""[The world] is good in a much broader, metaphysical sense" (see above).

Yes, that's one way to put it. A very abstract, dry, granola way to put it. Sometimes I wonder if philosophers have have lower parts--in the tripartite sense, as in physical bodies with physical body parts.

Just so you know, the world is good, I mean REAL good. Try it sometime. It's way better than bacon....

This is an old kerfuffle... so old, this tablet does not like kerfuffle. Oh, well. Old news is better than bad news. i guess. Linguists, take a hike...

I suggest unrolling the riddle. Or, better yet, rolling around in the riddle. I love a good roll. I suspect language loves a good roll as well. There are cinnamon rolls, sweet rolls, and rolls in the hay, and then there are the roles we play. Role-play is fun. Let's do that here. What would Leibniz say to the logical positivists, who strictly limited the ability of philosophers to roll around in the hay linguistically with one another? (Talk about a cold shower, that clever Wittgenstein was.) Let's role-play here. Oysters or clams? Or what about that bacon stuff? And tomatoes, let's not forget those pretty pretties...

Leibniz was queer.

His society buried him in an unmarked grave. He wore funny wigs. Only about half his papers are known. The book if there ever is one, is only partially written.

Newton and Leibniz were both queer.

LGBTQ liberation, still more promising than reality today, would have possibly limited the genius of these two “universal” icons. Their incredible output comes from their sexual identities and expression; much is between the lines and not the sheets, as there is plenty of evidence of limited activity.

Do humans need to transcend the paths of our desert fathers and uncelebrated mothers? I don’t know. Sometimes it helps. It is a driving force in Leibniz’s life and legacy, which is the UI you are staring down at this moment. A word of thanks is in order, but we should hold off on the party.

Neither Ludwig nor Isaac were “Universal” geniuses, there is no such thing, and the talk here of this idea is neither helpful nor thoughtful. Daniel Garber’s lateral to Einstein is wildly misleading. Leibniz never approached influence like Einstein, though Ludwig’s impact will be far more significant if we attribute his notations to scrutiny, for good or ill. The ill here is subtle and convenient.

Semantic knowledge was characterized by Robert Anton Wilson, former editor for Playboy magazine, in Jesus units (the amount of semantic information at ~30AD.) In the time of Ludwig, there were 2 Jesus (unfortunately for his homeland, in a double entendre.) When I was born, there were 64 Jesus, and my back-of-the-envelope calculation says there are well over 3000 Jesus today. Jesuses of semantic information speak to Ken’s point about the specialness of Leibniz’s time. Those, and antiquity to boot, were simpler times that allowed small people to loom large.

Their parents also abandoned both Isaac and Ludwig. They were left to pick up their adult sensibilities from medieval scholastic traditions that parented and misled both men in a time when more was possible than either achieved.

Newton was bitter and small in a way Leibniz’s irenicism couldn’t fathom. Newton burned down the world and took Leibniz’s optimism with him. The fire glints in our modern sensibility that evil is an argument against the existence of God. Ludwig didn’t understand that argument and never lost his faith or fundamental premise that God was great. That ignorance is where Leibniz met Dr. Pangloss. Where Spinoza and Montaigne retreated, Leibniz advanced. It would have been sound to look for monads, and it did happen eventually. We don’t have to travel that path.

Leibniz read Lady Anne Conway and could have been more generous in his debt to female philosophers but had his cross to bear. There is a story where Leibniz is the mouthpiece of a feminine school still taking root, and I like that view.

No. Leibniz's view is that two different things, including parts of space, can not differ, as he puts it, in number only. And this is based on the principle of Identity of Indiscernibles. Just to review, this is the principle that, if two things share every predicate which applies to them, they are the same thing. With regards to parts of space, then, even if they are empty and the of the same size and dimensions, they must differ at least in their relation to each other, with one above it with regards to a particular location, one below it, one to the side, and so on. While this is clearly contrary to Newton's view of space as "absolute", that is, with all its parts identical regardless of what's in them or from where they're observed, how closely it approximates and/or is compatible with Einstein's is still a bit controversial.

Again, that's obvious. There's always a context for any use of the term "nothing", which is itself not nothing. Here it refers to a characteristic and not at all uncommon dislike of philosophy, similar to that of Anytus at the end of the Meno.

The question however is an interesting one. It goes back to Aristotle's De Anima at 429a15, where the philosopher wonders how the soul and an object of perception are related. He rejects the idea that there must be an intervening medium between them (424b29), anticipating Descartes's corpuscularianism, since then there could be no contact between what's perceived and its perceiver. Rather, he opts for a Mitlaufer approach, where both the perceiver and the object of perception occur together, and must therefore in some sense be the same thing. From this deduction he moves on to a further premise on the example of auditory perception: Although hearing and a sound which is heard occur together, hearing exists as a capacity even without any sound, but sound does not exist without an action upon the ability to hear. In this way, as Aristotle puts it, the soul is "potentially everything" (431b20). Now that appears to be very near to what Leibniz says with regards to the monadological explanation of physical phenomena. Has Aristotle provided the foundation of an account of representational fuzziness here which excludes the requirement of having to make it an intervening object between the mind and its potential perceptual contents?

If nothing exists in the world but that which is self-predicating, and no external denomination of what exists is permissible, as Leibniz argues, then any movement in space of what's represented as an extended body, even one's own, is a matter of internal properties of what perceives, understands, or represents to itself as being moved. Therefore it would be inaccurate to say that Leibniz thinks motion isn't real, or constitutes a mere phenomenal bi-product of the ontological source from which it derives. The existence of motion on the contrary is accounted for by the claim that bodies don't do it, but only minds exclusively. This seems to be reasserting Aristotle's idea of an "unmoved mover", but that would also be a mistake, since by simple observation one can determine that the mind is rarely at rest. A boulder rolling down a hill doesn't look much like a movement of one's own mind, but it should be conceived on this view as mind-like nevertheless.

An example of mind-likeness (or, similarity to what minds do in reality) can be taken from visual experience. When one is deprived of sufficient light to see well, as when walking at night in a forest, optic sensitivity is increased as one's eyes become adjusted to a decreased light source. It seems that along Leibniz's lines of reasoning, inanimate objects can be partly explained by analogy to minds which have very little resources from sense-stimulation, but nevertheless are capable of perception in the sense of being affected by all of what's possible to perceive, even if in this case no clear distinctions can be supposed in this affectation. Rocks therefore may not look like a mind, but they must have to be enough of one to reflect all the others by their own internal predicates by what's possibly perceptible, like the sounds of a brook which is not noticed by some adjacent picnickers, without the picnickers.

But how to describe what's possible to perceive? According to the principle of parsimony of explanatory elements, if a single element does the job better or equally to what two can do, the former should be preferred. So if space and time could be accurately referenced by a single term, as with space/time, it should have methodological priority. And this holds for the distinction between soul and body as well. This latter is one of the problems which Leibniz had with the Mechanists, as giving rise to the irresolvable problem of their correspondence, and a dichotomy between free will and pre-determination. But one can talk about bodies as mind-aggregates without having to deny their existence. Instead, a body's relationship to the mind, or the volume of minds of which it is composed, is analogous to a rainbow's relationship to the droplets of which it consists (Leibniz's metaphor). What's seen is its chromatic series of colors, but it's the drops of water which cause the effect of getting wet in the rain, and constitute therefore a more accurate description of what it is. This dispenses with the mind/body dichotomy by joining both to a singular ontological account. And something similar can be seen to occur in the case of time as an internal predicate of what is represented as occupying a space, especially one's own, while retaining its ontological status as an objective content of perception, and generates no obligation to distinguish between time and space as separate objects or different categories of intuition. Might one say, then, that Leibniz has made a similar metaphysical adjustment on methodologically deductive and logical grounds as was required by the objects of Special Relativity and non-Euclidean geometry, pre-dating them by several centuries?