Abstract
Richard Arthur (McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada), in Substantial forms, points of view, and the relativity of motion, argues that one of Leibniz’s motivations for reintroducing substantial forms was to save the reality of motion. Already in 1676 Leibniz had established that motion, understood geometrically (i.e. as change of situation), is merely relative, and therefore a pure phenomenon or appearance. True motions, on the other hand, according to Leibniz, are identifiable by reference to their causes, and these are determined by appeal to the most intelligible hypothesis for understanding the phenomena. Arthur argues that the introduction of substantial forms, reinterpreted as enduring primitive forces of action in each corporeal substance, allows Leibniz to found the reality of the phenomena of motion in force, and thus avoid reducing motion to a mere appearance. Arthur argues that the entelechies of Leibniz’s mature philosophy continue to serve this same function, in opposition to the view that his middle-period realism gave way to an idealist stance on motion.
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Notes
- 1.
See Arthur (2013a) for an account of the genesis and development of Leibniz’s views on space.
- 2.
- 3.
I am not sure I fully understand Puryear here. He says Leibniz is “clearly an idealist about motion”, and then seems to retract it on the grounds that it has not yet been decided whether perceiving substances are purely immaterial. I will treat him as claiming that motion is phenomenal in the sense of mere appearance, but as not being committed to substance idealism for Leibniz in his middle years.
- 4.
See Loptson and Arthur (2006), and Arthur (2011) for a defence. I would add that this interpretation of the unity only as mind-dependent is consistent with Leibniz’s philosophy of perception, according to which a perception consists in the representation of an infinity of lesser perceptions as one; here each lesser perception would correspond to the action of a smaller constituent body on the sense organs, and the confused perception to a fusing together or composition of the corresponding endeavours.
- 5.
See Jardine (1984), for an analysis of the dispute between Ursus and Kepler.
- 6.
“Following Cassirer’s interpretation, the legitimacy of hypotheses in natural philosophy and mathematics was defended by Leibniz exactly as Kepler had done in astronomy. In their philosophical systems phenomena assume a new dignity and the true hypothesis becomes the instrument for binding them to the laws of knowledge” (Bertoloni Meli 1993, 19).
- 7.
Here I agree with Puryear (2012, 147) that Leibniz’s commitment to Copernicanism as the most intelligible hypothesis cannot be understood as an instrumentalist position: “the evidence actually weighs rather heavily against such an instrumentalist reading.”
- 8.
In the Hypothesis physica nova Leibniz writes “I agree completely with the followers of those excellent gentlemen Descartes and Gassendi, and with whomever else teaches that in the end all variety in bodies must be explained in terms of size, shape and motion” (A VI, 2, 248). On his espousal of mechanism in his controversy with Stahl, see Justin E. H. Smith (2011, esp. 83–89).
- 9.
The title Principia Mechanica is supplied by the Akademie editors, who date it very tentatively as 1673–1676 (?). As Dan Garber observes (2009, 108), there are many themes that resonate with ideas first articulated in the Spring-Summer of 1676, including the claim that “the full cause must produce a unique effect” and that shape is an incomplete concept. For a translation of this piece and commentary, see Arthur (2013b).
- 10.
This undermines Puryear’s claim that in Leibniz’s considered view, “Motion, like force, is absolute in the sense that it is not relative to a frame of reference” (Puryear 2012, 167). He rightly points out that using the term “frame of reference” is anachronistic, and that Leibniz has in mind a space relative to a body or system of bodies (rather than that together with a system of three space and one time coordinates); but the point stands that Leibniz took the equivalence of hypotheses to rule out absolute motions as motions relative to an absolute space in the Newtonian sense.
- 11.
Leibniz says that if Spinoza were right that there is only one substance, “then everything except God would be transitory, and would sink into mere accidents and modifications, since there would not be in things the basis of substances, which consists in the existence of monads” (Letter to Bourguet, December 1714; GP III, 575).
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Arthur, R.T.W. (2015). The Relativity of Motion as a Motivation for Leibnizian Substantial Forms. In: Nita, A. (eds) Leibniz’s Metaphysics and Adoption of Substantial Forms. The New Synthese Historical Library, vol 74. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9956-0_10
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