The Non-Aristotelian Novelty of Leibniz’s Teleology

Abstract

My aim in this paper is to underscore the novelty of Leibniz’s teleology from a historical perspective. I believe this perspective helps deliver a better understanding of the finer details of Leibniz’s employment of final causes. I argue in this paper that Leibniz was taking a stance on three central teleological issues that derive from Aristotle, issues that seem to have occupied nearly every advocate of final causes from Aristotle to Leibniz. I discuss the three Aristotelian issues, and how major thinkers treated them in the medieval period. I argue that Leibniz rejected all of the mainstream Aristotelian teleological views on these issues. I conclude that Leibniz broke with longstanding threads of teleological thinking in ways that were often extreme. L is famous for his attempts to rehabilitate certain Scholastic doctrines. It is well known, for example, that he incorporated substantial forms into his philosophy. His attempts to revive the doctrine of substantial forms have received a lot of attention in the scholarly literature. But the other major Aristotelian doctrine he sought to revive---the doctrine of final causes---has received far less attention until recently.1 Leibniz believed final causes were explanatorily relevant for every event at every ontological level of his system. And his commitment to the explanatory importance of efficient causes was equally firm. Any state of affairs in his system could be explained by way of efficient causation (at least, in principle). Moreover, each type of explanation is sufficient on its own for a complete explanation of any given state of affairs in Leibniz’s system. This implies, as Jeffrey McDonough has recently argued, that Leibniz had “a particularly novel, systematic, and intriguing picture of final-efficient explanatory overdetermination.”2 Any fact about the created world can be explained by appeal to a set of efficient causal laws, or a set of final causal laws, both of which govern the created world with equal explanatory power. I concur that Leibniz’s picture here is entirely novel, for careful attention to the historical record shows that Leibniz broke with longstanding threads of teleological thinking in ways that were often extreme. My aim in this paper is to underscore the novelty of Leibniz’s teleology from a historical perspective. This perspective helps, I think, not only to see the historical novelty of Leibniz’s teleology, but also