Physis (/ ˈ f aɪ ˈ s ɪ s /; Ancient Greek: φύσις) is a Greek philosophical, theological, and scientific term, usually translated into English—according to its Latin translation "natura"—as "nature".The term originated in ancient Greek philosophy, and was later used in Christian theology and Western blogger.com pre-Socratic usage, physis was contrasted with νόμος, nomos Twelve Signs That We Are Very Near the End of the World. I strongly believe that we are very close to the beginning of the time of Tribulation and the sequence of Events of Revelation culminating with the "end of the world" as we know it! Here are twelve of the most evident signs that are being fulfilled. Most were prophesied by the Bible or other prophetic writers Dec 22, · 1. Life. Leibniz was born in Leipzig on July 1, , two years prior to the end of the Thirty Years War, which had ravaged central Europe. His family was Lutheran and belonged to the educated elite on both sides: his father, Friedrich Leibniz, was a jurist and professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Leipzig, and his mother, Catharina Schmuck, the daughter of a professor of Law
Physis - Wikipedia
He made deep and important contributions to the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, dissertation on the end for which god created the world, philosophy of religion, as well as mathematics, physics, geology, jurisprudence, and history. The aim of this entry is primarily to introduce Leibniz's life and summarize and explicate his views in the realms of metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical theology. Note that throughout this entry, the following standard abbreviations are used: PC Principle of ContradictionPSR Principle of Sufficient ReasonPII Principle of the Identity of IndiscerniblesPIN Predicate-in-Notion Principleand CIC Complete Individual Concept.
Leibniz was born in Leipzig on July 1,two years prior to the end of the Thirty Years War, which had ravaged central Europe. His family was Lutheran and belonged to the educated elite on both sides: his father, Friedrich Leibniz, dissertation on the end for which god created the world, was a jurist and professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Leipzig, and his mother, Catharina Schmuck, the daughter of a professor of Law.
Leibniz's father died inand his subsequent education was directed by his mother, uncle, and according to his own reports, himself. He was given access to his father's extensive library at a young age and proceeded to pore over its contents, particularly the volumes of ancient history and the Church Fathers. In Leibniz began his formal university education at the University of Leipzig. While in Leipzig, Leibniz met Jacob Thomasius, who would have an important influence on Leibniz and who supervised Leibniz's first philosophical treatise On the Principle of Individuation De principio individui.
It was Thomasius more than anyone else perhaps who instilled in Leibniz a great respect for ancient and medieval philosophy. Indeed, one of the leitmotifs of Leibniz's philosophical career is his desire to reconcile the modern philosophy with the philosophy of Aristotle, Plato, the Scholastics and the Renaissance humanist tradition.
After receiving his baccalaureate from Leipzig, he continued his studies at the University of Altdorf. Although Leibniz was offered a position on the faculty of Law upon the completion of his Doctorate of Law inhe had a different future in mind. In that year, Leibniz met Baron Johann Christian von Boineburg, a Protestant convert to Catholicism, who was able to secure a position for Leibniz with the Elector of Mainz.
While in the court of the Elector, Leibniz composed a series of works in philosophical theology, the Catholic Demonstrationswhich are another manifestation of Leibniz's lifelong irenicism: in this case, in their attempt to provide a basis and justification for the reconciliation of Protestantism and Catholicism.
Leibniz also turned his mind to natural philosophy, having finally been able to study some of the works of the moderns; the result was a two-part treatise inthe New Physical Hypothesis Hypothesis physica nova. The first part, the Theory of Abstract Motion Theoria motus abstractiwas dedicated to the Académie des Sciences de Paris, and the second part, the Theory of Concrete Motion Theoria motus concretiwas dedicated to the Royal Society in London.
These works, however, were not likely to impress their audiences, for, given his circumstances, Leibniz could not but dissertation on the end for which god created the world amateurish works in the field. This changed, however, inwhen Leibniz was given the single most important opportunity of his life: the Elector of Mainz sent him on a diplomatic mission to Paris, the center of learning and science at the time. Leibniz was able to stay in Paris for four years with a brief trip to London induring which time he met many of the major figures of the intellectual world, among them Antoine ArnauldNicholas Malebrancheand, most important, the Dutch mathematician and physicist, Christiaan Huygens.
Not only was Leibniz able to converse with some of the greatest minds of the seventeenth century while in Paris, he was also given access to the unpublished manuscripts of Descartes and Pascal. And, according to Leibniz, it was while reading the mathematical manuscripts of Pascal that he began to conceive what would eventually become his differential calculus and his work on infinite series.
In this time, Leibniz also designed a calculating machine able to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division see the Other Internet Resources for a picture, dissertation on the end for which god created the world. And his trip to London in was meant in part to present his designs to the Royal Society.
While Leibniz was living the life of the mind in Paris, his employer died, and Leibniz was thus forced to look for another position. He eventually found one as the librarian for Duke Johann Friedrich of Brunswick, who ruled in Hanover. On the way to Hanover, Leibniz stopped in Amsterdam to meet with Spinoza between November 18 and 21,three months before the latter's death; according to Leibniz's own notes, they spoke of Spinoza's yet-to-be-published EthicsCartesian physics, and Leibniz's improved version of the ontological argument see below.
Although Leibniz would travel to Italy for a time in the late s in order to conduct historical research for the House of Hanover and make many shorter trips including to Viennathe rest of his life was essentially spent in Hanover and its environs, working in different capacities for the court, first, for Johann Friedrich until his death inthen for Johann Friedrich's brother, Ernst August from toand finally for the latter's son, Georg Ludwig, who in would become George I of England.
Leibniz's relations with Ernst August and Georg Ludwig were not as amicable as his relations with his original employer, but he was close to Sophie, the wife of Ernst August and youngest sister of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, with whom Descartes had an important philosophical correspondence. Sophie was also the daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, and it is for this reason that her son became King of England.
While Leibniz may have felt physically isolated from the intellectual scene of Europe, he did manage to stay connected through a vast network of correspondents. Leibniz exchanged letters with over different people in the course of his life. Despite the great demands placed on Leibniz as librarian, then historian, and Privy Councillor at the court of Hanover, he was able to complete work that, in its breadth, depth, and sheer quantity, is staggering.
Leibniz's final years were bleak. He was engaged in a vituperative debate with Newton and his followers over the priority of the discovery of the calculus, even being accused of stealing Newton's ideas.
Most historians of mathematics now claim that Newton and Leibniz developed their ideas independently: Newton developing the ideas first with Leibniz the first to publish. And at the court he was mocked for his wig and old-fashioned clothing think s Paris! When Georg became George, the acrimony surrounding Leibniz in England was so great that Leibniz was asked to remain in Hanover rather than follow his employer to London. Leibniz died November 14, Unlike most of the great philosophers of the period, Leibniz did not write a magnum opus ; there is no single work that can be said to contain the core of his thought.
While he did produce two books, the Theodicy and the New Essays Concerning Human Understanding finished in but not published untilthe student of Leibniz's thought must piece together Leibniz's philosophy from his myriad dissertation on the end for which god created the world essays published in scholarly journals and in more popular journals; unpublished works left abandoned by their author; and his many letters.
Moreover, many of Leibniz's writings have not yet been published. The authoritative scholarly version of Leibniz's works, the Akademie edition, has thus far only published his philosophical writings from to ; in other words, only half of his writing life has been covered.
And the mere act of dating pieces often depends upon careful analysis of the paper Leibniz wrote on and watermarks and so on. Hence, for example, the important short work, Primary Truthswhich, because of its content, was often thought to date to as in AGhas recently been redated by the Akademie editors to because of a watermark.
Piecing together Leibniz's philosophy into a systematic whole is made more difficult because Leibniz seems to have changed or at least refined his views on a number of issues over the course of his career and because he was always very aware some might say too aware of the audience for any of his writings.
As stated above, Leibniz's intellectual training was squarely in the tradition of Scholasticism and Renaissance humanism; his background, then, was of Aristotelianism, Platonism, and orthodox Christianity. Yet, as he became more familiar with the modern philosophy of the seventeenth century, he came to see many of its virtues.
Although there dissertation on the end for which god created the world some reason to be skeptical of the details, the spirit of the self-portrait Leibniz paints to Nicolas Remond in can be a helpful guide for approaching his work. He writes:. Again, there is some reason to doubt whether Leibniz was really fifteen when he made his philosophical perambulations and whether and to what extent he had actually read any of the moderns. Nevertheless, this self-portrait does express something that one sees in Leibniz's writings: the weaving together of varying strands of ancient and modern philosophy in a remarkably creative and sophisticated manner.
The letter to Remond makes clear that Leibniz had reservations about certain aspects of the modern philosophy, qualms that arose from and led him back to this eclectic mix of Aristotle and Christian Platonism. It is probably most helpful, then, to see Leibniz's philosophy as a reaction to two sets of modern opponents: on the one hand, Descartes and his followers; on the other hand, Hobbes and Spinoza, dissertation on the end for which god created the world.
Leibniz's critique of Descartes and his followers was focused principally on the Cartesian account of body or corporeal substance. According to Descartes, the essence of body is extension; that is, a corporeal substance is simply a geometric object made concrete, an object that has size and shape and is in motion. This view, indeed, is the cornerstone of the new mechanical philosophy to which Leibniz was originally attracted, dissertation on the end for which god created the world.
Nevertheless, Leibniz came to see two distinct problems with this view. First, in claiming that the essence of body is extension, Descartes is endorsing the view that matter is infinitely divisible.
But if matter is infinitely divisible, then one can never arrive at the simple unities that must exist at some ontological ground level.
Second, if matter is simply extension, then there is in its nature no source of activity. If this is so, Leibniz thought, then the bodily objects of the world cannot count as substances. Hobbes and Spinoza, despite their own differences, advanced, or were read as advancing, a number of objectionable and deeply troubling theses which Leibniz and most of his contemporaries saw as an enormous threat: materialism, atheism, and necessitarianism.
It is Leibniz's response to Hobbesian and Spinozistic necessitarianism that is perhaps of greatest interest, for he sought to develop an account of action and contingency that would preserve divine and human freedom.
As will be shown, central to Leibniz's philosophy was the view that God freely chose the best world from an infinite number of possible worlds and that a person could be said to act freely when the contrary of that action does not imply a contradiction. This topic will be addressed principally in the article on Leibniz's Modal Metaphysics.
To these two great principles could be added four more: the Principle of the Bestthe Predicate-in-Notion Principlethe Principle of the Identity of Indiscerniblesand the Principle of Continuity.
The relation among these principles is more complicated than one might expect. And while the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles is often presented in contemporary discussions in analytic metaphysics as a stand-alone axiom, Leibniz tells us that it follows from the two great principles. Finally, the Principle or Law of Continuity is actually a principle that Leibniz takes from his work in mathematics and applies to the infinite hierarchy of monads in the world and to the quality of their perceptions; it appears to derive only tenuous support from the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
Leibniz presented a number of arguments for the existence of God, which represent great contributions to philosophical theology and which will be discussed below. But one of the most basic principles of his system is that God always acts for the best. See Adams And Leibniz sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, appeals to this principle in his metaphysics, most notably when he is also employing the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
Leibniz has a very distinctive notion of truth, one which underlies much of his metaphysics. But this notion of truth goes back to Aristotle's Organon cf. Posterior Analytics I. As he tells us in the Primary Truths and the Discourse on Metaphysicsmany things dissertation on the end for which god created the world from the Predicate-in-Notion Principle PINincluding what he believes to be the correct analysis of necessity and contingency.
Leibniz also follows Aristotle cf. Metaphysics IV. Furthermore, the combination of PC and PIN will mean that, since in any true proposition the predicate is contained explicitly or implicitly within the subject, this is so for all affirmative truths, whether they be universal or particular, necessary or contingent. Leibniz will use this seemingly innocuous principle to draw profoundly strong metaphysical conclusions about the nature of substance and modality.
The Principle of Sufficient Reason PSR in its classic form is simply that nothing is without a reason nihil est sine ratione or there is no effect without a cause.
In the Principles of Nature and GraceLeibniz suggests that the claim that nothing takes place without a sufficient reason means that nothing happens in such a way that it is impossible for someone with enough information to give a reason why it is so and not otherwise.
While the idea that every event must have a cause and that there is a reason why everything is so and not otherwise again might not seem novel, it is the connection that Leibniz sees between this principle and his other metaphysical principles that is noteworthy. According to Leibniz, PSR must actually follow from PIN, for if there were a truth that had no reason, then there would be a proposition whose subject did not contain the predicate, which is a violation of Leibniz's conception of truth.
PC and PSR may seem innocent enough, but Leibniz's other well-known principle, the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles PIIis more controversial, dissertation on the end for which god created the world.
See also the entry on identity of indiscernibles. What is particularly important to note, however, is that Leibniz is adamant that certain kinds of properties are dissertation on the end for which god created the world from the list of properties that could dissertation on the end for which god created the world as difference-making properties, chief among these spatio-temporal properties. This is what Leibniz means in part when he asserts that there can be no purely extrinsic i.
Therefore, it is not the case that there could be two chunks of matter that are qualitatively identical but existing in different locations. In Leibniz's view, any such extrinsic difference must be founded on an intrinsic difference. As he puts it in the New Essays. Sometimes, dissertation on the end for which god created the world, unfortunately, only the Principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals is so called. It is also interesting to note that in his Primary Truths and Correspondence with Clarke, Leibniz presents PII not as a bedrock axiom of his system but as a consequence of PC and PSR.
Briefly, one way to sketch the argument is this:. Now, it was said above that Leibniz excludes purely extrinsic denominations or relational properties from the dissertation on the end for which god created the world of properties that are constitutive of an individual.
To allow purely extrinsic denominations would be to accept the possibility that that two things could be discernible in terms of their relational properties while being identical in terms of their intrinsic properties, for their relational properties would not follow from their intrinsic properties.
Again, if relational properties were allowed to factor into the nature of an individual, then PII would be relatively weak. Of course two things that exist in different spatio-temporal locations are distinct, and that is what Leibniz admits in the passage from the New Essays above.
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