Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm | Nicholas Rescher (essay date 1967)
Nicholas Rescher (essay date 1967)
SOURCE: "God and the Mind of God," in The Philosophy of Leibniz, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967, pp. 11-21.
[In the following excerpt, Rescher focuses on Leibniz's concept of substance and explains the centrality of God to Leibniz's philosophy.]
God
Leibniz, more than any other modern philosopher, took seriously the idea of a creation of the universe, giving it a centrally important place in his system. Like the theories of the medievals for whom he had such great respect, his system put God as the author of creation at the focal position in metaphysics. The concept of God provides the theoretical foundation upon which the structure of the Leibniz metaphysic is built.
God, for Leibniz, may be defined as "the perfect being."1 His existence is not a seriously problematic issue; it follows directly from the idea (or essence) of his perfection, by reasonings along the...
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