| Popis: |
This chapter traces the development of Leibniz’s theory of space, from his absolutist conception in the early 1670s, to his mature relational theory. It is argued that the relations in question are the relations of situation among bodies, and that place is an equivalence class of relations of situation, space being a system of places, and thus an order of possible situations—not a system of relations among actual bodies. It charts Leibniz’s debts to Hobbes for his conception of abstract situation in terms of relations among the vertices of geometric figures, to Spinoza for the idea of the divine attribute of the “extended per se” as the basis of space, and to Huygens for the rejection of the idea of an immobile space as incoherent, and gives an analysis of how Leibniz’s novel mathematical theory of situations allows him to identify key properties of space, such as its homogeneity, arcwise connectedness, isotropy, and continuity. The origin of Leibniz’s analysis situs is linked to his emerging metaphysics in the late 1670s through the idea that the point of view of a monad is given primarily by the situation of its organic body, and this is connected with a realist interpretation of extension of the body as arising from the diffusion of derivative forces, and thus of substances possessing these forces, in the body. De Risi’s opposing phenomenalist interpretation is discussed in detail, and the idea of a phenomenal space distinct from mathematical space is also discussed and rejected. |
