Maria Rosa Antognazza
Biographic Data
| ID | 3440607 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Maria Rosa Antognazza |
| GIVEN NAMES | Maria Rosa |
| FAMILY NAME | Antognazza |
| SIGNATURE | ANTOGNAZZA M R |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5214-479X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 62 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 43 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Leibniz’s opposition to monism
Leibniz's metaphysics appears to go a long way towards monism: it supports a strong dependence of limited things on the absolute or God and understands this dependence not only as causal dependence but also as a pervasive ontological dependence which involves the communality of nature between absolute and limited. Yet, Leibniz stops short of affirming monism. Why? This paper takes a fresh look at Leibniz's reasons for opposing monism through the …
Intuition in the history of philosophy (what’s in it for philosophers today?)
Intuitive cognition in the Latin medieval tradition
This paper explores some key features of Medieval accounts of intuition, focusing on Thomas Aquinas (1224/5–1274), on the one hand, and on Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308), Peter Auriol (c. 1280–1322), and William Ockham (c. 1287-1347), on the other hand. The first section is devoted to the type of intuitive cognition which is accepted by all these authors, namely, the immediate and direct grasp of some present material object by the senses. It is from…
Oxford Handbook of Leibniz
Truth and Toleration in Early Modern Thought
The Reformation presented with heightened urgency the question of how to relate the system of beliefs regarded as fundamental by an established political community to alternative beliefs introduced by new groups and individuals. This chapter revisits different ways of addressing this problem, focusing on the relationship between truth and toleration. After discussing a variety of approaches, it investigates whether grounds for a general and princ…
Knowledge and Belief from Plato to Locke
This essential historical introduction to the main themes of the book starts with a close, sympathetic, and significantly novel analysis (with reference to associated arguments) of a famous argument in Plato’s Republic in which Plato draws a distinction of kind between knowledge and belief, and between their objects. It is then demonstrated that the distinction, broadly so understood, remained a dominant force, in one form or another, in all non-…
The Oxford Handbook of Leibniz
The extraordinary breadth and depth of Leibniz’s intellectual vision commands ever increasing attention. As more texts gradually emerge from seemingly bottomless archives, new facets of his contribution to an astonishing variety of fields come to light. This volume provides a uniquely comprehensive, systematic, and up-to-date appraisal of Leibniz’s thought thematically organized around its diverse but interrelated aspects. Discussion of his philo…
Probability and Statistics
This chapter investigates why Leibniz, an outstanding mathematician with deep interest in combinatorial reasoning, failed to contribute to the mathematics of probability. It explains that Leibniz was more interested in developing a new kind of logic that could guide human reasoning in all circumstances and that this logic is contained in his De incerti aestimatione . This chapter also considers the three important probabilistic and statistical id…
Theory of Knowledge: Mathematical and Natural Science
Leibniz’s theory of knowledge is an investigation of the conditions that enable human beings to have that degree of certainty which is appropriate to our various areas of concern. This chapter concerns demonstrative certainty in the sciences of mathematics, which contain necessary a priori truths, and the natural sciences, which are based on the senses and structural principles drawn from reason. According to Leibniz, we rarely attain maximum cer…
The Scientia Generalis and the Encyclopaedia
This chapter discusses Leibniz’s plan for a new encyclopaedia. In addition to being a collection of all available knowledge, this encyclopaedia would be an instrument for demonstrating new knowledge and, thereby, for contributing to humankind’s wisdom or happiness. The central plank of this plan is the establishment of a Scientia Generalis that would serve as a preliminary tool. The texts dealing with the Scientia Generalis , however, raise two p…
The Calculus
This chapter discusses the history of Leibniz's work on infinitesimal calculus of which a considerable part is still unknown. His new method, emerging from studies in the summing of infinite number series and the quadrature of curves, combines two procedures with opposite orientation, differentiation and integration. These two procedures are united in a common formalism introducing in 1675 the symbols d and ∫ for differentiation and integration. …
The Origins and History of the Earth
This chapter examines Leibniz’s contribution to the earth sciences. It focuses on his history of the earth, or Protogaea , written during the early 1690s. In this work, Leibniz used minerals and fossils to reconstruct prehistory, applying the methods of the historian to the archives of nature. The argument here is that Leibniz’s history of the earth helped to create conditions for the possibility of geology and paleontology as modern disciplines.
Leibniz as Historian
The aim of this chapter is to provide a first impression of Leibniz’s long and deep engagement with history and historiography, in the hope of stimulating a more thorough investigation of this poorly studied aspect of his oeuvre. After a brief account of Leibniz’s work as an historian, the second section of the chapter explores Leibniz’s conception of history, which is shown to be profoundly embedded in his philosophical thought. The last section…
Body and Corporeal Substance
This chapter discusses Leibniz’s conception of body and the closely related concept of corporeal substance. Leibniz saw problems with Descartes’s and Hobbes’s view and introduced a new conception of body based on a metaphysical argument that multiplicity presupposes unities, leading Leibniz to the view that extended bodies are made up of corporeal substances, genuine unities on the model of living animals, and a physical argument that the proper …
Theory of Relations and Universal Harmony
This chapter discusses Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s philosophical reflections on the theory of relations and universal harmony. It first outlines the scholastic background of the doctrines concerning the ontology of relations. It turns then to Leibniz and his development of a theory of relations based on the ideas of Pierre Du Moulin and Caspar Bartholinus. More specifically, it examines Leibniz’s explicit characterization of the “mental” nature o…
Leibniz’s Political Vision for Europe
This chapter examines Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s political vision for Europe, beginning with his views on the Holy Roman Empire and the Peace of Westphalia. It considers how Leibniz viewed Germany’s political and cultural structures and his support for the Reich, along with his thoughts on order, security, and law. It also discusses Leibniz’s modern notion of state and his ideas of territorial power, diplomacy, and international politics; his vi…
Optics
Although often overlooked today, optics thrived in the early modern era as a science of first rank, engaging many of the best minds of the period and producing some of its most dramatic scientific results. This chapter attempts to shed light on Leibniz’s efforts to contribute to the development of early modern optics by focusing on his derivations of the laws of reflection and refraction. The first three sections examine his attempts to derive th…
The Labyrinth of the Continuum
This chapter traces Leibniz’s developing thought on the continuum problem from its earliest manifestation in the Theory of Abstract Motion to his last writings. Leibniz is adamant that his mature theory of substance is intended to solve the continuum problem: that is, what are the foundations of matter, given that it is infinitely divided, and how are bodies constituted from these foundations? How can motion be constituted from endeavours (instan…
Calculating Machine
This chapter sketches the challenges Leibniz faced in building a calculating machine for arithmetic, especially his struggle to coordinate with skilled artisans, surveys his philosophical remarks about such machines and the practical knowledge needed to make them, and recounts the eighteenth-century legacy of his failure to produce a machine understood to be adequately functional.
Ecclesiology, Ecumenism, and Toleration
This chapter discusses Leibniz’s conception of the Christian church, his life-long ecumenical efforts, and his stance toward religious toleration. Leibniz regarded the main Christian denominations as particular churches constituting the only one truly catholic or universal church whose authority went back to apostolic times and whose theology was traceable back to the entire ecclesiastical tradition. This is the ecclesiology that underpins his ec…
Essences, Ideas, and Truths in God’s Mind and in the Human Mind
This chapter discusses Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s philosophical reflections on essences, ideas, and truths in God’s mind and in the human mind. After examining Leibniz’s claim that the essences ( essentiae ) of things are like numbers, the chapter goes on to analyze his argument that ideas are the buildings blocks of truths and that the intimate nature of ideas is what determines the truth of a proposition. It then outlines Leibniz’s views about…
The Technology of Mining and Other Technical Innovations
This chapter examines the contribution of Leibniz to mining technology and other technical innovations. It explains that Leibniz’s earliest reflections on technical issues are contained in the paper De longitudinibus inveniendis , which was published between the end of 1668 and the beginning of 1669, and that his intensive preoccupation with technology is primarily associated with the commissions he received from Duke Johan Friedrich and his succ…
Force and Dynamics
Leibniz’s mature physics is most noted for the centrality of the notion of force and the development of the dynamics, the science of force. This chapter examines the development and challenges of this “dynamics project,” active from 1676–c. 1700, from its initial motivations and methodological maturation to its important convergence with the systematic metaphysics of his later writings. The chapter begins with Leibniz’s early approach to physical…
Happiness and Justice
This chapter focuses on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s philosophical reflections on happiness and justice. It begins with a discussion of the two central concepts of Leibniz’s moral theory: disinterested love and love (or charity) of the wise. It then looks at Leibniz’s efforts to ground the happiness of man in virtue and the good of others, as well as his views about the good that moves us to act. Leibniz argues that it is our perfection that const…
Scientific Organizations and Learned Societies
This chapter discusses Leibniz’s life-long efforts to create societies or academies of science. He was convinced that by collecting the knowledge available to humankind and by improving upon it through innovations in science and technology, rulers could ameliorate conditions in their territories, benefitting both themselves and their subjects, and thereby increasing their welfare and happiness. In Leibniz’s view, all this would be achieved if the…
The Benefit to Philosophy of the Study of Its History
This paper advances the view that the history of philosophy is both a kind of history and a kind of philosophy. Through a discussion of some examples from epistemology, metaphysics, and the historiography of philosophy, it explores the benefit to philosophy of a deep and broad engagement with its history. It comes to the conclusion that doing history of philosophy is a way to think outside the box of the current philosophical orthodoxies. Somewha…
Leibniz and the post-Copernican universe. Koyré revisited
Debilissimae Entitates?: Bisterfeld and Leibniz’s Ontology of Relations
Over the past decades a number of scholars have identified Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld as one of the most decisive early influences on Leibniz. In particular, the impressive similarity between their conceptions of universal harmony has been stressed. Since the issue of relations is at the heart of both Bisterfeld and Leibniz's doctrines of universal harmony, the extent of the similarity between their doctrines will depend, however, on Bisterfeld a…
Leibniz de Deo Trino: Philosophical aspects of Leibniz's conception of the Trinity
This paper discusses Leibniz's Trinitarian doctrine in the light of his philosophy, as revealed by a set of virtually unstudied texts. The first part of the paper examines Leibniz's defence of the Trinity against the charge of contradiction as a necessary precondition to the development of his own conception of the Trinity. The second part discusses some of the key features of Leibniz's Trinitarian doctrine, notably his conception of person, the …
Leibniz and the post-Copernican universe. Koyré revisited
Comments on Adams ‘The Priority of the Perfect’
This chapter comments on Robert Adams’ chapter on the concept of the priority of the perfect in continental rationalists’ philosophical theology. It identifies the point of the top-down strategy project as a way of establishing that God’s properties are the ontological grounding of the properties of finite things, that that God is the root or ground of all reality, and a conclusion is not available from a bottom-up approach. It considers whether …
Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography
Of all the thinkers of the century of genius that inaugurated modern philosophy, none lived an intellectual life more rich and varied than Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Maria Rosa Antognazza's pioneering biography provides a unified portrait of this unique thinker and the world from which he came. At the centre of the huge range of Leibniz's apparently miscellaneous endeavours, Antognazza reveals a single master project lending unity to …
Leibniz on the Trinity and the Incarnation: Reason and Revelation in the Seventeenth Century
Leibniz on the Trinity and the Incarnation: Reason and Revelation in the Seventeenth Century
Leibniz penned his reflections on Christian theology, yet this wealth of material has never been systematically gathered or studied. This book addresses an important and central aspect of these neglected materials - Leibniz's writings on two mysteries central to Christian thought, the Trinity and the Incarnation.
Leibniz’s Doctrine of Toleration: Philosophical, Theological, and Pragmatic Reasons
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is not usually regarded as a thinker who had a substantive theory of toleration. This chapter pieces together the scattered evidence to suggest otherwise. It is argued that Leibniz did have a doctrine of toleration, which operated on philosophical, theological, and pragmatic levels as part of his project for religious unification. The structure of Leibniz's philosophical arguments reflected his dependence on an idea of n…
The Benefit to Philosophy of the Study of Its History
This paper advances the view that the history of philosophy is both a kind of history and a kind of philosophy. Through a discussion of some examples from epistemology, metaphysics, and the historiography of philosophy, it explores the benefit to philosophy of a deep and broad engagement with its history. It comes to the conclusion that doing history of philosophy is a way to think outside the box of the current philosophical orthodoxies. Somewha…
Locke and Leibniz on Substance
This paper explores the development of Leibniz’s metaphysics of the Incarnation in the context of his philosophy. In particular it asks to what extent Leibniz’s repeated endorsement of the traditional analogy between the union in humankind of soul (mind) and body, and the union in Christ of divine and human natures, could be accommodated by his more general metaphysical doctrines. Such an investigation highlights some of the deepest commitments i…
The Hypercategorematic Infinite
This paper aims to show that a proper understanding of what Leibniz meant by “hypercategorematic infinite” sheds light on some fundamental aspects of his conceptions of God and of the relationship between God and created simple substances or monads. After revisiting Leibniz’s distinction between (i) syncategorematic infinite, (ii) categorematic infinite, and (iii) actual infinite, I examine his claim that the hypercategorematic infinite is “God h…
Leibniz: A Very Short Introduction
"Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a man of extraordinary intellectual creativity who lived an exceptionally rich and varied intellectual life in troubled times. More than anything else, he was a man who wanted to improve the life of his fellow human beings through the advancement of all the sciences and the establishment of a stable and just political order. In this Very Short Introduction Maria Rosa Antognazza outlines the central featu…
Encyclopaedia, scientia generalis , and the academies of sciences
The characteristica universalis was intended to provide the key instrument of a scientia generalis leading to the development of a new kind of encyclopaedia of all the sciences. ‘Encyclopaedia, scientia generalis , and the academies of sciences’ describes Leibniz’s plan to undertake the collection and systematic reorganization of all available knowledge into an updated version of Johann Heinrich Alsted’s universal encyclopaedia of all the arts an…
The Oxford Handbook of Leibniz
The extraordinary breadth and depth of Leibniz’s intellectual vision commands ever increasing attention. As more texts gradually emerge from seemingly bottomless archives, new facets of his contribution to an astonishing variety of fields come to light. This volume provides a uniquely comprehensive, systematic, and up-to-date appraisal of Leibniz’s thought thematically organized around its diverse but interrelated aspects. Discussion of his philo…
Probability and Statistics
This chapter investigates why Leibniz, an outstanding mathematician with deep interest in combinatorial reasoning, failed to contribute to the mathematics of probability. It explains that Leibniz was more interested in developing a new kind of logic that could guide human reasoning in all circumstances and that this logic is contained in his De incerti aestimatione . This chapter also considers the three important probabilistic and statistical id…
Theory of Knowledge: Mathematical and Natural Science
Leibniz’s theory of knowledge is an investigation of the conditions that enable human beings to have that degree of certainty which is appropriate to our various areas of concern. This chapter concerns demonstrative certainty in the sciences of mathematics, which contain necessary a priori truths, and the natural sciences, which are based on the senses and structural principles drawn from reason. According to Leibniz, we rarely attain maximum cer…
The Scientia Generalis and the Encyclopaedia
This chapter discusses Leibniz’s plan for a new encyclopaedia. In addition to being a collection of all available knowledge, this encyclopaedia would be an instrument for demonstrating new knowledge and, thereby, for contributing to humankind’s wisdom or happiness. The central plank of this plan is the establishment of a Scientia Generalis that would serve as a preliminary tool. The texts dealing with the Scientia Generalis , however, raise two p…
The Calculus
This chapter discusses the history of Leibniz's work on infinitesimal calculus of which a considerable part is still unknown. His new method, emerging from studies in the summing of infinite number series and the quadrature of curves, combines two procedures with opposite orientation, differentiation and integration. These two procedures are united in a common formalism introducing in 1675 the symbols d and ∫ for differentiation and integration. …
The Origins and History of the Earth
This chapter examines Leibniz’s contribution to the earth sciences. It focuses on his history of the earth, or Protogaea , written during the early 1690s. In this work, Leibniz used minerals and fossils to reconstruct prehistory, applying the methods of the historian to the archives of nature. The argument here is that Leibniz’s history of the earth helped to create conditions for the possibility of geology and paleontology as modern disciplines.
Leibniz as Historian
The aim of this chapter is to provide a first impression of Leibniz’s long and deep engagement with history and historiography, in the hope of stimulating a more thorough investigation of this poorly studied aspect of his oeuvre. After a brief account of Leibniz’s work as an historian, the second section of the chapter explores Leibniz’s conception of history, which is shown to be profoundly embedded in his philosophical thought. The last section…
Body and Corporeal Substance
This chapter discusses Leibniz’s conception of body and the closely related concept of corporeal substance. Leibniz saw problems with Descartes’s and Hobbes’s view and introduced a new conception of body based on a metaphysical argument that multiplicity presupposes unities, leading Leibniz to the view that extended bodies are made up of corporeal substances, genuine unities on the model of living animals, and a physical argument that the proper …
Theory of Relations and Universal Harmony
This chapter discusses Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s philosophical reflections on the theory of relations and universal harmony. It first outlines the scholastic background of the doctrines concerning the ontology of relations. It turns then to Leibniz and his development of a theory of relations based on the ideas of Pierre Du Moulin and Caspar Bartholinus. More specifically, it examines Leibniz’s explicit characterization of the “mental” nature o…
Leibniz’s Political Vision for Europe
This chapter examines Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s political vision for Europe, beginning with his views on the Holy Roman Empire and the Peace of Westphalia. It considers how Leibniz viewed Germany’s political and cultural structures and his support for the Reich, along with his thoughts on order, security, and law. It also discusses Leibniz’s modern notion of state and his ideas of territorial power, diplomacy, and international politics; his vi…
Optics
Although often overlooked today, optics thrived in the early modern era as a science of first rank, engaging many of the best minds of the period and producing some of its most dramatic scientific results. This chapter attempts to shed light on Leibniz’s efforts to contribute to the development of early modern optics by focusing on his derivations of the laws of reflection and refraction. The first three sections examine his attempts to derive th…
The Labyrinth of the Continuum
This chapter traces Leibniz’s developing thought on the continuum problem from its earliest manifestation in the Theory of Abstract Motion to his last writings. Leibniz is adamant that his mature theory of substance is intended to solve the continuum problem: that is, what are the foundations of matter, given that it is infinitely divided, and how are bodies constituted from these foundations? How can motion be constituted from endeavours (instan…
Philosophy (54 works) · Epistemology (48 works) · Historical Philosophy and Science (43 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Metaphysics (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Mathematics (18 works) · Political science (18 works) · History (16 works) · Theology (12 works)