Partially Examined Life podcast - Leibniz - Monadology

This is an excerpt from a past episode of The Partially Examined Life podcast, discussing Gottfried Leibniz's Monadology. You can find the unabridged Leibniz podcast, along with dozens of others discussing philosophers from Plato to Kant to Wittgenstein, at the Partially Examined Life website: http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com

About PEL: The podcasters were all graduate students in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin back in the Clinton years. They all left the program at some point before getting their doctorates and have consequently since had time to get outside that whole weird world of academia and reflect on it and the various philosophical topics with a different, and probably much more lazy, perspective.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Partially
• Examined
• Life
• PEL
• Gottfried
• Leibniz
• Monadology
• philosophy
• podcast
• calculus

[emblemOFbeing]

(3 of 3) H. Bergson: "But all consciousness is also anticipation of the future. Consider the direction of your mind at any moment you like to choose; you will find that it is occupied with what now is, but always and especially with regard to what is about to be." Bergson p 8; "Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays" 1902-1912, chapter 1

[emblemOFbeing]

2) H. Bergson, cont'd: "A CSness unable to conserve its past, forgetting itself unceasingly, would be a CSness perishing and having to be reborn at each moment: and what is this but unconsciousness? When Leibniz said of matter that it is " a momentary mind," did he not declare it, whether he would or no, insensible? All consciousness, then, is memory--conservation and accumulation of the past in the present. 

[emblemOFbeing]

1) H. Bergson: " What is CSness? There is no need to define so familiar a thing, something which is continually present in every one's experience and [a definition] would be less clear than the thing itself; I will characterize CSness by its most obvious feature: it means, before everything else, memory. Memory may lack amplitude; it may embrace but a feeble part of the past: it may retain only what is just happening; but memory is there, or there is no CSness.