{"title":"Leibniz and ‘Bradley’s Regress’","authors":"Massimo Mugnai","doi":"10.5840/LEIBNIZ2010201","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In a text written during his stay in Paris, Leibniz, to deny ontological reality to relations, employs an argument well known to the medieval thinkers and which later would be revived by Francis H. Bradley. If one assumes that relations are real and that a relation links any property to a subject – so runs the argument – then one falls prey to an infinite regress. Leibniz seems to be well aware of the consequences that this argument has for his own metaphysical views, where the relation of inherence (‘inesse’) plays such a central role. Thus, he attempts first to interpret the relation of inherence as something ‘metaphoric’, originating from our ‘spatial way’ of looking at the surrounding world; and then he tries to reduce it to the part-whole relation which clearly he considers weaker, from the ontological point of view, than that of ‘being in’.","PeriodicalId":137959,"journal":{"name":"The Leibniz Review","volume":"278 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2010-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"5","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"The Leibniz Review","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5840/LEIBNIZ2010201","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 5
摘要
莱布尼茨在巴黎期间写的一篇文章中,为了否认关系的本体论实在性,他采用了中世纪思想家所熟知的一个论点,后来被弗朗西斯·h·布拉德利(Francis H. Bradley)重新发扬。如果一个人假设关系是真实的,并且一个关系将任何属性与一个主体联系起来——这是这样的论点——那么一个人就陷入了无限回归的牺牲品。莱布尼茨似乎很清楚这种争论对他自己的形而上学观点的影响,在他的形而上学观点中,内在关系(“内在”)起着如此重要的作用。因此,他首先试图将内在关系解释为某种“隐喻”,源于我们看待周围世界的“空间方式”;然后他试图将其简化为部分-整体关系,显然他认为,从本体论的角度来看,这比"存在"的关系更弱。
In a text written during his stay in Paris, Leibniz, to deny ontological reality to relations, employs an argument well known to the medieval thinkers and which later would be revived by Francis H. Bradley. If one assumes that relations are real and that a relation links any property to a subject – so runs the argument – then one falls prey to an infinite regress. Leibniz seems to be well aware of the consequences that this argument has for his own metaphysical views, where the relation of inherence (‘inesse’) plays such a central role. Thus, he attempts first to interpret the relation of inherence as something ‘metaphoric’, originating from our ‘spatial way’ of looking at the surrounding world; and then he tries to reduce it to the part-whole relation which clearly he considers weaker, from the ontological point of view, than that of ‘being in’.