ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I focus on the way that practical concerns in important respects determined Leibniz’s method of scientific discovery and thus shaped the development of his theoretical system. Retracing the history of Leibniz’s critique of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More’s anti-mechanism, I show how his own metaphysical physics was originally conceived as a conciliatory construction aiming at finding the “middle ground” between formalists and mechanists. I moreover argue that thus steering the middle course was, for Leibniz, an important truth criterion in scientific research. Hence, he took certain scientific theories to be true to the extent that the motivations behind their formulation conformed to the rules of a practical code of intellectual conduct.
