On Leibniz: Expanded Edition

Postscript

397 This inventory of my Leibnizian writings merits a brief preliminary account of the history of my concern with the work of this fascinating and many-sided thinker, whose influence has been a recurrent leitmotiv in my life. Indeed, our initial contact dates from a development of merely symbolic importance—seeing that it occurred in 1928 when I was only four or five months old—namely, my parents’ move to the house of my early childhood at No. 3 Leibnizstrasse in the Westphalian town of Hagen. Though I had certainly encountered Leibniz in undergraduate history of philosophy courses, and had been intrigued by the strangeness of his system of monadology, I became seriously interested in him only after graduating from Queens College (New York) in June of 1949. That summer I read Bertrand Russell’s The Philosophy of Leibniz, and this motivated me to more serious reading and thinking about Leibniz’s philosophy of mathematics and physics after I started graduate work in Princeton that fall. It was then that I discovered Louis Couturat’s La Logique de Leibniz, and this splendid book stimulated me to work up a longish study of Leibniz’s metaphysics during my first year in graduate school (the 1949–1950 academic year). My interest in Leibniz dates from a time—the late 1940s—when the history of philosophy was an underdeveloped area of American scholarship, at any rate outside the classical domain. It was two figures of a past generation (Russell and Couturat) that led me to Leibniz, but it was Leibniz himself who held me there. It is perhaps fitting that I had no teacher in Leibnizian matters, but was an autodidact, relying on books alone. As matters turned out, my Leibniz project proved to be the first draft of my 1951 doctoral dissertation on Leibniz’s Cosmology: A Reinterpretation of the Philosophy of Leibniz in the Light of His Physical Theories. (By having stolen a Postscript 398 postscript march on a dissertation project in this way, it became possible for me to earn the Ph.D. in just two years, while still only twenty-two years of age.) Work on this dissertation provided the stimulus for a group of articles on Leibniz’s logic and philosophy that appeared during the 1952–1955 period. This work firmly implanted in my mind an ongoing interest in Leibniz’s ideas and projects. During my years at Lehigh University (1957–1961), I taught Leibniz from time to time in courses on the history of modern philosophy, but otherwise my Leibnizian interests lay fallow during the 1956–1966 decade. And since coming to the University of Pittsburgh as professor in 1961, a graduate seminar on Leibniz became a regular feature of my teaching repertoire. This kept my interest alive, and in 1967 issued in my exposition of The Philosophy of Leibniz, an attempt to meet the need for a well-rounded introduction for advanced students. Now too I began to be involved in various organizational efforts. In November of 1967 the Leibniz scholars of the world gathered in Hanover, Germany, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of his death. Dr. Wilhelm Totok, the able and enterprising head of the Nether-Saxon State Library, was the leading spirit behind this celebration, and on its occasion he took the decisive steps towards launching the International Leibniz Society. It was founded at a meeting in the Stadthalle at which I was present, and I was chosen a member of its Council (Beirat), an office I continue to hold to the present day. I also became a member of the editorial board of the official journal of this society, Studia Leibnitiana. (Indeed, it was my plea that a Latin rather than German title be adopted—for reasons of internationalism and in homage to Leibniz’s boundary-transcending spirit—that led to the selection of this title in the place of Leibniz-Studien.) When the idea of an American Leibniz Society first came to be mooted in 1976, I was also involved. I helped to organize the society, became a member of its Executive Committee, and handled the negotiations that led to its affiliation with the International Leibniz Society. During the 1970s, I maintained a steady interest in Leibniz, writing, on the average, one paper every two years. And at the end of the decade, in 1979 I published Leibniz: An Intro­ duction to His Philosophy, a revised and expanded version of my earlier book, taking account of the active...