Customer Reviews

Philosophy of Leibniz

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The advertising makes this appear to be a new printing of a wonderful old book that has gone out of print. That isn't what it is at all.

An outfit called General Books took an old copy of this out-of-print book, scanned it, used a computer program to covert it into text, and then printed it out (with new pagination, bearing no relation whatever to the original pagination) and bound it. The result is a complete mess. There are misspelled words everywhere (the software apparently isn't so good at recognizing letters in older fonts); the footnotes and chapter headings were absorbed into the text; the original page numbers are lost; the table of contents is completely useless because it gives page numbers corresponding to the original pagination. There are also many apparently meaningless long strings of characters.

For example, here is how the book begins:

ffamititrge: PBINTED BY J. and O. F. OLAT AT THE TJNIVEBSITT PRESS. PEEFACE. The history of philosophy is a study which proposes to itself two somewhat "different objects, of which

and here's a randomly selected passage from page 85:

It remains to say something concerning time and change. Here we have fewer passages to refer to, and so far as I know no thoTOugh discussion after Leibniz's philoso phy i s matare.

This is probably the worst produced and printed book I've seen in many years. Typos, misprints, paragraphs separated.

Note that I'm not talking about the content, which remains to be read, but rather about the production itself. It is so bad that even glancing through it immediately highlights problems - no need to look hard.

Russell's famous work is of great importance historically because it set the tone for Leibniz study for a generation. Today this tone has been completely rejected by modern Leibniz scholars. Russell's work says more about Russell than Leibniz. Russell uses Leibniz as a punching bag to push his dogma. I recommend the many papers and journal entries written over the last 100 years which basically have proven almost every major attack Russell made on Leibniz to be unjustified. Still, this book is a must read for any serious Leibniz scholar for its historical importance alone and to understand why so many scholars after Russell had the narrow interpretation of Leibniz that they did.

As Russell lays out Leibniz' system giving five axioms and critiques two as false, we have an interesting historical analysis of predicate logic as well as the analytic - synthetic distinction both pre-Kant, and a la Russell. This is certainly bound to interest logicians and historians of logic as well as Leibniz students.