Candide and Leibniz's Garden

Leibniz's Legacy and Impact, 2019

The oft-told story of Leibniz’s doctrine of the best world, or optimism, is that it enjoyed a great deal of popularity in the eighteenth century until the massive earthquake that struck Lisbon on 1 November 1755 destroyed its support. Despite its long history, this story is nothing more than a commentators’ fiction that has become accepted wisdom not through sheer weight of evidence but through sheer frequency of repetition. In this paper we shall examine the reception of Leibniz’s doctrine of the best world in the eighteenth century in order to get a clearer understanding of what its fate really was. As we shall see, while Leibniz’s doctrine did win a good number of adherents in the 1720s and 1730s, especially in Germany, support for it had largely dried up by the mid-1740s; moreover, while opponents of Leibniz’s doctrine were few and far between in the 1710s and 1720s, they became increasing vocal in the 1730s and afterwards, between them producing an array of objections that served to make Leibnizian optimism both philosophically and theologically toxic years before the Lisbon earthquake struck.

2012

G. W. Leibniz professes a commitment to historical Christian theism, but the depth and orthodoxy of his commitment has been questioned throughout the past three centuries. In this project I defend both the cogency and the orthodoxy of Leibniz’s philosophical theology and, by extension, its application to the Christian task of theodicy. At the heart of this defense is the central claim of this project, namely, that Leibniz’s philosophical theology represents a traditional brand of Augustinianism. In short, I argue that Leibniz’s theodicy is not his own, but is the tacit claim of a longstanding theological tradition made explicit and brought to bear on the problem of evil as articulated in Leibniz’s day. Accompanying this central claim are a number of subordinate claims, the most significant of which center on how we read Leibniz on providence and on free choice. Regarding the former, I argue that Leibniz’s understanding of providence has precedence in and is a recapitulation of older Augustinian views of the God-world relationship. As for free choice, I maintain that the Augustinian tradition is not only incompatiblist, or libertarian, but was recognized as such in Leibniz’s day. Hence in adhering to this tradition, Leibniz is knowingly adhering to a libertarian theology. I show that his adherence to this tradition and its views of freedom has significant textual support. My method of defense is both historical and constructive. On the historical side I focus primarily on contextual and textual analysis. However, insofar as this defense includes the viability of Leibniz’s theodicy for Christian theology and theodicy today, constructive engagement with Leibniz’s contemporary objectors and the current literature on the problem of evil is also required. Therefore, I devote the latter part of this defense to lingering objections and interlocution with current approaches to the problem of evil. In the end I conclude that Leibniz’s theodicy, when read in the light of the Augustinian tradition, is not only orthodox, cogent, and defensible, but is perhaps the most viable response to the problem of evil for traditional Christian theology, if not the inevitable response for a traditional Augustinian.

in Edward Kimber, The Happy Orphans, a criticial edition by Jan Herman and Beatrijs Vanacker, Cambridge, Modern Humanities Research association, 2015., 2015

It is undeniable that the rise of the novel was an international phenomenon. In spite of the developments and movements related to national contexts, the rise and subsequent triumph of a new form of narration to which Ian Watt dedicated his fundamental book simultaneously affected Spain, England and France. It is to the study of this transnational aspect of the phenomenon that our analysis of The Happy Orphans desires to contribute. The triptych that consists of The Fortunate Foundlings by Eliza Haywood (1744), Les Heureux Orphelins by Crébillon-fils (1753) and The Happy Orphans by Edward Kimber (1759) is an exemplary illustration of the intense interaction between the French and English novelistic domains during a period that was characterised by anglomania in France. Josephine Grieder distinguishes between three phases: the interest in all things English that appears from the 1750s onwards becomes ‘a maladie épidémique of imitation of the English’ in the 1760s. This epidemic phase is then followed by a real appropriation of English models – in the fields of politics, ideology, fashion,... – that begins in the 1770s and lasts until just after the French Revolution: ‘The frequency with which it appears in literature of all sorts – private and public, from diaries and memoirs to periodicals and pamphlets – testifies to the vitality of the phenomenon.’ However, it would be overly simplistic to declare that Haywood’s English novel was translated into French by Crébillon and then simply returned to England in the retranslation by Kimber. In reality, the translation into French and the retranslation into English only concern the first part of Haywood’s novel. It is remarkable that the section translated by Crébillon is exactly the section that Kimber retranslated into English. The triptych, in other words, is based on a truncus communis and offers three different versions of this common root to bilingual readers. Starting from the basis of this truncus communis, each of the three works develops in its own way. There are but few corpora that have the advantage of displaying similarities and differences simultaneously and on this scale. The section which the three novels have in common develops the theme of the foundling/orphan, which is a commonplace of the sentimental novel made fashionable by S. Richardson’s Pamela or Virtue Rewarded in 1740. This Richardsonian sentimentalism would later be satirised by H. Fielding in Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742). Fielding, however, is also the author of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749). Both in France and in England, the motif is a surprisingly constant presence throughout the century.

Chapter [preprint version, do not cite] for upcoming collection on Rethinking the Enlightenment, edited by M. Lloyd and G. Boucher [draft form]. Part 1 reframes the enlightenment, looking forwards from the early modern context (in light of the scientific revolution, reformation, renaissance, and discovery of the new worlds), rather than backwards, in light of the enlightenment's alleged effects in the short 20th century. Part 2 looks at Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Diderot's Letter on the Blind, and Candide, as bearing out Peter Gay's depiction of the enlightenment as a "revolt against rationalism" as much as an "age of reason". The chapter contends that these classic enlightenment texts-a million miles from postmodern endoxa about "the Enilghtenment project"-- involve artful exercises in confronting and working through the loss of Europe’s providential sense of its own uniqueness and cosmic centrality, central to the Christian epos: philosophical exercises prompting their readers to relook at their beliefs, customs and society critically, comparatively and ironically, as if from the outside: or as we might say today, “cross-cultural dialogues” pointing the way towards “a world united by its celebration of diversity, a cosmopolitan harmony orchestrated in free individuality; an open world, not of absolutes or of persecution, but of pacific and continuous dialogue".

British Journal for The History of Philosophy, 2011

Many commentators have suggested that the metaphysical portions of Emilie du Châtelet's Institutions de physique are a mere retelling of Leibniz's views. I argue that a close reading of the text shows that du Châtelet's cosmological argument and discussion of God's nature contains both Lockean and Leibnizian elements. I discuss where she follows Locke in her arguments, what Leibnizian elements she brings in, and how this enables her to avoid some of the mistakes commonly attributed to Locke's formulation of the cosmological argument. I show that while du Châtelet accepts the causal principle ex nihilo nihil fit, she does not utilize Locke's stronger causal principle. I also discuss her use of the principle of sufficient reason in both improving the Lockean cosmological argument and in proving the attributes of God.

In: Fuer unser Glueck und das Glueck anderer, Hildesheim, Olms, 2017 pp. 53-68. The possibility of giving a rich descriptive account of morality from this perspective and the absence of any agreed upon method of verification for the assessment of disputed moral claims suggests that the notion of moral truth is at best a useful social fiction. To escape this conclusion, I argue that we must begin at the other end, deriving moral epistemology from moral historiography, much as we derive scientific epistemology from consideration of the history of science, regardless of the absence of a consensus omnium.

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at the University of Tennessee, 2017

This paper is an examination of the intellectual relationship between Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man and the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. This relationship was accentuated by Crousaz, a Swiss critic, who accused Pope of plagiarizing Leibniz’s misguided philosophy due to the evidence of Leibniz’s Principle of the Best, Principle of Sufficient Reason, and Principle of Continuity found within An Essay on Man. This paper argues that both Leibniz and Popes’ philosophies do not reflect a direct relationship but instead share the spirit of Augustan thought as well as a similar classical upbringing. Crousaz and other critics who criticized the philosophical constructs in the poem, particularly Voltaire, express the drastic social changes that took place around the turn of the century in Europe — a sudden questioning of faith and classical learning brought on by both political changes and natural disaster. In this way, An Essay on Man and the related criticism act as a microcosm of the changing ideals of the Augustan Age as it passed into the Enlightenment.

Forum Philosophicum 15 (2010), 17-35.

Leibniz’s claim that this is the best of all possible worlds has been subject to numerous criticisms, both from his contemporaries and ours. In this paper I investigate a cluster of such criticisms based on the existence, abundance or character of worldly evil. As several Leibniz-inspired versions of optimism have been advanced in recent years, the aim of my investigation is to assess not just how Leibniz’s brand of optimism fares against these criticisms, but also whether optimism as a philosophy has the resources to meet these challenges. I show that none of the criticisms considered has sufficient force to pose a threat to Leibniz’s version of optimism or to one modelled on it.