Leibniz’s Natural Philosophy: Its Hobbesian Origins and Development

Abstract

This dissertation examines Leibniz’s natural philosophy from a systematic point of view. In specific, it argues that Leibniz’s way of doing philosophy is consistently informed by a methodological framework that he learns from Hobbes in his early career. According to this framework, a philosophical system is divided into two parts: an abstract, a priori part thatdemonstrates necessary truths from definitions, and a concrete, a posteriori part that explains phenomena with hypotheses. The young Leibniz builds several systems based on this framework, two of which, Leibniz’s early legal system and early physical system, are examined in detail in this dissertation. Then, this dissertation argues that, despite crucial changes of view, the mature Leibniz still obtains his main theories of fundamental reality following this methodological framework. Therefore, some of Leibniz’s well-known theories, including the theory of monads, are hypotheses rather than truths which hold with certainty.