Abstract
Catherine Wilson has claimed that “we need to see the monads as to some extent modeled after the animalcula.”1 In this chapter, we are going to offer a qualified defense of Wilson’s claim. We will argue that, while some version of the doctrine of monads would have been proposed by Leibniz no matter what the state of microscopic research had been in his day, still microscopic research would later influence certain important aspects of Leibniz’s monadbased metaphysics. Microscopy was not a condition sine qua non of the system of monads, but the new science did enrich and corroborate Leibniz’s system in important ways.
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Smith, J.E. (2002). Leibniz’s Preformationism: Between Metaphysics and Biology. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Creative Matrix of the Origins. Analecta Husserliana, vol 77. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0538-8_12
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