Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil / Edition 1

by Gottfried Leibniz

Overview

In order to be truly free, must you act arbitrarily? If an event did not happen, could it have happened? Since there is evil, and God could have made the world without evil, did God fail to pick the best course? Grappling with such simple—yet still intriguing—puzzles, Leibniz was able to present attractively his new theories of the real and the phenomenal, freewill and determinism, and the relation between minds and bodies. Theodicy was Leibniz's only book-length work to be published in his lifetime, and for many years the work by which he was known to the world. Fully at home with the latest scienctific advances, Leibniz ultimately rejected the new atomistic philosophies of Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes, and drew upon the old cosmology of Aristotelian scholasticism. There could be no conflict, he argued between faith and reason, freedom and necessity, natural and divine law. Ingeniously defending his postulate of pre-established harmony, Leibniz made important advances in the precise analysis of concepts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780875484372
Publisher:	Open Court Publishing Company
Publication date:	01/22/1999
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.56(w) x 8.54(h) x 1.15(d)

Table of Contents

	Editor's Introduction	7
	Preface	49
	Preliminary Dissertation on the Conformity of Faith with Reason	73
	Essays on the Justice of God and the Freedom of Man in the Origin of Evil, in Three Parts	123
	Appendices
	Summary of the Controversy, Reduced to Formal Arguments	377
	Excursus on Theodicy, [section] 392	389
	Reflexions on the Work That Mr. Hobbes Published in English on 'Freedom, Necessity and Chance'	393
	Observations on the Book Concerning 'the Origin of Evil', Published Recently in London	405
	Causa Dei Asserta	443
	Index	445