De la Recherche du Bien: A Study of Malebranche's Science of Ethics (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 261 The reader who is looking for close analysis of distinctive Leibnizian doztrines, problems, or texts will, with the exceptions noted below, be disappointed; most of the essays in this book are too general and philosophically nonchalant. The book consists of an introductory chapter followed by thirteen chapters which are divided into three parts entitled respectively "Investigations," "Assessments," and "Historical Studies." In the brief introductory chapter Leroy Loemker provides a thorough summary of the astonishing breadth of Leibniz's interests and accomplishments. In addition to his contributions to physics, mathematics, logic, and metaphysics, Leibniz made contributions to library organization and hydraulic engineering; he wrote satires, hymns, and risque rhymes; and finally, he spent far too much of his time as a servant and historian for the Hanoverian court. Part I, in addition to Loemker's three essays on judgments of fact, ideas, and substance, contains a paper by Milic Capee which explores in some detail Leibniz's theories of matter before his mature phenomenalism was developed. Also in this part is a paper by Ivor Leclerc which is one of the most succinct and accurate accounts of the historical development of the concept of matter which I have seen. Leclerc traces the concept from the notion of "stuff" in Aristotle through the concepts of matter as extension and matter as corpuscular to Leibniz's dynamics wherein Leibniz attempts to explain both the extension and motion of matter by the "relations between constituent monads" (p. 128). Unfortunately , Leclerc is unable in this short paper to provide the detail which might better explain just how Leibniz's phenomenalism works in his analysis of matter. Part II includes two papers which are more satisfying from the standpoint of a careful analysis of Leibniz's philosophy. Nicholas Rescher brings out three basic problems with Leibniz's metaphysics: (1) whether Leibniz can have logically incompossible substances, (2) whether Leibniz's changeless metaphysics can account for change, and (3) whether there is a conflict between Leibniz's metaphysical characterization of the best of all possible worlds and his moral characterization of that world. A more thorough examination of these problems, beginning with the excellent foundation Rescher provides, would be a welcome addition to Leibniz scholarship. N. L. Wilson's paper is a careful consideration of Leibniz's defense and use of his identity of indiscernibles principle, although Wilson's formulation of the principle, "Two things are identical if and only if they have all their non-spatio-temporal properties in common," is suspect (p. 195). It is suspect first because Leibniz only makes dissimilarity a necessary condition for diversity and second because Leibniz does not hold that there are common properties (see, for example, the fifth letter to Clarke, paragraph 47). Part III is devoted to examining more fully the influence on Leibniz's philosophy of Malebranche, Boyle, and the Herborn encyclopedists. These are very specialized studies by Loemker in the history of ideas and are likely to be of interest only to devoted Leibniz scholars. KENNETH CLATTERBAUGH University o] Washington, Seattle De la Recherche du Bien: A Study o] Malebranche's Science o/Ethics. By Craig Walton. International Archives of the History of Ideas, 48. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972. Pp. x+178. Gld. 31.50) Said Descartes of the last branch of his tree of philosophy, la morale, "I mean the highest and most perfect moral science which, presupposing a complete knowledge of the other moral sciences, is the last degree of wisdom" (The Philosophical Works o/Descartes, trans, by Haldane and Ross, I, 211). His followers all reiterated this goal, but its achievement , and the connexion between it and the knowledge it presupposed, proved as elusive 262 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY and as unclear for them as it had for him. Among them Malebranche has often been viewed by the English-speaking world as epitomizing the failure of the entire program. Now we have Craig Walton's book which attempts to show that Malebranche was not a mere Cartesian, and that he produced a coherent ethics--one which is securely rooted in his ontology. In this Walton succeeds admirably to the point that no one dealing with this topic will be able...