Well, I suppose one is 'a number' but I was kinda expecting more! ;)

One is a number, that's true. And numbered subjects is Russell's beef with the "world apart" and in fact, all of German idealism.

So keep expecting more... numbers.

But on closer examination, Leibniz didn't think of bodies as qualifying as substance. Bodies are phenomenal. Substances are eternal. If there's a distinction between mind, soul, monad, and substance in Leibniz's view... I'm not sure what it is. But I think the next stop should be the predicate-in-notion principle, which seems pretty familiar to me, but I've never thought of it as a theory of truth.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/substanc/#SH4a

Thanks dude. I have glanced at the iep. So far the most helpful author I've found is Nicholas Jolley. He explains how Leibniz varied from Descartes and Aristotle, and how his thoughts about substance remained fluid.

One feature of Leibniz is that he believed that all monads see truth to some degree. So all philosophers are right about some things.

Have a look at this. This paragraph struck me:

Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects. So what’s going on? Here’s how I think about it. I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your own moon. But I assume it’s relevantly similar to mine. That’s an assumption that could be false, but that’s the source of my communication, and that’s the best we can do in terms of public physical objects and objective science..

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/

I thought -at last! Now I'm starting to get 'monads'.

Actually I am now starting to understand how to relate that to Hegel.

Like Kant, Hegel believed that we do not perceive the world or anything in it directly and that all our minds have access to is ideas of the world—images, perceptions, concepts. For Kant and Hegel, the only reality we know is a virtual reality. Hegel’s idealism differs from Kant’s in two ways. First, Hegel believed that the ideas we have of the world are social, which is to say that the ideas that we possess individually are utterly shaped by the ideas that other people possess. Our minds have been shaped by the thoughts of other people through the language we speak, the traditions and mores of our society, and the cultural and religious institutions of which we are a part. Geist is Hegel’s name for the collective consciousness of a given society, which shapes the ideas and consciousness of each individual.

So, the individual is a 'windowless monad' who embodies the memes of the culture that's sorrounded him, interpreted according partially to adaptive necessity, and partially according to 'mimetics'.

It's all falling into place.

For me, that passage presents a gross misunderstanding of Hegel. (Where does it come from?). If what it says were true then Hegel would just be another philosopher of the noumenal, as Kant was. Hegel believed we see things exactly as they are in themselves; that is just what 'absolute idealism' means.

Seriously, if you follow that line of thought I would say that things are not falling into, but out of, place. :s

Hegel believed we see things exactly as they are in themselves; that is just what 'absolute idealism' means.

Can you substantiate that? Every definition I read of 'absolute idealism' emphasises the primacy of mind. I perfectly aware that Hegel didn't concur with Kant's 'ding an sich' but to reject that doesn't imply the opposite.

I's a complex issue, but for me Hegel is a kind of spiritual monist. The Phenomenology of Spirit had earlier been called The Phenomenology of Mind which I think is misleading. Hegel is very much a thinker of trinity and very much a Christian. So my interpretation is that the Father (the mind) is related to the Son (the world) via the Holy Spirit. Looked at in terms of dialectic the spirit is the synthesis (although it doesn't exactly work to think of mind and matter as thesis and antithesis, and actually Hegel never explicitly proposed that commonly used formulation).

A very interesting read is Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition https://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Hermetic-Tradition-Glenn-Alexander/dp/0801474507/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1474069419&sr=1-1&keywords=hegel+and+the+hermetic+tradition which I think convincingly corrects mistaken modernist materialist readings of Hegel. Modernist materialism is not a superioir result of intellectual progress, but merely a ( hopefully) transient intellectual fad, that is terribly spiritually limiting, in my view; and I have little doubt you will disagree with that.

Hegel rejected Kant's critical philosophy on the basis that it leads inevitably to skepticism about knowledge; and in the Phenomenology worked out a system of thought that culminates in absolute knowing. The passage you quoted represents the view that spirit is nothing more than inter-subjectivity; and from there it can easily be seen to devolve to the merely subjective. Hegel was not a subjective, but rather an objective, idealist. He took Kant's formulation that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51/B76), elaborated in this passage:

"Intuition and concepts … constitute the elements of all our cognition, so that neither concepts without intuition corresponding to them in some way nor intuition without concepts can yield a cognition. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind . It is, therefore, just as necessary to make the mind's concepts sensible—that is, to add an object to them in intuition—as to make our intuitions understandable—that is, to bring them under concepts. These two powers, or capacities, cannot exchange their functions. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only from their unification can cognition arise."(A50–51/B74–76), very seriously and took it to what he understood to be its logical conclusion, which is a monism consisting of mind, matter and spirit. For Hegel this is the very meaning of the Incarnation.

But I don't think it is a fair assessment to say that he rejected Kant's critical philosophy outright, rather he commented on it, modified it, and qualified it, as per that passage.

Of course I am with you in rejecting materialism. But the point I was making above in relation to Hoffman-Leibniz-Hegel is an understanding of the sense in which 'the real is a structure in consciousness'. Of course that sounds just like Deepak Chopra, but I would really rather related it to the Western philosophical tradition. That quote I found was in some cribbed lecture notes on Hegel, but I think it makes a fair point. (Spouse is calling, back much later.)

On one hand, I would certainly agree that Hegel didn't "reject Kant's critical philosophy outright", if by "outright rejection" you meant that he considered it to be of no importance. Hegel considered all moments in philosophy to be of essential significance in the whole evolution of spirit.

On the other hand, I do think Hegel rejected Kant's conclusions concerning the limitations of reason that are inherent to the culmination of his critical project of 'determining the limits of reason".

And I don't think the real is, for Hegel, a structure in consciousness. The trajectory of that kind of terminology is very alien to the movement of Hegel's thought. For Hegel "the Rational is the Real", and the Real is presented aspectually as each moment of consciousness, and presented fully as the whole movement of consciousness. At least that's my interpretation.

Nevertheless Hegel is called 'absolute idealist' which means that mind is the primary reality. Where I came back into this thread was with that post about Donald Hoffmann above. Have another read of that. 'There are no public physical objects'. So he is arguing that what we think we see as an external reality, really is something occurring in the mind, as a consequence of the way the brain interprets sensory data. We have shared experiences, which mean that when you and I say 'apple', then we both have the same apparent referent. But the apple really exists in the mind's eye, so to speak.

So reading that - and I will now go back and read Hoffman in more detail - was a real lightbulb moment about the so-called 'windowless monads' of Leibniz. Hope you can see why.

So why did Leibniz say that any entity whose essence is extension is not a substance? He believed that bodily entities (for Descartes: extended substance) are always aggregates. Being able to be divided into parts, the parts are also divisible, and so on ad infinitum.

So whence true unities? Leibniz thought that the nature of aggregates presupposes true unities. And true unities alone qualify as substance. Arnaud accused him of simply stipulating a peculiar definition of substance, so we have the reasoning Leibniz offered:

"To cut the point short, I hold as an axiom the following proposition which is a statement of identity which varies only in the placing of the emphasis: nothing is truly one being if it is not truly one being. It has always been held that one and being are reciprocal things. -WF 124

So Leibniz, being of a rationalist tradition, is doing ontology by following apriori knowledge. There are aggregates and unities because these categories are residents of the mind. Only unities qualify as substance because by the LONC, a being can't be a crowd.

It's not that Leibniz was totally unconscious of the pending questions about proceeding in this way. All roads come back to God, for him. What's peculiar to him about human substance is that a human reflects the mind of God. So humans have direct access to Truth via rationality (not that there are any guarantees that Truth will be seen accurately, but the possibility is there.). In this way, regarding certain topics, there is no distinction between subjective and objective truth.

For Leibniz, extensional entities are endlessly divisible. There's no bottom to it. A monad, on the other hand, is solid. It's self-animated and it expresses the whole.

I think I'm following the reasoning, but is 'solid' the right word? I would have thought 'irreducible' might be better suited.

Such a description contains expectation that a monad is an account of everything else. Here the point a monad is distinct from the divisible. It's its own logical expression which is not any of the endlessly divisible extensional entities-- which is why it doesn't relate causality. To say "unity is a cause" make no sense. Unity is not an extensional entity that acts.

I don't know of any usage of "irreducible" that applies. "Solid" is just a metaphor.

The idea that 'extended entities are infinitely divisible' makes complete sense to me and has been borne out by science, I think.

But the problem is conceiving of what it is that is *not* extended. It's more like a 'principle of unity' than an actual numerical unit of something. Here's one analogy from modern technology - if a holographic image is broken, then each part of resulting pieces contains the whole image, but at a slightly lower resolution. So the original image may be physically divided but still retain its 'wholeness'. I think that is nearer the idea than 'solidity' which is too much like atomism.

Missed this one before! I'm not convinced that Hegel would agree with the idea that mind is the primary reality. The way I read Hegel, he thinks spirit is the primary reality; which manifests 'dualistically' (or better, dialectically) as mind and matter (think Spinoza though, not Descartes, because mind and matfer are not substances but modes).

So if one of either mind or matter is thesis then the other is antithesis and spirit is synthesis (to use a simplistic way of formulation that Hegel never himself used).

So, neither matter nor mind are primary; they are codependently and at least implicitly original. Spirit is primary and precedes the moment of consciousness wherein matter and mind arise explicitly together.

I believe Hegel's word was 'geist', which is translated as 'mind' in some contexts and 'spirit' in others; the Wiki article on Phenomenology says, 'The title can be translated as either The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Phenomenology of Mind, because the German word Geist has both meanings.' Which is about the sum total of my knowledge of the Hegel.

Where I chimed in was the quotation above in the article about Hoffman:

I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your own moon. But I assume it’s relevantly similar to mine. That’s an assumption that could be false, but that’s the source of my communication, and that’s the best we can do in terms of public physical objects and objective science.

I still think that is very close in meaning to what Leibniz must have meant by the monad:

"Monad" means that which is one, has no parts and is therefore indivisible. These are the fundamental existing things, according to Leibniz. His theory of monads is meant to be a superior alternative to the theory of atoms that was becoming popular in natural philosophy at the time.

Maybe - just maybe - closer to what would later be called the 'actual occasions of experience'. But the second of the above quotes also addresses the issue of the 'subjective unity of experience', i.e. that even though we know the body is composed of parts, one's experience is appears as a unified whole.

Where i disagree with Hoffman here is that while we cannot experience the same headache we have very good reasons to believe that we experience the same objects.

I can point to, say, an apple in front of us, to a precise spot on its surface where there is an uncharacteristic white streak roughly 50 mm long and 5 mm wide and ask you what you see there, and be confident that you will say you see a white streak of the same dimensions.

But Leibniz would respond that both of us are monads, each with our unique experience, which is organised by a pre-established harmony in such a way that we appear to experience the same thing.

Gottfried Leibniz's theory of pre-established harmony (French: harmonie préétablie) is a philosophical theory about causation under which every "substance" only affects itself, but all the substances (both bodies and minds) in the world nevertheless seem to causally interact with each other because they have been created by God in advance to "harmonize" with each other.

The only reason I'm pointing this out, is that I think Hoffman's basic point converges with Leibniz's in some respects. Whilst we appear to be experiencing an 'external world', in fact what we take to be 'external' is really happening in the mind as a consequence of the process of perception>assimilation of sense data>cognition.

There is no sun or moon unless a conscious mind perceives them, for both are constructs of consciousness, icons in a species-specific user interface. To some this seems a patent absurdity, a reductio of the position, readily contradicted by experience and our best science. But our best science, our theory of the quantum, gives no such assurance. And experience once led us to believe the earth flat and the stars near. Perhaps, in due time, mind-independent objects will go the way of flat earth. — Donald Hoffman

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10930

obviously, Hoffman does not appeal to 'god', in his theory, the process is driven by natural selection. But in other respects I think the schemes map quite well.

I think 'philosophical idealism' is coming back with a real vengeance in some of these types of theories. Not that it ever really went away.

All of what we measure, amounts to the fact that as a species, we all interpret and understand the same units of measurement, we share a kind of baseline of perception against which we can measure and predict with accuracy and reliability.

But what philosophy has always told as, and what science is now also starting to realise, is that the complete picture includes the observer. This doesn't mean that units of measurement are unreal or subjective, but they're still dependent on a perspective - in our case, a shared perspective. I don't want to be taken as one of those who says that scientific measurement is merely or only subjective or conventional, as some appear to do, but neither is objectivity absolute.

Per Leibniz, there is no connecting cross-piece. The explanation for the coordinated movement is God.

Tune in later for a more esoteric explanation.

I haven't read Leibniz, but I'm wondering if the esoteric explanation is that the role God is playing is from our perspective like (rather crudely) someone spinning and balancing plates on top of poles, and has to tweak them all continuously to keep them balanced. Each plate could represent an atom. God could delegate the tweaking to a team of angels, infact many teams and hierarchies, these could be the kingdoms of nature. I mean the transcendent spirits in nature not their outer casing(expression) or physical vehicles?

The idea that 'extended entities are infinitely divisible' makes complete sense to me and has been borne out by science, I think. — Wayfarer

What science?

But the problem is conceiving of what it is that is *not* extended. It's more like a 'principle of unity' than an actual numerical unit of something. Here's one analogy from modern technology - if a holographic image is broken, then each part of resulting pieces contains the whole image, but at a slightly lower resolution. So the original image may be physically divided but still retain its 'wholeness'. I think that is nearer the idea than 'solidity' which is too much like atomism. — Wayfarer

What is the "original image" you mentioned? A monad? Or God?

I haven't read Leibniz, but I'm wondering if the esoteric explanation is that the role God is playing is from our perspective like (rather crudely) someone spinning and balancing plates on top of poles, and has to tweak them all continuously to keep them balanced. Each plate could represent an atom. God could delegate the tweaking to a team of angels, infact many teams and hierarchies, these could be the kingdoms of nature. I mean the transcendent spirits in nature not their outer casing(expression) or physical vehicles? — Punshhh

:) I'm not sure. I don't think Leibniz would like the idea of continuous divine intervention. Newton actually proposed that and the reaction of Leibniz was kind of ridiculing and dismissive (there was bad blood between Newton and Leibniz... maybe between Leibniz and England in general)

I would use support rather than intervention.

Or in other words God(the supernatural) provides(facilitates) the stage upon which the world happens.

The idea that 'extended entities are infinitely divisible' makes complete sense to me and has been borne out by science, I think".
— Wayfarer
"What science? — Mongrel

Physics! 'The atom' was supposed to be the 'indivisible unit'. Didn't work out! So Leibniz' assertion that 'everything extended is aggregate' still looks good.

What is the "original image" you mentioned? A monad? Or God? — Mongrel

Sorry, what I mean is: a hologram of anything is different to a photograph (it doesn't matter what the image is of). Take a photograph, and cut it up, and you get bits of the image. Take a hologram and break it, and each piece has a whole image, albeit at lower resolution than the original.



The reason I mentioned it, is because it illustrates the 'principle of unity' by analogy.

obviously, Hoffman does not appeal to 'god', in his theory, the process is driven by natural selection. But in other respects I think the schemes map quite well. — Wayfarer

The problem I see is that without the work of a 'Master Monad', or some other form of spiritual work to coordinate the experiences of all the monads, there can be no explanation for the commonality of experience. There is no plausible, or even imaginable, physical mechanism which could do this work. The only plausible purely materialist explanation is that of the sheer independent existence of material entities.

An alternative metaphysical explanans to the "Master Monad" would be that the physical world is an expression of a spiritual world where souls in between death and rebirth do the work of coordinating the experiences of souls on the physical plane of existence Steiner suggests something like this. In that case the explanation is obviously not purely a material one, but in a formal sense the result is still that there are material entities which are independent of any and all individual percipients.

Or take Berkeley's explanation that entities are held in stable existence in the mind of God, and given by Him to all human (and presumably animal) minds. But, here again the result is that there are existent material entities that are independent of any and all individual minds. It doesn't really matter what the final metaphysical explanation for the existence of identifiable material entities is (it's not knowable discursively anyway); but in any case we know that there must be such, simply because we are able to experience a world in common.

Leibniz' 'pre-established harmony' is indeed a very far-fetched philosophical theory. BUT, in Yogacara Buddhism, which is 'mind-only' Buddhism, there is a doctrine that as every experience is a result of karma, then those who we share our experiences with - our fellow beings - have similar karma, so are part of the same milieu. There are beings on other planes - higher and lower - that see 'the same things' that we do, but they appear completely differently to them. (Actually, this is probably very similar to Steiner.)

But the idea of the 'independently existing material object' - that is surely what has been called into question by science itself. That is what Hoffman alludes to in that quotation above - he's referring to the observer problem, which is exactly that the purported 'mind-independent' sub-atomic particles, only exist as a kind of distribution of probabilities, up until the moment that a measurement is taken. Of course this fact has triggered enormous volumes of debate and theory, and I'm not wanting to open that can of worms here. But it is precisely the notion of the 'mind independent reality' that has been called into question by that.

There was a physicist by the name of Victor Stenger who was a vociferous critic of what he and others called 'quantum woo' - the tendency to appeal to quantum physics in support of an idealist metaphysics. He wrote books against the idea, which were published by Prometheus Press (which publishes a lot of anti-spiritual books, kind of a mirror image of Quest Books).

Stenger's last published piece was in HuffPo, titled 'Particles are for Real'. It was a plaintive appeal to the reality of sub-atomic particles, against all those who say that the wave-particle nature of such things, demonstrates that they don't really exist as particles at all.

The point is, Stenger had to believe there are ultimately-existing particles - true atoms - because otherwise, he had to acknowledge that his materialist model couldn't be supported.

Now materialists say that the 'real substances' are fields and field equations, and the like. But any undergraduate can see that 'an equation' is an intellectual object, i.e. something that can only be grasped by a rational mind. There are no equations in nature. Nor any 'ultimately-existing particles'.

So Leibniz was correct in calling the existence of atoms into question.