Monadology

The Monadology (La Monadologie, 1714) is one of Gottfried Leibniz's best known works of his later philosophy. It is a short text which presents, in some 90 paragraphs, a metaphysics of simple substances, or monads. During his last stay in Vienna from 1712 to September 1714, Leibniz wrote two short texts in French which were meant as concise expositions of his philosophy. After his death, Principes de la nature et de la grâce fondés en raison, which was intended for prince Eugene of Savoy, appeared in French in the Netherlands. Christian Wolff and collaborators published translations in German and Latin of the second text which came to be known as The Monadology. Without having seen the Dutch publication of the Principes they had assumed that it was the French original of the Monadology, which in fact remained unpublished until 1840. The German translation appeared in 1720 as Lehrsätze über die Monadologie and the following year the Acta Eruditorum printed the Latin version as Principia philosophiae. There are three original manuscripts of the text: the first written by Leibniz and glossed with corrections and two further emended copies with some corrections appearing in one but not the other. Leibniz himself inserted references to the paragraphs of his Théodicée ("Theodicy", i.e. a justification of God), sending the interested reader there for more details. The monad, the word and the idea, belongs to the Western philosophical tradition and has been used by various authors. Leibniz, who was exceptionally well-read, could not have ignored this, but he did not use it himself until mid-1696 when he was sending for print his New System. Apparently he found with it a convenient way to expound his own philosophy as it was elaborated in this period. What he proposed can be seen as a modification of occasionalism developed by latter-day Cartesians. Leibniz surmised that there are indefinitely many substances individually 'programmed' to act in a predetermined way, each substance being coordinated with all the others.