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(METHODO)LOGICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS IN THE WORK OF LEIBNIZ 27
The rationality of the world gets conveyed in the form of the world’s
fundamental and inherent logicality, which, at the same time, constitutes
the basis for the epistemic subject’s comprehension. Thus, Shand (1988)
appreciates that:
“There is no intimate connection, in Leibniz’s philosophy, between
metaphysics and the fundamental nature of logic... The
fundamental structures of the world are retrieved from the
conclusions derived from the fundamental structures of logic… The
intellect comprehends it [metaphysical reality] in virtue of an
inexorable logic that refers to the way in which the world is and
(necessarily) has to be at its fundamental level, so that the most
thorough-going statements that reason holds true remain
sustainable” (Shand, pp. 120-122).
Shand (1988) also remarks a foremost important fact: that for Leibniz,
the premise of the rational (logical) nature of the real functions in the
same manner as the Gadamerian pre-judgment does in a hermeneutic
enterprise. Let us recall that Leibniz starts out (as Kant does) by
researching the nature of the truth. Dumitriu (1988) asserts that:
“To reach out to the logical principles, as Leibniz conceived them,
we must first examine his idea of truth” (Dumitriu, p. 618).
The next step is for the German philosopher to propose the distinction
between necessary and contingent truths, a distinction based on logical
principles. As it will be seen, this distinction becomes the key tool in
deciphering the monadologic structure of the real and, in particular, the
necessary character of God’s existence (the divine monad). Leibniz’s
divinity, regardless of whether it “authors” the nature of the truth or not,
admits and makes use of the distinction necessary-contingent in the
process of creating the world. The world consists, in Leibniz’s view, of the
orchestration of two distinctive series: the series of necessary truths (that
cannot be absent from any possible world) and the series of contingent
truths, which the principle of sufficient reason renders actual. Thus, the
divinity knows and makes use of the logical principles in the process of
creating the particular monad, i.e., the knowing subject that, in its turn,
admits and makes use of the same logical principles. Anticipating a
subsequent section, I ask the question: Does a monad’s capacity to make
use of logical principles derive from the fact that its representational
character (constitutive to the monad) extends to include the divine monad
(see Monadology, paragraph 83)? Or, rather, the reason in the hindsight
of this capacity is the “transcendence” of the logical principles in relation