Freedom in Leibniz’s Monadological System Essay

In the Discourse on Metaphysics by Leibniz he suggest that, "we maintain that everything that is to happen to some person is already contained virtually in his nature or notion, as properties of a circle are contained in its definition." This assertion raised a difficulty for Leibniz. This difficulty was that "human freedom will no longer hold, and that an absolute fatality would rule over all our actions as well as over all the rest of what happens in the world." With such a reality there would be no use for free will and whatever fate succumbs an individual is the will of the Most High; in other words, being destined. But for Leibniz, this is not the determined reality of humanity. Leibniz

Determinism is a doctrine suggesting that for every event there exist conditions that could cause no alternative event. Free will is a philosophical term describing a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Understandably, the dichotomy between these two concepts is a topic philosophers have debated over for many years. As a result of these debates, a number of alternative philosophical perspectives arguing for the existence of free will, namely libertarianism and compatibilism, have emerged, existing in stark contrast to determinism. In order to ascertain the extent to which free will is compatible with determinism, one must first consider these different approaches to

The purpose of the wax argument is designed to provide a clear and distinct knowledge of “I”, which is the mind, while corporeal things, “whose images are framed by thought, and which the senses themselves imagine are much more distinctly known than this mysterious ‘I’ which does not fall within the imagination” (66). Through the wax argument, Descartes’ demonstrates that corporeal things are perceived neither through our senses nor imagination, but through our intellect alone. In this argument, you will see that there is cause to doubt Descartes’ analysis of the wax and his method of philosophical reasoning.

Many believe that the world is largely determined but we can still act freely as our behaviour is not predictable. Thomas Aquinas disagreed with hard determinism as he believed that ‘man chooses freely, not out of necessity’. Although Aquinas and others that criticise hard determinism and disagree with the hard determinist views, would still agree with hard determinists in that free will and determinism are incompatible, but would argue that we have free will but our lives are not determined. This view that free will and determinism are incompatible but it is free will that exists, not determinism, is also supported by libertarians.

Since Plato, two mutually exclusive yet essential categories of reality have been posited, one of concrete particulars and the other being abstract universals. Particulars are “unproblematic,” but universals may be entirely extant in many positions with no influence on the universal itself. A particular “distinguishing mark is that is exhausted in the one embodiment, or occasion, or example.” (Campbell 298) Particulars are unproblematic because they are restricted to a single point at any given time, not like universals which exist in different locations and are wholly present in those instances. The number of examples which contain the abstract universals are not diminished in quality of the universal. Campbell posits that this “problem” can be alleviated if properties were not universal at all. There is a distinction between abstract and concrete which differs from the distinction between universals and particulars. This is because particulars and universals can both be abstract where only particulars can be concrete. The particulars that

The first matter to be noted is that this view is in no way in contradiction to science. Free will is a natural phenomenon, something that emerged in nature with the emergence of human beings, with their

The following essay is a response to George Berkeley’s Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, in which he argues that the Cartesian notion of substance is incoherent, that the word "matter" as Descartes uses it, does not mean anything.

When analyzing the free will/ compatibilism argument, one must choose the argument they agree with the most. In my case, I chose the compatibilist vs. Libertarian free will case, which will provide to broader cases, one with a determined outcome made by some sovereign “god” (Compatibilisim), and the opposite end of the spectrum the idea that nothing can be predetermined (Libertarian). These views contrast on arguments of free will, being that the compatibilist has free will to make decisions that are predetermined through god, where the Libertarian would disagree with that logic and say, how can someone make a choice if his actions are already determined through god.

Perhaps we need to take a step backwards and understand the definition of free will. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, free will is the “freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention”. Therefore, free will is voluntary and not predicable or predestined as scientists and some philosophers would say. In the introduction of David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book, Art & Fear, they say, “It [art] is about committing your future to your own hands, placing Free Will above predestination, choice above chance. It is about finding your own work”.

Leibnitz argued that all of these monads were linked in a complex chain of cause and effect and that this linking had been done by a divine creator as he created the harmonious universe. Since he was benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient, he logically would create the best of all possible worlds. Hence, everything

The juxtaposition of predestination with the exercise of free will is an age-old question. In the pagan world, prior to the upsurge of Western development and Christianity, predestination was deemed a truth; pagan gods were superlative and dictated the lives and fates of subordinate humans. Around 524 A.D., a Roman writer, Boethius, published a tract entitled The Consolation of Philosophy. Changes in medieval times were formulated around this document. By delving deeper into the possibility of chance, Boethius proclaims that, should one identify philosophically that chance is random, there is no such thing. Because “… nothing comes out of nothing” (p. 116), it is an impossibility that, with God maintaining security, there are acts of arbitrariness. Given that humans are rational creatures and cannot exist without reason, the presence of free will is a plausible assumption because philosophy acknowledges that there is freedom for cogent beings.

“Flexibility” and “mutability” refer to the wax’s ability to take on any of an indefinite number of shapes—indeed, an infinite number. We cannot know these properties of the wax through our imaginations because our imagination is incapable of cataloguing all the possible shapes the wax may take. (The imagination, remember, consists in discrete mental images of the wax with certain shapes.) Likewise, with the property of “extension”—we cannot imagine all of the sundry sizes and dimensions of which the wax is capable of taking, but nevertheless we know that it has this same ability. Because we cannot account fully for the three essential properties of the wax with our imagination we conclude that we do not know the wax through our imagination.

The problem of freewill concerns whether it is possible to retain agency in a world where events are necessitated. For the sake of clarity, my definition of freewill is “the power of acting or not acting without constraint”. Universal causation or hard determinism (both terms I shall use interchangeably) is the belief that “events in the future are fixed, as a matter of natural law, by the past”. Indeterministic theories such as libertarianism preserve freewill by maintaining that not all events are determined by preceding causes. Both indeterminism and determinism are incompatibilist theories as they imply that universal causation erodes the prospect of freewill. Compatibilist theories, like agent-causalism assert that causation doesn’t necessarily mean we do not have free will.

Your organization skills are superb. I enjoy how you have listed problems with evil. Since these problems are popular among humanity, it would benefit to give plenty of time and effort into theodicies. There are theodicies that are biblically sound. Be aware, however, there are theodicies that are partially logical but fail to comply to biblical truths. For instance, I have fallen for the Leibniz's theodicy because it sounds logical. Eventually, I realized that the theodicy failed biblically. I still agree, nevertheless, with certain sections of his theodicy. Specifically, I agree that God has a good reason to allow evil. I disagree with Leibniz concerning God's goodness sovereignty, and immutability. As Paul said in the letter of Colossians,

We perceive a different world through our mind than we do through the senses. It is the material world, perceived through the senses and this world changing. It is the realm of forms,which one sees through the mind, this world is permanent. It is this world that is more real; the world of change is merely an imperfect image of this world. A form is an abstract property or quality. Take any property of an object and separate it from that object and consider it by itself, this is a form.For instance,when we talk of a triangle we say that it is a three sided enclosed figure and the sum of whose all sides is 180degrees,but have we ever seen a perfect triangle what we have seen is just a close approximation of an ideal triangle but not an ideal triangle.