Bibliographic record
Abstract
Central to Leibniz's philosophical system is his view that substances must have genuine unity, that they must be simple or indivisible. In this dissertation, I argue that Leibniz's well-known view that substances must be simple, i.e. without parts, follows from his commitment to mereological nihilism--the view that nothing with a plurality of parts is truly one being. I begin by offering a detailed analysis of Leibniz's view that matter or body is inherently plural. I argue that the reasons for this view have not been fully understood, and are rooted in Leibniz's claim that matter is discrete. I then defend Leibniz's commitment to the plurality of matter against what I call the 'Spinozistic Challenge' according to which the entire physical world is a single substance, a view sometimes attributed to Descartes. This challenge alleges that since the physical world is a plenum, the parts of matter can't exist without the entire physical world, and as such the physical world is really one thing, not many things. I argue that, for Leibniz, the sort of dependence involved here does not undermine the plurality of matter. \nAfter establishing the reasons for Leibniz's view that matter is inherently plural, I turn to Leibniz's frequent talk of composite, corporeal substances. How can Leibniz account for such substances given his views that matter is inherently plural and that no substance--no true unity--has a plurality of parts? I first examine Leibniz's view that composite substances have bodies that are actually infinitely divided. It seems that this view conflicts with Leibniz's explicit rejection of infinite number. I defend the claim that Leibniz can accept infinite pluralities without accepting infinite number. Finally, I analyze Leibniz's attempt to reconcile the existence of composite substances with his view that no substance has parts. Ultimately, I argue, this attempt fails to offer a real account of the per se unity of composite substances, and this leads Leibniz to a theory where only monads are genuine substances.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.038 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".