"Theodicy" by Freiherr von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (translated by E. M. Huggard). Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
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Freiherr von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Theodicy
Theodicy
Table of Contents
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
I
II
PREFACE
PRELIMINARY DISSERTATION ON THE CONFORMITY OF FAITH WITH REASON
ESSAYS ON THE JUSTICE OF GOD AND THE FREEDOM OF MAN IN THE ORIGIN OF EVIL
PART ONE
ESSAYS ON THE JUSTICE OF GOD AND THE FREEDOM OF MAN IN THE ORIGIN OF EVIL
PART TWO
ESSAYS ON THE JUSTICE OF GOD AND THE FREEDOM OF MAN IN THE ORIGIN OF EVIL
PART THREE
APPENDICES
SUMMARY OF THE CONTROVERSY REDUCED TO FORMAL ARGUMENTS
EXCURSUS ON THEODICY
§ 392
published by the author in Mémoires de Trévoux
July 1712
REFLEXIONS ON THE WORK THAT MR. HOBBES PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH ON 'FREEDOM, NECESSITY AND CHANCE'
OBSERVATIONS ON THE BOOK CONCERNING 'THE ORIGIN OF EVIL' PUBLISHED RECENTLY IN LONDON
CAUSA DEI ASSERTA PER JUSTITIAM EJUS
INDEX
Отрывок из книги
Freiherr von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil
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Practically this might do, but speculatively it was most disturbing. For if the 'loose relation' had to be admitted in one instance, it was admitted in principle; and one could not get rid of the suspicion that it would turn up elsewhere, and that the banishment of it from every other field represented a convenient pragmatic postulate rather than a solid metaphysical truth. Moreover, the correlation of the unitary soul with the unitary gland might do justice to a mechanistical philosophy, but it did not do justice to the soul's own consciousness of itself. The soul's consciousness is the 'idea' or 'representation' of the life of the whole body, certainly not of the life of the pineal gland nor, as the unreflective nowadays would say, of the brain. I am not conscious in, or of, my brain except when I have a headache; consciousness is in my eyes and finger-tips and so on. It is physically true, no doubt, that consciousness in and of my finger-tips is not possible without the functioning of my brain; but that is a poor reason for locating the consciousness in the brain. The filament of the electric bulb will not be incandescent apart from the functioning of the dynamo; but that is a poor reason for saying that the incandescence is in the dynamo.
Certainly the area of representation in our mind is not simply equivalent to the area of our body. But in so far as the confines of mental representation part company with the confines of the body, it is not that they may contract and fall back upon the pineal gland, but that they may expand and advance over the surrounding world. The mind does not represent its own body merely, it represents the world in so far as the world affects that body or is physically reproduced in it. The mind has no observable natural relation to the pineal gland. It has only two natural relations: to its body as a whole and to its effective environment. What Descartes had really done was to pretend that the soul was related to the pineal gland as it is in fact related to its whole body; and then that it was related to the bodily members as in fact it is related to outer environment. The members became an inner environment, known only in so far as they affected the pineal gland; just as the outer environment in its turn was to be known only in so far as it affected the members.
