leibniz new essays on human understanding summary

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7 New Essays on Human Understanding

• Published: October 2020
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New Essays explicates Leibniz’s doctrines in response to John Locke’s Essay . The Preface anticipates the most important disagreements. The body of the work is a dialogue between an admirer of Locke, who retells the Essay and his friend who is impressed with Leibniz’s system. They compare views under somewhat artificial rules, with the result that many of Locke’s doctrines discredited in favour of Leibniz’s. I argue that these results have modest but legitimate rational ground. New Essays is tailored to readers influenced by Locke, stressing the inseparable connection between sense perception and intellect. It maintains in detail that the nature of substances is best understood by considering them as concrete individuals that are metaphysically complete down to their spatial and temporal relations to everything in the universe. However, New Essays also contains a wealth of philosophical views regarding language, logic, mathematics, physics, morals, persons, society, history, and more.

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Leibniz: New Essays on Human Understanding

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Book/Printed Material New essays concerning human understanding,

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About this Item

• New essays concerning human understanding,
• Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von, 1646-1716.
• Gerhardt, K.
• Langley, Alfred G., tr.

Created / Published

• New York, The Macmillan Company; London, Macmillan & Co., ltd., 1896.
• -  Locke, John,--1632-1704.--Essay concerning human understanding
• -  Knowledge, Theory of
• -  "The work ... consists of a translation of the entire fifth volume of Gerhardt's Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz, sub-entitled 'Leibniz und Locke,' consisting of an introduction by Gerhardt, several short pieces on Locke's Essay and the New essays on human understanding; and of an appendix containing a translation of other short pieces of Liebnitz bearing on the subjects discussed in the New essays or referred to therein."- Translator's pref.
• -  Also available in digital form.
• xix, 861 p. 21 cm.

Call Number/Physical Location

• B2581.E5 L5

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• online text

LCCN Permalink

• https://lccn.loc.gov/04003691

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• Langley, Alfred G.
• Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm
• Essay Concerning Human Understanding
• Knowledge, Theory of
• Locke, John

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Chicago citation style:

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr Von, K Gerhardt, and Alfred G Langley. New Essays Concerning Human Understanding . New York, The Macmillan Company; London, Macmillan & Co., ltd, 1896. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/04003691/.

APA citation style:

Leibniz, G. W., Gerhardt, K. & Langley, A. G. (1896) New Essays Concerning Human Understanding . New York, The Macmillan Company; London, Macmillan & Co., ltd. [Pdf] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/04003691/.

MLA citation style:

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr Von, K Gerhardt, and Alfred G Langley. New Essays Concerning Human Understanding . New York, The Macmillan Company; London, Macmillan & Co., ltd, 1896. Pdf. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/04003691/>.

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New Essays on Human Understanding

• ISBN-10 0521231477
• ISBN-13 978-0521231473
• Publisher Cambridge University Press
• Publication date April 30, 1981
• Language English
• Dimensions 5.98 x 1.26 x 8.98 inches
• Print length 504 pages
• See all details

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cambridge University Press (April 30, 1981)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 504 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0521231477
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0521231473
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.95 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.98 x 1.26 x 8.98 inches
• #3,418 in Philosophy Reference (Books)
• #32,055 in Philosophy (Books)
• #88,764 in Professional

About the author

Freiherr von gottfried wilhelm leibniz.

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Toleration of what is above reason: the impact of leibniz’s view on religious belief on experiential matters.

1. Introduction

2. knowledge, limitation, and toleration: leibniz’s notion of ‘above reason’.

[i]ndeed, the greatest mysteries are made known to us by God’s testimony, which we recognize through those rational grounds for belief on which our religion rests—grounds which unquestionably depend on sensation and reflection. The question, then, seems to be not whether the existence of a fact or the truth of a proposition can be deduced from the sources which reason employs (from sensation and reflection, that is, or rather from the outer and inner senses), but whether a created mind is capable of knowing the wherefore of this fact or the a priori ‘reason’ for this truth. Thus we can say that what is ‘above reason’ can indeed be learned but cannot be understood by the methods and powers of created reason, of however great and exalted a kind. ( Leibniz 1981, p. 493 )

I begin with the preliminary question of the conformity of faith with reason […] I assume that two truths cannot contradict each other; that the object of faith is the truth God has revealed in an extraordinary way; and that reason is the linking together of truths, but especially (when it is compared with faith) of those whereto the human mind can attain naturally without being aided by the light of faith. […] It is in the same sense that sometimes reason is contrasted with experience. Reason, since it consists in the linking together of truths, is entitled to connect also those wherewith experience has furnished it, in order thence to draw mixed conclusions; but reason pure and simple, as distinct from experience, only has to do with truths independent of the senses. And one may compare faith with experience, since faith (in respect of the motives that give it justification) depends upon the experience of those who have seen the miracles whereon revelation is founded, and upon the trustworthy tradition which has handed them down to us, whether through the Scriptures or by the account of those who have preserved them. ( Leibniz 1985, Preliminary Discourse, § 1 )

3. Faith and Experience, Eucharist and Bodies in the Correspondence with Des Bosses

If you wish to hold real accidents that remain without a subject, it must be said that when the monads constituting the bread are destroyed with respect to their primitive active and passive powers, and the presence of the monads constituting Christ’s body is substituted for them, there remain only the derivative forces that were in the bread exhibiting the same phenomena that the monads of the bread had exhibited. ( Leibniz 2007, p. 153 )

If corporeal substance is something real over and above monads, as a line is taken to be something over and above points, we shall have to say that corporeal substance consists in a certain union, or rather in a real unifier superadded to monads by God, and that from the union of the passive powers of monads there in fact arises primary matter, which is to say, that which is required for extension and antitypy, or for diffusion and resistance. ( Leibniz 2007, p. 225 )

[T]he divine nature itself, which is infinite, is necessarily incomprehensible. In the same way, there is something of infinity in all substances too, which is why we can perfectly understand only incomplete notions, like those of numbers, shapes and other such modes that are abstracted from things by the mind. I admit that we have, as the author quite rightly observes, some distinct notion of the infinite (namely the infinite in itself, or absolute infinite), but through the finite intellect given to us there is no distinct consideration of infinite varieties, yet this would very often be needed in the comprehension of divine matters. (‘Hasty comments on the book Christianity not Mysterious , written 8 August 1701’ Leibniz 2016, p. 212 )

4. When Metaphysics and Faith Meet: Leibniz’s Answer to Tournemine

But since this metaphysical union, which is added on to that, is not a phenomenon, and as we have not even been given any intelligible notion of it, I have not taken it upon myself to look for an explanation of it. […]

However, I do not deny that there may be something of this kind; it would be something like presence, which is also something whose notion has not been explained as it is applied to incorporeal things, and is distinguished from the relations of harmony which go along with it. […]

When we see that there is union and presence in material things, we think there must be something somehow analogous in immaterial things; but since there is nothing more that we can understand about these things, we have only obscure notions of them. […]

It is the same with mysteries, where again we try to elevate what we understand in the normal course of created things into something more sublime which would correspond to them with respect to nature or the divine power; but we cannot understand in such things anything sufficiently distinct to be suitable for making a fully intelligible definition. ( Leibniz 1997, p. 250 )

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Share and Cite

Tropper, S. Toleration of What Is above Reason: The Impact of Leibniz’s View on Religious Belief on Experiential Matters. Religions 2024 , 15 , 1004. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15081004

Tropper S. Toleration of What Is above Reason: The Impact of Leibniz’s View on Religious Belief on Experiential Matters. Religions . 2024; 15(8):1004. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15081004

Tropper, Sarah. 2024. "Toleration of What Is above Reason: The Impact of Leibniz’s View on Religious Belief on Experiential Matters" Religions 15, no. 8: 1004. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15081004

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