http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz

QUOTES

• "...monads or simple substances are the only true substances and that material things are only phenomena, though well founded and well connected..."Enter
• "...everything in nature happens mechanically and at the same time metaphysically but that the source of mechanics is metaphysics..."
• "Our reasonings are based on two great principles, that of contradiction… [and] that of sufficient reason."
• “it is not true that two substances can resemble each other completely and differ only in number [solo numero].”
• "Nothing takes place suddenly, and it is one of my great and best confirmed maxims that nature never makes leaps."
• "I consider the notion of substance to be one of the keys to the true philosophy"

NOTES

• eclectic mix of Aristotle and Christian Platonism
• reaction to two sets of modern opponents: on the one hand, Descartes and his followers; on the other hand, Hobbes and Spinoza
• God freely chose the best world from an infinite number of possible worlds
•  a person could be said to act freely when the contrary of that action does not imply a contradiction
• 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.
• 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
• every event must have a cause and that there is a reason why everything is so and not otherwise
• everything is composed of or reducible to simple substances
• x is a substance if and only if x has a complete individual concept (CIC), that is, a concept that contains within it all predicates of x past, present, and future