display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
14 ideas
| 5034 | Mind is a thinking substance which can know God and eternal truths [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Minds are substances which think, and are capable of knowing God and of discovering eternal truths. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Antoine Arnauld [1686], 1687.10.09) | |
| A reaction: 'God' is there because the ability to grasp the ontological argument is seen as basic. Note a firm commitment to substance-dualism, and a rationalist commitment to the spotting of necessary truths as basic. He is not totally wrong. |
| 5045 | No machine or mere organised matter could have a unified self [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: By means of the soul or form, there is a true unity which is called the 'I' in us; a thing which could not occur in artificial machines, nor in the simple mass of matter, however organised it may be. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New System and Explanation of New System [1696], p.120) | |
| A reaction: I think the unity of consciousness and the unified Self are different phenomena. A wonderful remark about artificial intelligence for 1696! Note the idea of functionalism contained in 'organised'. Personally I see the brain as a 'mass of matter'. |
| 5054 | Animal thought is a shadow of reasoning, connecting sequences of images by imagination [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The sequences of the brutes are but a shadow of reasoning, that is to say, they are but connexions of imagination, transitions from one image to another. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref) | |
| A reaction: This account of animal thought cannot capture the fact that they are motivated by their images, and obviously make decisions based on them. Externally, there is usually an obvious reason why even an insect does something. |
| 5061 | Animals are semi-rational because they connect facts, but they don't see causes [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: There is a connexion between the perceptions of animals, which bears some resemblance to reason: but it is based only on the memory of facts or effects, and not at all on the knowledge of causes. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Principles of Nature and Grace based on Reason [1714], §5) | |
| A reaction: This amounts to the view that animals can do Humean induction (where you see regularities), but not Leibnizian induction (where you see necessities). I say all minds perceive patterns, but only humans can think about the patterns they have perceived. |
| 5032 | It seems probable that animals have souls, but not consciousness [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It appears probable that the brutes have souls, though they are without consciousness. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Antoine Arnauld [1686], 1686.12.08) | |
| A reaction: This will be a response to Descartes, who allowed animals sensations, but not minds or souls. Personally I cannot make head or tail of Leibniz's claim. What makes it "apparent" to him? |
| 19354 | Leibniz introduced the idea of degrees of consciousness, essential for his monads [Leibniz, by Perkins] |
| Full Idea: The designation of degrees of conscious awareness is one of Leibniz's most significant innovations, and it is fundamental to almost every aspect of his account of monads. | |
| From: report of Gottfried Leibniz (works [1690]) by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 4.I | |
| A reaction: A very important development, which seems to have been ignored by philosophers for three hundred years, since they usually treat consciousness as all-or-nothing. Introspection makes degrees obvious, and I suspect sparrows are down the scale. |
| 19438 | Our large perceptions and appetites are made up tiny unconscious fragments [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Our great perceptions and our great appetites of which we are conscious, are composed of innumerable little perceptions and little inclinations of which we cannot be conscious. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Remond de Montmort [1715], 1715 §2) | |
| A reaction: I think this is a wonderfully accurate report of how the mind is, in comparison with the much more simplistic views presented by most philosophers of that era. And so much understanding flows from Leibniz's account. |
| 12944 | It is a serious mistake to think that we are aware of all of our perceptions [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Many errors can flow from the belief that the only perceptions in the soul are the ones of which it is aware. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: What a perceptive remark, for its time! I took it that it was only modern neuroscience and psychology which had woken us up to how much non-conscious activity is central to the mind. |
| 19355 | The soul doesn't understand many of its own actions, if perceptions are confused and desires buried [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The soul does many things without knowing how it does them - when it does them by means of confused perceptions and unconscious inclinations or appetites. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Note L to Bayle's 'Rorarius' [1705], [L]) | |
| A reaction: This increasingly strikes me as a wonderful and important insight for its time. He's really paid attention to his own mind, and given up the simplistic view that derives from Descartes. Are birds conscious? Yes or no! Silly. |
| 2109 | Increase a conscious machine to the size of a mill - you still won't see perceptions in it [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If a conscious machine were increased in size, one might enter it like a mill, but we should only see the parts impinging on one another; we should not see anything which would explain a perception. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716], §17) | |
| A reaction: A wonderful image for capturing a widely held intuition. It seems to motivate Colin McGinn's 'Mysterianism'. The trouble is Leibniz didn't think big/small enough. Down at the level of molecules it might become obvious what a perception is. 'Might'. |
| 12951 | Abstraction attends to the general, not the particular, and involves universal truths [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Beasts recognise whiteness, but this does not amount to abstraction, which requires attention to the general apart from the particular, and consequently involves knowledge of universal truths. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.11) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure where 'truth' creeps into this. I might hallucinate pink elephants, and abstract the general notion of pink from them. Nevertheless, the features picked out in abstraction tend to be the shared features. |
| 13193 | Active force is not just potential for action, since it involves a real effort or striving [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Active force should not be thought of as the simple and common potential [potentia] or receptivity to action of the schools. Rather, active force involves an effort [conatus] or striving [tendentia] toward action. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Body and Force, Against the Cartesians [1702], p.252) | |
| A reaction: This is why Leibniz is lured into making his active forces more and more animistic, till they end up like proto-minds (though never, remember, conscious and willing minds). |
| 19364 | Volition automatically endeavours to move towards what it sees as good (and away from bad) [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Volition is the effort or endeavour ('conatus') to move towards what one finds good and away from what one finds bad, the endeavour arising immediately out of one's awareness of those things. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: Modern neuroscience seems to confirm that there is a chicken-and-egg problem here. Is the moment of perception as good or bad itself an act of volition, or is it neutral? |
| 13183 | Primitive forces are internal strivings of substances, acting according to their internal laws [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Primitive forces can be nothing but the internal strivings [tendentia] of simple substances, striving by means of which they pass from perception to perception in accordance with a certain law of their nature. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Burcher De Volder [1706], 1704 or 1705) | |
| A reaction: 'Perception' sounds a bit crazy, but he usually qualifies that sort of remark by saying that it is an 'analogy' with conscious willing souls. The 'internal strivings of substances' is a nice phrase for the basic powers in nature where explanations stop. |