherford modestly acknowl-edge that their edition ‘falls short of the aims of the Akademie edition’ (xvi)their versions of the original Latin text constitute a great improvement overthe texts included in the two previous most important editions of thecorrespondence (Ludovic Dutens’s edition of 1768, printing seventy lettersby Leibniz, and C. I. Gerhardt’s edition in volume 2 of Die philosophischenSchriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1875–90, including seventy-oneletters by Leibniz and fifty-seven by Des Bosses). Given the complex historyof the manuscript sources and editions of the correspondence, an additional,very valuable feature of the Look–Rutherford volume is the catalogue of allthe known letters between Leibniz and Des Bosses (Appendix, 381–7),recording dates, manuscript sources and previous editions.

An even more remarkable feature of the volume is its sixty-pageintroduction. This extensive essay is a philosophical gem in its own right.The two authors have wedded their long-standing and widely recognizedexpertise in Leibniz’s philosophical thought with the intensive study of thecorrespondence required by an edition and translation of high scholarlystandards. The product is a sophisticated and insightful re-interpretation ofone of the problems currently most debated in Leibniz’s metaphysics – hisdoctrine of corporeal substances – together with a fine analysis andilluminating discussion of the broad range of philosophical-theologicalissues tackled by Leibniz and Des Bosses in their correspondence.

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They begin by setting the scene, that is, by examining the role ofcorrespondences in Leibniz’s thought and his constant search for accord.Even granting the importance of epistolary exchange during the earlymodern period in general, correspondences played an extraordinarily largepart in the development of Leibniz’s thought due, amongst other things, tosome aspects of his personality and to the specific circumstances of his life.In the relative isolation of Hanover, a man who regarded intellectualexchange and meeting people as second to nothing among life’s pleasuressupplemented the meager intellectually challenging conversation available atcourt with a gigantic correspondence. Moreover, by his own admission,Leibniz thrived in the stimulation provided by objections and replies ofother people, rather than in meditating in splendid isolation. Philosophical,theological and scientific correspondences were for him a sort of laboratoryfor work-in-progress as opposed to the relatively crystallized promulgationof theses in publications. His aversion to rigidity comes in full view also inhis programmatic search for accord, his emphasis on agreement overdisagreement, and his firm belief in a universal truth to be traced throughapparently contradictory positions. Both of these aspects – the flexibleformulations afforded by epistolary conversation and his life-long agenda ofreconciliation – are fully evident in the friendly and intelligent exchange withDes Bosses.

Against this backdrop, Look and Rutherford do not skirt the searchingquestion of whether Leibniz, in fact, was trying to reconcile theirreconcilable and, in so doing, masked substantive disagreement under aveneer of agreement possible only on an interpretation of his opponents’stheses which substantially altered their meaning. Raising this question isnot to embrace the usually superficial charge of insincerity. Rather, it is toengage seriously with the difficulties posed by Leibniz’s method and theinterpretation of some of his most complex positions. Although hewas crystal clear that certain views were so fundamentally mistaken thatmust be uncompromisingly rejected – such as the denial of the immor-tality of the soul or of the existence of God, to name just two – on otherissues it is much more difficult to ascertain what Leibniz’s consideredposition was. One instance of the latter is whether he thought thatcorporeal substances do, strictly speaking, qualify as substances; another iswhether he thought that his beautifully economical ontology of monadsneeded (at least in certain cases) to be supplemented by something else. Inthe correspondence with Des Bosses Leibniz experimented with possiblealternatives in an attempt to solve problems not completely addressed byhis monadological metaphysics that his friend, acutely, repeatedly posedto him.

The broader context of their debate on these metaphysical issues isrepresented by Des Bosses’s project of accommodating Leibniz’s philoso-phy to the doctrines of Aristotle and the dogmas of the Catholic Church.In itself this attempt was germane to Leibniz’s own lifelong efforts of

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synthesis and reconciliation. Far from being a project toward which theJesuit was pulling his unwilling friend, it had been an aspiration runningthroughout Leibniz’s life to show that his philosophy agreed with thedeepest intuitions of Aristotle and was compatible with Roman Catholi-cism. Des Bosses, however, possibly more than anyone else, broughtLeibniz to wonder whether he was being successful in his efforts or whetherhis mature ontology of monads failed to provide a completely satisfactoryexplanation for something of importance. This something of importancewas not primarily the most famous problem debated in the correspon-dence, namely whether the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation could beexplained within Leibniz’s metaphysics, but the larger, pivotal issue towardwhich the philosophical puzzles posed by transubstantiation ultimatelypointed. As Look and Rutherford phrase it: ‘Does Leibniz’s metaphysics,like Aristotle’s, uphold the existence of embodied, living creatures (plants,animals) as paradigmatic substances, or does it take a sharp turn towardidealism, rejecting the ultimate reality of anything except immaterialmonads?’ (xxxix) On Leibniz’s own concept of substance, only beingsendowed with an intrinsic unity, beings which are unum per se, qualify(strictly speaking) as substances. In an attempt to account for the unity ofa corporeal substance which would justify bestowing the status ofsubstances to composite beings such as human persons, animals, plants,as well as accommodating transubstantiation, Leibniz experimented withthe puzzling concept of vinculum substantiale. Look and Rutherford take usthrough a sophisticated analysis of the evolving meaning of this conceptfrom the apparently inconsistent notion of a substantial thing that is also arelation (lxiv) to the identification between corporeal substance andsubstantial bond as a key element of the ‘emended Peripatetic philosophy’which ‘Leibniz describes himself as offering’ (lxxi). As a guiding compass inthis sometimes baffling journey through Leibniz’s late ontology, oneshould keep the following key interpretative claim by Look and Rutherfordin mind:

Propositions asserting the existence or nonexistence or reducibility of

corporeal substance, we suggest, are located toward the periphery of Leibniz’stheory. They are theses that to some extent are up for grabs, depending uponthe answers that are given to other questions. On the face of it, this may seemat odds with the central role given by Leibniz to the notion of substance.

However, as already suggested, Leibniz’s certainty concerning the nature ofsubstance is largely limited to the intension of the term ‘substance’ as opposedto its extension. That is, Leibniz has deep convictions about the essential

properties of substance, but he is less certain about the class of things thatinstantiate those properties. In particular, for much of his career Leibniz lacksany decisive argument for the conclusion that the class of substances either

does or does not include corporeal substances.(xliv–xlv)

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A measure of the richness of this correspondence is the fact that (as Lookand Rutherford remind us) these extremely interesting debates on Leibniz’smetaphysics of substance are only one of the sets of philosophically andtheologically relevant topics discussed in it. Another one is the Jesuitmission in China and its implications for Leibniz’s theological thought,notably his soteriology and his proposal of a theology of love reminiscentmore of Paul’s hymn to charity than of Luther’s emphasis on faith. A third,no less important cluster of themes is related to Leibniz and Des Bosses’sdiscussion of Jansenism. This discussion sees Leibniz tackling not only thekey problems of any theodicy – freedom, middle knowledge, determinism –but also, perhaps less familiarly, presenting his own defence of the ‘freedomof philosophizing’.

In short, the wealth of philosophical and theological issues discussed inthis correspondence, coupled with the very illuminating, extensiveintroduction by Look and Rutherford, make this volume a precious andwelcome contribution. This is a volume which should be part of thestandard Leibniz collection of any research and university library.No doubt many individual scholars will also want the have it on theirshelves.

Maria Rosa AntognazzaKing’s College London

ª 2009, Maria Rosa Antognazza

John Russell Roberts: AMetaphysics for the Mob: The Philosophy of GeorgeBerkeley, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, 200 pp. £32.99. ISBN0195313933

In his introduction, John Russell Roberts captures very nicely the feelingshared by many of Berkeley’s readers over the centuries: how on earth coulda man making such fantastic claims suppose himself to be siding ‘in allthings with the mob?’ Roberts suggests we can trace this widely sharedinability to recognize common sense in Berkeley’s ideas to two misappre-hensions due to Hume. The first stems from Hume’s well-known remarkthat Berkeley’s arguments ‘admit of no answer and produce no conviction’.Roberts’ proposal is that we are unconvinced by Berkeley’s excellentarguments because we limit ourselves to the negative half of his theory aboutthe non-existence of matter, and ignore his positive claims about theexistence of spirit. Roberts thinks that the blame for this inattention to whatBerkeley says about spirits can also be laid at Hume’s door. It was Humewho gave rise to the notion that Berkeley’s endorsing spiritual substance wasinconsistent with his rejection of material substance. Roberts proposes in hisbook both to show that Berkeley has a perfectly consistent account of

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