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By Paul Lodge

Not like lots of the different nice philosophers, Leibniz by no means wrote a magnum opus, so his philosophical correspondence is key for an knowing of his perspectives. This selection of new essays by way of preeminent figures within the box of Leibniz scholarship is the main thorough account of Leibniz's philosophical correspondence to be had. It illuminates his philosophical perspectives and will pay due cognizance to the dialectical context within which the proper passages from the letters ensue.

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He had informed his former student only a few months previously that he was prepared to take seriously neither the young man’s reformulation of fundamental parts of Aristotelian metaphysics nor the mechanical physics that the reformulation was supposed to accommodate. In reaction to Thomasius’s considered opinion, Leibniz composed an extended response that began with grand pronouncements of his former master’s erudition and insight and ended with a lengthy argument for a position only slightly more subtle than the one that the elder philosopher had recently rejected.

But Leibniz’s present task is not a very difficult one. The first part of his demonstration virtually accomplishes it: Because Leibniz has mechanized Aristotle’s basic principles of matter, form, and change and because Aristotle’s fundamental principles are the origins or sources of everything else in nature, the position shared by the reformers and moderns (namely, that all corporeal phenomena can be explained by matter in motion) will follow from those principles. Leibniz explains: For what does Aristotle discuss, in the eight books of the Physics, besides figure, magnitude, motion, place, and time?

The Early Correspondence Between Leibniz and Thomasius in Its Wider Context That Thomasius considered Leibniz’s philosophical proposal in his letter of October 1668 an utter failure seems clear. But the energetic young man was not discouraged, and it is now time to consider exactly why he was prepared to go so far beyond the teachings of his master. In order to evaluate Leibniz’s proposals in the correspondence of 1663–68, we need to examine more thoroughly exactly what motivated the young man to reject the metaphysical foundations of mechanism and how he intended to place a mechanical physics on Aristotelian foundations.

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