Abstract

"God creates the best of all possible worlds," Leibniz says. But what does it mean for one world to be better than others, and how does God select our world as the best possible? Descartes argues that, when God creates the world, he is faced with no objective limitations, whatsoever. Thus, God does not create triangles whose interior angles equal two right angles because this accords with some prior mathematical law; rather, God's creation of triangles having certain properties determines what the geometric laws governing triangles will be. But if God faced no limits when he created the world, neither the world nor God could meaningfully be called "good," since there would be no reason God should not have created some other world. Spinoza replies that God could not have created the world otherwise--in everything he does, God is bound by the same necessity that determines geometric figures. Yet, if this were the case, there could again be no reason for calling either God or the world he creates good, since we do not praise an agent for doing something it has no choice but to do. Thus, Leibniz realized, for God to create the best of all possible worlds, and thereby manifest his own goodness, he must face certain objective limits in the worlds he can possibly create, but he must then be free to select one world for creation from among these using some non-necessary reasoning process. Limiting its scope, the present dissertation focuses primarily on Leibniz's attempts to overcome Cartesian voluntarism, and thus takes as its subject matter the objective limits God faces when he contemplates creation, although an opening blow is struck against determinism in the final chapter, where a form of contingent reasoning is introduced that does not plunge God back into voluntarism. Over the course of the work, three increasingly more sophisticated levels of objectivity are systematically developed, here termed hyletic, abstract and concrete objectivity. These levels of objectivity are the respective themes of Chapters 1, 2 and 3, which take logic atomism, mathematics and dynamics as their more specific subject matters