 Welcome to another one of my Dr. Salem Chalk and Talk video lectures devoted to showing that you can, in fact, inform people, teach, get people excited through the old-fashioned techniques of talking at them and writing things on a blackboard. It's called Chalk and Talk a little bit in jest. You notice today I'm not dressed in my normal, more formal apparel. I like to honor the hallowed tradition of Casual Friday, and this is also kind of an important day for me, in part because this is actually my last day teaching a staple class here at Fayetteville State University, which I have been very much consumed with over the last three years critical thinking. I'm leaving Fayetteville State University and essentially starting a new and broader career over the next several years, and some still some teaching, writing, talking, consulting. So, I'm not particularly dressed up, but that shouldn't affect the content of the lecture. What are we talking about today? Well, I've put it like this. Why does Leibniz remain in Descartes' show? And I received a question, this time not through VU or YouTube, but actually through email, and somebody asked, I would like to ask whether there is any reasonable explanation why many of today's philosophers or philosophers in the last several years refer to Descartes instead of referring to Leibniz? Although Descartes influenced significantly the new modern air and philosophical thinking, so did Leibniz. Moreover, Leibniz proved some imperfections in Descartes' metaphysics. I mean, both of them deserve our attention, yet in my opinion Leibniz is somehow still a Descartes channel. Why is that? That's a good question. I am actually quite sympathetic to the notion that if we sort of put them toe to toe and compare them side by side, that Leibniz certainly merits just as much honor and study as does Descartes. And that's actually, that's holding him very high, because I think very strongly that Descartes is one of the key philosophers that you want to read, probably not just the discourse but also the meditations. I go back every year, whether I teach Descartes or not, and I read through the meditations in English, in French, and in Latin that Descartes wrote them, because I consider it such as a seminal work. I also go back and I read some of Leibniz's works every year, including his discourse on metaphysics, which I also think is a brilliant and seminal work, and it's well worth pursuing. So, in order to answer this, you have to put yourself in the perspective of the history of Leibniz. If you think about the whole notion of the modern era, what are we talking about? We're talking about the notion that there was a time before modernity and interesting things happened. People, you know, grew, people changed, civilizations developed, people came up with ideas, great philosophers wrote things down, other philosophers transmitted them and studied them and commented on them. But then something changes in this new modern period. What makes this modern period actually modern? What makes it distinctively new? Well, I mean, part of it is newer technology, you know, spreads of cultures, the whole mechanism that we nowadays call early globalization. But part of it is in the realm of ideas, in the realm of intellectual culture. And these guys, they all have a role in that, and they're all more or less contemporaries. Descartes is influenced by Galileo in his early work, actually, which he suppressed when Galileo was persecuted. Descartes knew of Galileo's work. He took some ideas from him. Thomas Hobbes is also very influenced by that. Hobbes is doing something kind of similar to what Descartes is doing in epistemology in terms of political theory, but also actually in terms of epistemology or the theory of knowledge as well. Pierre Cassendi, known in physics for some of his contributions, also was an important philosopher and Epicurean, trying to revive this tradition of trying to explain things primarily on a physical basis. That's something that these guys all had in common. Descartes arguably a little less so, but Descartes also thought that the physical world, and so far as it was extended matter, extended things, extended substance, could be wholly explained by mathematics and physics. The reacting against scholasticism, and there's a sort of standard narrative that holds that medieval philosophy had become moribund, that it had become sterile, they talk about angels, how many angels could dance on the head of a pin? In reality, if you actually study scholastic philosophy, you find that they're not concerned with that sort of thing. They're much more concerned with real issues, but they had a very different approach. Part of the approach was to see what other people in the past had to think about things before you open your own mouth and try to show everybody how clever you are. That's something that you might say disappears in the modern. The early modern era is a time of starting anew, or at least the period to start anew. I mean, as we know from Antioch Joe Sohn, Descartes owes a lot to the scholasticism that he's reacting against. So does Thomas Hobbes. But they are doing something distinctively new. They are reporting a new method, and Descartes is bringing something that I think you can't find in any of these others with his notion of hyperbolic doubt and sort of wiping everything away and building things from the ground up. You might say that Hobbes is doing something similar at least on a political basis, but Descartes is clearly doing that. Clearly doing that. So they're going to get a lot of credit in the history of ideas for doing something new, particularly from those later on in the vantage point who look back and don't actually know anything about the scholastics. You have to remember that in the 17th, 18th, 19th century, unless you actually were within the scholastic tradition, you probably did not read much scholastic philosophy. So as somebody said, hey, those scholastic philosophers, they're no good. They're just jangling with words, as Hobbes said. Then you're probably going to believe them. Particularly, there's some religious things that makes them as well, those scholastics are mostly Catholics, and you happen to be, say, Calvinist, right? But even within Catholic France, you have people like Descartes reacting against these scholastics and saying, that stuff is no good. You have these post-Cartesian philosophers. They're working within Descartes' wake, you might say. Descartes has changed the way, changed the rules of the game for how what's considered to be serious philosophy is going to take place. And so people like Benedict Spinoza, he clearly Cartesian. He actually writes a book, Principles of Cartesian Philosophy. Nicholas Malbranches is adapting Descartes within an Augustinian context. Antoine Arnaud, Leibniz correspondent, was not a great philosopher, was one of the sort of heavy hitters of the time. And then they have this guy, Goldfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German, not a French guy. Well, Spinoza's not French either, but... And he is coming in, and he actually arrives on the scene. He's not just concerned with doing philosophy. He's actually concerned with what we would nowadays, to some degree, call geopolitics. He's also deeply concerned with theology. Whereas Descartes wanted to wipe things away so that they could rebuild the basis of knowledge, one of Leibniz's key ideas was he wanted to bring the churches that had broken apart in the Reformation back together by establishing a common philosophy that they could all agree upon. Someone who kicks out a very noble task. Now, all of these guys are working within the Cartesian tradition. Leibniz is doing something new in that he is bringing back some elements of scholasticism into Cartesian philosophy. The notion, for example, of substantial forces. This is an idea that the Cartesians had rejected because they wanted to explain everything in terms of just pure extension and the relations between the bits of matter. And Leibniz said, no, not even matter itself has to be treated in a much more organic manner where the form of it, the intelligibility of it means something. What happens after that? You notice I also put Blaise Pascal in there. He's kind of an Australian figure. He's critical of the Cartesians. He's not a Cartesian, but he's within this current who are interested in a new way of doing things. And he and Leibniz actually have some important themes in common. What happens afterwards? I mean, we have something going on in Britain, of course. There's the whole empiricist tradition. But I'm not ignoring that. We have Cartesian philosophy. Interestingly, Leibniz was one of the first people to write philosophy in German. He deliberately, towards the end of his life, wrote a few philosophical texts in German. Most of the time he was writing in French or in Latin. But he writes in German to try to promote it as a language fit for philosophy. And Kant very much does that. I mean, there are some good things that Kant did. One of them is to bring German inches sort of an elevated status as a legitimately philosophical language, a fit tool for doing that. And then you have all these other people who have come along. And they are much more interested when they're looking back. They're not so interested in these guys. They're interested in these guys. The beginning of modernity, the radical shift, Kant conceives of himself as doing a yet even more radical shift. He calls it his, you know, Copernican term. And he finds ways to put all of these guys in perspective. It's a flawed perspective. But it's one that's very common. And I think that you see something similar in the other post-Kantian philosophers in Germany, and even to some degree in France. They're much more looking to Descartes as a central figure than they would be to Leibniz. So it's really because of the structure of the narrative, because of what we might call dramatic positions. Because if you look at his achievements, Leibniz certainly achieved as much if not more than Descartes did. He made contributions in more fields of human knowledge. He at one time was considered the universal genius of Europe. But you're right, he has become somewhat eclipsed in our time, and that is because he was eclipsed throughout a good portion of modernity. This gets transmitted through sort of standard, fair histories of philosophy, textbooks, through people who are not really delving into these philosophical thinkers and studying them on their own grounds, on their own merits, spending a lot of time going back to the primary texts, but relying on master narratives. And in those master narratives, René Descartes is simply more of a central figure than he would be to be on Leibniz. So there's my answer for you.