Abstract

Since the appearance of Bertrand Russell’s A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, Leibniz’s theory of relations has been a topic of considerable discussion and controversy. Russell himself argued that Leibniz cannot consistently assert both the primary motivation for his denial of relations—that all propositions are of subject-predicate form—and also that relations are to be understood as somehow mental, their foundations being guaranteed by the divine mind. For on the one hand, God must know all relational truths about numbers, aggregates, and relations among monads; but on the other hand, any judgment lacking a subject and predicate will be meaningless.