Polk on Augustine and Time

In a 1991 article in Augustinian Studies, Danne W. Polk talks about Augustine, Husserl (and to a lesser extent Heidegger), phenomenology, theological anthropology, and the relationship between time and eternity. And because I have written posts and a paper or two about all of them, it seems only fair to write one more. Allow me to begin by summarizing Polk's paper. It is a phenomenological anthropology in which Polk puts the time-awarness of human beingness under the microscope. And, after examination, Polk contrasts it with the being of God so that the being of God is revealed as the ground of the becoming of everything else. Here is a rough outline (Heideggarian language added by me in square brackets):

1. Human beings are time-trapped creatures [da-Sein]; God is not
2. As bodied things, humans beings interact with the world from a particular point of view [Geworfenheit, thrownness]; God sees it all
3. Human beings interact with all things as they arrive and disappear in the flow of time [held out into the nothing]; All things are present to God
   • Attention, expectation, and memory
4. For human beings, the present is not an objective point but a subjective synthesis; God's eternity is timeless
   • A critique of Aristotle's objective and static model of time
5. God's being supports beings; eternity is the hub of time's wheel

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Human Beings are time-trapped creatures; God is not

The way human being are in the world is tensed. We move. We have extension. There is a a before and an after, a future that flows into a past. Time is dramatic; time is storied. Our lives are stories, and we tell stories about our lives. Polk says that Aristotle described a cosmic or objective time existing outside us. But Augustine, and much later Edmund Husserl and other phenomenologists such as Heiddeger and Merleau-Ponty, did not understand time like that. They said time is intimate and basic to human experience. Time is subjective to us, an insight that Husserl attributed to Augustine's Confessions.

Temporality (pro tempore)--what Augustine called "subjective time" and what Husserl called "immanent time"--is so close to us that any attempt at uncovering the essence of the human person, or in more modern terms, a description of human existence, must include an equal attempt at a personal or 'authentic' portrayal of the way time in fact appears to us. For Husserl, this amounts to a 'pure' description of how 'external' or 'transcendent' objects come to be constituted within the continual flow of experience. . . . [Later, Heidegger would say that the] human subject as it exists in time (or as time) is . . . the phenomenological question par excellance.

If Aristotle is right about time being objective, we cannot know. How could we know? We have no access to objectivity. But we know time because we are time. "This field of presence is not the presence of God, but rather, it is the presence of ourselves in the existential unfolding of our own experience" (66).

And why are humans so trapped in time? We are so because our bodies fix us in place. Our bodies locate us. “The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is … to be intervolved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them.”[6] We cannot know nor do we experience time as an objective whole, but only in our fixed locatedness. This qualifies all human knowing.

Things come and go

Time, then, cannot be understood objectively. We only understand it from our perspective. And the same goes for everything else. Things come into our awarness--they come in from the future--and they pass out again--they recede into the past. Objects take time to be. "Neither thoughts nor objects are able to stand still, at least not in the radical sense that it would take to understand the object as God understands it."

Objects (including human beings) are 'measured' by birth and death. That is, nascency and finality are the limits or boundaries between which the process of becoming takes place. These limits, and what goes on between them, keep us from knowing the object (or person) as a whole. . . . And it is this existential situatedness which marks off the contrast between time and eternity. (67)

Attention, expectation, and memory

So, then, our perception of an object is achieved by a synthesis in the mind. "Consciousness is a 'bond' which holds the object with its elements of being and non-being together (Husserl's Zeiterlebnisse, internal time-consciousness). We give conscious attention to things (for Husserl, intentionality). We anticipate or expect them. And we hold their passing by us in memory until they are gone into nothingness. Trying to hold anything in stasis, in an unmoving now, is impossible. The now is too thin, too transitory. We synthesize to form a whole. "Memory is the power of synthetically preserving the meaning of an object as it takes its time to make an appearance" (75). Memory is the subjective form of time. Through anticipation and memory, the mind dilates. The sliver of the present is thickened to behold the world. Say a friend recites a psalm. "We do not receive all the words and silences at once, but gather them together in our mind to make a meaningful and understandable unity which fills itself out in its passing, moving from anticipation into the present and then into the past." In the psalm, "each moment exists in relation to all the others." (71)[2] Attention is necessary for this. Without attention, there can be no unity of experience.[1] The whole appearance takes time. Things occur in the realm of becoming, not in a fixed point of time, no matter how slight.

God's Time / Human Time

Objectivity, such as Aristotle's present now, is unavailable to us. Aristotle presumed a now or a present moment as an objective point. Standing apart, high on a height, the world could be examined objectively. But, of course, there is no now from which Aristotle may stand objectively and judge the world. Such objectivity could only be achieved if we could stop time's flow. And that, for Augustine, would be to step into eternity, for only God sees things as they are.

What seems to be present if we could stop the flow is eternity, stillness, sameness, it is the absolute ground of God. But for us, the flow of time continually pushes us off the center point of the exact now. (75)

Augustine said that eternity hides behind the flow of time. And when we raise the question of objectivity (or, rather, when we ask the question about the difference between objectivity and subjectivity), we stand at the rift between being and becoming. Augustine would say that we ask even how time and eternity are compatible, and with that, whether it is possible for God and creation to interact at all.[3]

Being and Becoming

Underneath this reflection on phenomenological, subjective time and experience versus Aristotle's objective time is the deep problem of how being and becoming might connect. Aristotle's objective now was upgraded by Augustine into God's timelessness, an eternity that for timely thing is like a distant star peeking out between rolling clouds. Nothing moves for God. Worlds stand still. Unchanging eternity supports and gives meaning to finitude and change. Eternity supports faith.[4] Consider this Lenten collect:

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

The thing is, Augustine's Neoplatonic metaphysics have been severely challenged in the twentieth century. There is a great suspicion that says this entire machinery of God's eternity is imported from Greek metaphysics, not the Bible. It is an ontology or onto-theology, they say, that has exposed Christian metaphysics to a host of dangers and defeats under the withering blows of Enlightenment ideas, under Spinoza's interrogation of substantia and Kant's critiques.[5] Many say its should be abandoned. A new metaphysics and a new doctrine of God should be built. I do not know. To run the other way seems to me to run into panentheism and process theology. Centuries of theological ground would be overturned. And God would not be eternal but everlasting. God is then not being but the most becoming of all becomings. God comes to resemble modernity; God becomes the wave that has us all.

Also to be considered is hamartiology. Augustine's teaching that sin (αμαρτια) is not being is, to my knowledge, the most useful understanding of sin that we have. [Augustine equates temporality with fallenness. "The experience of time indicates that the soul is 'distended,' fallen from the otium, the restful contemplation of eternal truth, into the busy negotium of temporal activity." (Robert O'Connel Art and the Christian Intelligence in Saint Augustine 72.] If being is eliminated as a category to Christian metaphysics, then this helpful explanation of how sin works as disorder is abandoned as well.

Therefore, I hardly know what to do. This is a major question that I have not yet solved. And, the thing is, I have done twenty years of work in an attempt to try and solve it! I'm afraid it is beyond me to understand the metaphysical philosophy necessary to choose wisely. So where does this leave things? I have only the incarnation. Augustine sought answers everywhere but in the narrative life of Jesus.

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Danne W. Polk. "Temporal Impermanence and the Disparity of Time and Eternity" Augustinian Studies 22 (1991) 63-82.

See the pattern Opening a Closed Circle for God || Creation; Eternity || Time.

Works Cited

Augustine. Confessions
Ibid., De Musica
Edmund Husserl. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness
Ibid., Phenomenological Psychology
Ibid., Ideas
Maurice Mereau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception
Heidegger. Being and Time

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[1] Paying attention--allowing something to unfold itself under sustained contemplation--is learning to see things coram Deo in the light of the resurrection. This is the theologian's calling a thing what it is. This is what the arts help us to do. Individually, we will never see a thing as it is [its absolute quiddity] with even a fully restored imago. But the community can together over time begin to take steps to reflect God's complete knowing. We are allowed, by grace, to name the cosmos. Human beings are Michelangelo, seeing the David inside the stone. / Here is where I can connect with the contemplative tradition, with the arts, with the ethics of being for others (Bonhoeffer or even Levinas), an ethics that gives others the attention/the respect to become what they are. Simone Weil's work on attention is worth noting. And the scientific method comes sheepishly to the table.

[2] Augustine is reminding me--such as how each and every moment in his psalm singing exists in relation to all the others--of Leibniz's Monadology. In his speculative metaphysics, the cosmos is made of innumerable points called monads. Each monad reflected from its position the entirety of the cosmos. Every monad forms an absolute relation with the others, yet each is its own individual thing. Each has its particular perspective. Each is its own center of the map of the whole. There is absolute individuality and absolute relation. Polk refers to the Confessions (XI, 18): "An essential difference between eternity and temporality is that eternity has no particular perspective while temporality is always situationally located." For more on Leibniz, see my introduction to his Discourse on Metaphysics.

[3] Augustine drew a line between everlasting being and finite non-being. God was on one side; creation on the other. Now quoting from Polk (69) "Being," he thought, "is what it is because of itself, and time at best is only an image of the eternal sameness of Being. This means that objects are not only inadequate because of the way they appear, but because they lack the quality of true existence, 'for what is forever changing is not, since it does not abide.' But objects in the world do abide for a time, they are given a quasi-existence in 'my' time, and it is in this sense that an object is 'not wholly without being; rather, it is not supremely existent.' In this way, earth and sky exist as objects for me. In a sense, they are intimations of objects, subtle and delicate announcements of stability, which even though inadequate, participate in the ontological categories of the good and the beautiful. [Elsewhere, Augustine refers to time as a trace (vestigium or copy (imitatio) of eternity.] Still, in reference to subjective time, the world and things exist, but this realm of becoming is basically and essentially a lack of immutable Being. Unlike the objects of creation, Being has perfect self-identity which, for Augustine, is none other than the absolute being of God. By this ultimate standard, temporal objects are equivalent to nothingness just as our knowledge in comparision to God is equivalent to ignorance." Later Polk says "Augustine does not hold that objects are ever 'really real,' becuase all things are created, except for God, therefore all things are in some way mutable. That is, all things lack Being. (City of God VIII, 6). "Objects do show themselves, but they do so in time where faculties such as memory and expectation must be employed in order to hold the object together." (78) This makes objectivity a problem. // C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce comes to mind. As does Einstein's universe, where everything is exactly this: moving and subject to constant entropy. God, however, calls order from dissolving chaos. This order needn't be thought of as unchanging Being. Perhaps it need only be good enough, and that is as much as any created thing may be. // I cannot help but quote another lengthy bit from Polk--and I quote this because I hear its echo in liturgy even though it is talking about Augustine's view that the flow of time reflects Being's influence in its going:

In his early work, De Musica, Augustine does portray time as an image of eternity, but he moves away from this view toward an exploration of a radical difference between time and eternity in Confessions: 'times are ordered and made and changed, imitating eternity as they do when the turn of the heavens comes back to the same state and the heavenly bodies to the same place, and in days and months and years and centuries and others revolutions of the stars obey the laws of equality, unity, and order. So terrestrial things are subject to celestial, and their time circuits join together in harmonious seccession for a poem of the universe. (VI, 11.29)

Note also how the entire machinery of Augustine's anthropology of anticipation and memory come together in the singing of a psalm (Confessions XI, 28):

Suppose that I am going to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my faculty of expectation is engaged by the whole of it. But once I have begun, as much of the psalm as I have removed from my province of expectation and relegated to the past now engages my memory, and the scope of the action which I am performing is divided between the two faculties of memory and expectation, the one looking back to the part which I have already recited, the other looking forward to the part which I have still to recite. But my faculty of attention is present all the while, and through it passes what was the future in the process of becoming the past. As the process continues, the province of memory is extended in proportion as that of expectation is reduced, until the whole of my expectation is absorbed. This happens when I have finished and it has all passed into the province of memory.

[4] Because temporality has its source in eternity, God's providence makes from flux his economy--the fortunes of our lives included. // Remember that, like Plato, Augustine believed in the natural immortality of the soul. That belief is the (pagan) flaw in the Western mystical tradition. Because their anthropology is flawed and their exegesis is at best dated, how can they be guides for spiritual practice? For ethical practice, of course, but not for guiding the soul. Augustine wrongly taught an inward journey because the soul participated in God's eternity. Perhaps a robust pneumatology might alter the flooring but keep the walls in place?

[5] See the posts Onto-Theology and Its Fate; On Panenthism; The Three Options; Heraclitus's Chiasmus as a philosophical step toward sacrament; You have to set aside a block of time; Padgett versus Wood on time and eternity; Hannah's Natality and Juergen's Novum.

[6] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, ed. by Thomas Baldwin (Routledge: London, 2004), 93.

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Excursis: By reading this article, I am set up to make a leap forward. I am set to unify two arguments that, until this point, I had always considered very different. These arguments are arguments about time and arguments about interpretation. The former argument is represented by Augustine and phenomenology. The latter is represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer and hermeneutics. I can now bring them into relationship withone another in a vertical and a horizontal. Phenomenology occupies the vertical around the question of God's being; hermeneutics occupies the horizontal with ethical praxis at the center. Both are, of course, united in the one living One. He occupies both and transcends each. At the juxtaposing center is the perfect quiddity of shalom.

G. W. Leibniz. Discourse on Metaphysics

G W. Leibniz's Discourse on Metaphysics is the olive branch of a mind at once seizing and being seized by the churning intellectualism of the seventeenth century. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1717), forty at the time he penned his first mature outline of a universal metaphysic, was a man standing in between the ideological armies of Cartesian modernism and Aristotelian conservatism. His Discourse sounds above the crush of these two ideologies. It paves another way. And, in doing so, it has long outgrown its place as a piece of private correspondence to inform thinkers across the disciplines of the present day.

The roots of Leibniz’s intellectual modernism are traced to his youth. G. W. Leibniz was born July 1 at Leipzig, the son of a professor of moral philosophy. His mother also had university ties; her father was a Professor of Law. Culturally, the violence of the Thirty-Years war would subside in another two years time. Yet, Leibniz’s own intellectual violence grew with age. Upon his father’s death, the six-year old was allowed access to an expansive library. He taught himself enough Greek and Latin to, “immerse myself in the historians and poets.” He absorbed the ideas of Plato, Herodotus, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, and many others, all without intellectual prejudice. Leibniz’s gift to all was the unity of a curious mind. Authors were valued each for their own contribution. It was a habit of synthesis he would carry with him throughout life.

As a young man, Leibniz’s democratic intelligence had great affect upon his career. He studied law and philosophy at the universities of Leibzig and Altdorf, yet declined a university post in lieu of the broader opportunities of public service. (No doubt, the cultural stagnations attending a protracted war made a professorship repellent to the autodidact.) His employer was the Elector of Mainz. Leibniz’s flair for law, mining diplomatically from both scholastic canon and scientific analysis, brought him success and opportunities for travel. One diplomatic mission took him to Paris in the spring of 1672.

Paris in the seventeenth century was the intellectual center of the world. Aristotelian scholasticism, traditionally dominant in the schools, was failing in influence before the demonstrable results of the modern philosophers: Galileo, Torricelli, Cavaliere, Descartes, Pascal, and Hobbes. The substantial forms of the schoolmen were being poured into new wineskins of geometry, mechanics, and motion. New solutions reopened new problems to scrutiny: In a world of atomic flux, how can there be any continuity of matter? What is the relationship between contingency and necessity? Can we obtain a clear and distinct idea of things as they are en res by observing things as they appear to be?

In order to participate in the Parisian milieu, Leibniz needed to learn many new ideas. His education was Aristotelian. He was a humanist in the renaissance tradition. Therefore, the modernism of Paris was entirely new. He worked hard to understand and embrace the truths of its observational methodology. He negotiated meetings with the philosophers Antoine Arnauld and Nicolas Malebranche (he would also visit Baruch Spinoza in Holland). He read unpublished manuscripts by Pascal and Descartes. Yet, it was the teaching of Christiaan Huygens that equipped him to practice modern philosophy.

Huygens’s mathematical instruction found fertile soil; Leibniz’s progress was quick. He was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1673. His famous calculating machine was built that same year. He suggested ideas for improvements in barometry, time keeping and the calculation of distance, as well as for mechanical devices such as pumps, carriages, gears, and lenses. By the time Leibniz returned to Hanover in 1676, his mastery of mathematics was so thorough that, in 1675, at twenty-eight years of age, he had discovered the infinitesimal, or differential, calculus. Its dynamism formed the basis of all of Leibniz’s subsequent philosophical reasoning to his death on November 14, 1716.

Until 1675, a type of curve existed, called a mechanical or transcendent curve, which defied geometrical analysis. The mechanical curve resembles the shape made by a sail in the wind. Cartesians judged the curve to be forever inexplicable to mathematics because its explanation would require the knowledge of all possible numbers, a knowledge in extenso. Leibniz disagreed. The entire shape of the curve does not need to be explained, he reasoned, but only its geometrical movement. If the difference between each of its infinitesimally small points could be expressed geometrically, then all that would be needed to complete the analysis would be the movement of the equation. Expressing the generation of the curve geometrically–its “construction principle”–is tantamount to expressing the curve itself, and without the requirement of in extenso understanding. All that is needed to plot an infinitely complex shape is a foundational measurement and dynamic principle of continuity based on that measurement.

Leibniz’s mathematical insight was, in reality, an application of his rationalist understanding of knowledge. Throughout his educational life, he envisioned a universal characteristic language, an algebraic mathematics of logic (ars characteristica) by which all knowledge could not only be explained and compared, but ultimately constructed. Descartes had considered such a thing, but dismissed it since such a language would depend upon a true and absolute, if not omniscient, understanding. Leibniz, again, disagreed. Mathematics, he said, works by the dynamic manipulation of a handful of algebraic symbols. The sum of all equations is not needed to make mathematical advances. It was the same solution he proposed for the problem of the transcendental curve.

Yet, this application of thought traced far larger horizons. This was a worldview, a cosmology. The universal characteristic was a logos, a ratio of the universe. It was a logic so large that it could only be called a metaphysic. Leibniz’s universal characteristic required a metaphysical basis which would explain not only the change and extension of substances (if not a re-definition of substance itself), but also the contingency and necessity of God and of humanity. It would be a unique synthesis of truths from both Aristotelian scholasticism and Cartesian modernism. He appended descriptive abstracts of his metaphysic in his correspondence with Arnauld in 1686 (these are today incorporated as sectional summaries.) The whole was also prepared for publication, though its was not printed in his lifetime. It is known today as the Discourse on Metaphysics.

There are three principle aspects to the Discourse, all of which serve to make it a metaphysic in the style of his universal characteristic: first, there is existence; then, substance; and, lastly, there is proportion, or how these substances work together.

“God is an absolutely perfect being,” he writes, “whence it follows that God . . . acts in the most perfect manner.” Leibniz was not known for his religiosity, but was following his age by grounding his universal metaphysic in the nature of God. Descartes had done the same in the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), as had the medieval scholastics. Substances must have reason for existing in the infinite variety he conceived. Therefore, God must exist and have a reason for making the world as it is. Leibniz found the answer in the perfection of God, which results in a world made as perfectly as possible. He expressed perfection through a variety/simplicity criterion in which the best solution finds geometric expression in the balance between the complexity of a figure and the simplicity of its informing equation: “God . . . has chosen the most perfect [method of creation], that is to say the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena.” Voltaire later ridiculed Leibniz through the character of Dr. Pangloss in Candide (1759) for his belief that this was the best of all possible worlds, yet Leibniz’s variety/simplicity criterion is understandable given the cosmological philosophy of the time.

The perfection of God makes simple substances a metaphysical, and not just philosophical, assertion. God, from an innumerable number of possible worlds, actualizes the substances that together express the most perfect world. There are no atoms, no vacuum, only an infinity of simple substances. Substances, also called “ideas” and “souls”, had not yet achieved the true idealism that would characterize their expression in Leibniz’s more mature Monadology (1714). Yet, the conceptual foundation was already there in the concept of expression and the identity of indiscernables.

To define these terms, it is helpful to reconsider the mechanical curve which Leibniz explained using the differential calculus. Each of the curve’s infinite number of points contains virtually the entire curve, though the curve itself stretches infinitely into space. This point-by-point containment corresponds to the concept of expression. Each substance in Leibniz’s metaphysic is entirely complete in itself. It contains in itself all that defines it, both past, present and future. Its relationships to other substances are also contained in its concept. Every substance uniquely reflects the universe from its own position in relation to the whole as a windowless world unto itself.

Such uniqueness is what is meant by the identity of indiscernibles. Leibniz’s epistemology defined a true expression as that which contains in its subject all which may be predicated of it. Therefore, a subject is absolutely complete in itself; it contains all of its possible predications. This means that no two substances are completely identical. The identity of indiscernibles was informed both by the pre-formationist biology of the day and the recent discovery of the microscope.

Having laid the foundation of his metaphysics, Leibniz now had only to put the machine in motion, a process he understood as a function of God’s harmonious interaction with the universe. Leibniz called the interaction of substances a pre-established harmony. The system that results is, as he had hoped, one of immense difference and organic dependency.

That is not to say there are no internal problems created by the system. His effort to defend his metaphysic against Arnauld’s charge of determinism attests to that. Indeed, Leibniz’s effort to make peace between necessity and contingency within the same metaphysic makes the Discourse a classic text on the subject. Scholars still debate whether freedom is possible in his system, constrained as it is by the completeness and resulting necessity of each substance.

On the other hand, scholars are finding much that is to be learned from Leibniz’s philosophy. Many of his ideas, never properly assembled and scattered through thousands of pages of correspondence (luckily, Leibniz, who served as chief librarian in the court of Hanover and who was offered a position at the Vatican, collected his correspondence), are today being published for the first time. Three volumes of the Prussian Academy’s forty-volume critical edition are available. Thus, Leibniz’s contribution to the history of ideas is being reassessed. The organic and dynamic relationship he saw in all things influences many disciplines, including modern metaphysics of modality, phenomenology, symbolic logic, the desire of physics for its own universal characteristic and even Chinese Studies (Leibniz made careful analysis of the I Ching and of Chinese political science). He has also been called the father of supercomputers, relay switches, and virtual reality. It is no wonder that Alfred North Whitehead included Leibniz in his century of ideas.

So then, G. W. Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics is an olive branch arguing for the related dependency of all ideas upon each other, regardless of their source. To dismiss him as a system is to dismiss the consistency of the human mind and the possibility of intellectual progress. Therefore, reading the Discourse is both a tour and a possibility. It is a tour because the Discourse introduces its reader to the basic problems and ideas that informed the early Enlightenment. It is a possibility because those same ideas ultimately create and critique the philosophical story of today.

Bibliography

Writings

Leibniz, G. W. Samtliche Schriften und Briefe, ed. German Academy of Sciences. 40 vols. Darmstadt and Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1923- .
---. Die Philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz. 7 vols. Ed. C. I. Gerhardt. Berlin: Weidmann, 1875-90.
---. Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2nd ed. Ed. and trans. L. E. Loemker. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969.
---. Leibniz: Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. G. H. R. Parkinson. London: Dent, 1973.
---. New Essays on Human Understanding. Ed. and trans. P. Remnant and J. Bennett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
---. Theodicy, trans. E. M. Huggard (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1985).
---. G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. R. Ariew and D. Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989).
---. Leibniz: Monadology and other Philosophical Essays. Trans. Paul Schrecker and Anne Martin Schrecker. Bobbs-Merrill. Library of Liberal Arts. Indianapolis, 1965.
---. Leibniz: Selections. Ed. Philip P. Wiener. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1951.

Further Reading

Bobro, Marc and Kenneth Clatterbaugh “Unpacking the Monad: Leibniz’s Theory of Causality” Monist 7.3 (1996): 408.
Broad, C. D. Leibniz: an Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Brown, Stuart. “Leibniz and the Classical Tradition” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2.1 (1995): 68.
Hooker, M., ed. Leibniz: Critical and Interpretive Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
Jolley, Nicholas, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Jolley, Nicholas. “Leibniz.” A Companion to the Philosophers. Ed. Robert L. Arrington. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. 360-366.
Mates, B. The Philosophy of Leibniz: Metaphysics and Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Riley, Patrick. Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Sesonske, Alexander. “Pre-Established Harmony and Other Comic Strategies” Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 55.3 (1997): 253.
Steinhart, Eric. “Leibniz’s Palace of the Fates: A Seventeenth-Century Virtual Reality System” Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments 6.1 (1997): 133.
The Monist 81.4 (1998) is entirely devoted to various aspects of Leibniz’s metaphysics.

Web Sites

http://www.uh.edu/~gbrown/start.html Gregory Brown’s Leibniz homepage. Brown’s website is an expansive portal to all things Leibniz. It includes links to the Leibniz Listserv, various societies and journals as well as information in the form of journal and encyclopedia articles.

http://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Leibniz/RouseBall/RB_Leibnitz.html An article on Leibniz mathematical ideas which forms part of a collection of mathematical biographies made available online.

http://mally.stanford.edu/leibniz.html This Stanford University website is Leibniz-at-a-glance, including dates of authorship for his principles works, events in his life, and a short bibliography for further reading which focuses specifically on his conceptual philosophy.

http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html An online publication of the article, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” by Charles S. Pierce reprinted from Popular Science Monthly 12. Jan. 1878, 286-302. The article is concerned with logic in general and the contributions made by Descartes and Leibniz in particular.

http://etext.leeds.ac.uk/leibniz/leibniz.htm An online publication of George MacDonald Ross’s book, Leibniz (Oxford University Press (Past Masters) 1984) made available through the University of Leeds Electronic Text Centre. A comprehensive and understandable study of Leibniz’s thought, with special attention given to the mathematical basis of his insights in philosophy and logic.

http://www.tulane.edu/~plodge/lzlinks/ Leibniz Links: A selection of web pages devoted to the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz compiled by Paul Lodge.

http://www.philosopher.org.uk/ Philosophy Since the Enlightenment by Roger Jones. This website is very helpful for seeing Leibniz’s philosophy against the philosophical spectrum of present and past.
(c) 2002 Thom Chittom
Printed by permission, Barnes & Noble World Digital Library