Leibniz: An Introduction (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 105 14) The happy conclusion, except for the case of the martyr, is that Hobbes saves piety, but not theology, and he provides for the integrity of scientific knowledge. Describing Hobbes's philosophy as "'a-theistic," Johnson summarizes: Hobbes "sharply separated faith from reason and isolated piety from theology. Such a view let him completely free to construct a metaphysics , a psychology, and a politics in which the idea of God played no functional role and in which the traditional religious issues could be subjected to the severest criticism and finally left in the hands of the ruler" (p. 124). Johnson reveals the momentous achievement of Hobbes's capacity to deal with the divine as well as with the secular aspects of experience, even if there are passages in his writings that cause intellectual discomfort from both sides. There is such a question as that of false prophets, which requires a covenant before truth can be revealed (e.g., Lev., iii, 402). There is the further question of the proof of God's existence from his power (Lev., iii, 345-346, and passim), even if it does not reveal, as Fulton Anderson points out in the parallel in Bacon's thought that "the objects given to sense manifest the power of God but not his will and essential nature (The philosophy of Francis Bacon, p. 54). Also, as we have before noted, the questions of peace and its workings are beclouded by obligations sometimes said to be of divine origin. sometimes not. Perhaps some of these questions can be answered by a closer understanding of what Schneider felicitously calls "the civilizing arts." Thomas llobbes in Ills Time is a fine and illuminatingwork that deserves close reading for a fresh and needed reinterpretation of Hobbes. One may, however, also discern from this work that, placed in historical perspective, Hobbes's philosophical, but less pious, successors are Jeremy Bentham, and, in a humanistic sense, John Dewey. BERTRAM MORRIS UniversiO' of Colorado Leibniz: An Introduction. By C. D. Broad. Ed. by C. Lewy. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Pp. xi+174. 514.95 cloth. $4.95 paper.I Assessing this work presents the reviewer with some special problems. (11 The volume contains Broad's Cambridge undergraduate lectures on the philosophy of Leibniz which were delivered initiallyin 1948-1949 and again the following year revised. Thus at least a quarter of a century elapsed between the preparation of the lectures and the present publication. (2) Because this material was not specially prepared by Broad for publication, it has retained some features more appropriate to a lecture than to a published work, e.g., the style, the recapitulation of the point at issue, and the lack of detailed references. (3) The editor has tried to provide references to currently available English translations where possible, but since Broad himself usually gave no page citations and sometimes offered only a paraphrase of the actual text, it has been a formidable task, and one can only hope that all the references are accurate. (4) Since Professor Broad is dead, he cannot respond to such comments upon his work as may be inaccurate or unfair. The title is far too encompassing for the scope of the work. It is not a wide-ranging introduction to the multifaceted life and thought of Leibniz. Only brief mention is made of Leibniz's contributions in such areas as mathematics, science, technology, political and legal theory. history and linguistics. At most this can be thought of as an introduction to Leibniz's philosophy , but even here there are major omissions in Leibniz's logic and a quite brief treatment of his ethics. Of course, H. W. B. Joseph had preempted the title Lectures on the Philosoph.v of Leibniz. But Lewy might have entitled the volume C. D. Broad's Lectures on Leibniz 's Metaphysics and Epistemology and thereby more accurately conveyed the major thrust of the work, because Leibniz's ethics receives comparatively little attention and almost all of his theology can be reasonably subsumed under his metaphysics. Broad himself treats the controversy over transubstantiation and the doctrine of the vinculum substantiale under the theory of monads. The text...