ABSTRACT
I must pause, before plunging into the details of Leibniz’s views of aggregates and animals, to examine the complex set of rules laid out for the use of ‘‘part,’’ ‘‘whole,’’ and related mereological terms. The reason this must be done first is that he aspires to use substances as the ‘‘building blocks’’ for all else. Before one can in any intelligible sense build something derivative out of fundamental, primitive substances, one needs to know the ‘‘rules for building.’’ His mature mereology provides those rules. Now on typical materialist schemes – Newtonian atomism provides a
nice example – the relevant rules are largely spatiotemporal. Newton has Space and Time, with its regions fixed eternally and granted absolute uniqueness, as a backdrop against which to individuate extended atoms and their composites. Thus, suppose Atom A snugly fits Region One, Now. If at the same time another atom, B, snugly fits an adjoining Region, they can together compose a larger object, AB, just in virtue of holding these positions. Immediately one can see that way of agglomeration won’t work for Leib-
niz. First, he does not begin with extended atoms, but with non-extended substances – the sorts of things that remain altogether untouched by these relations. Second, as I will explain presently, he does not believe there are any absolute beings, Space and Time. He remained skeptical of these and offered an alternative (broadly ‘‘relational’’) conception of them – one that does not offer ‘‘spatiotemporal individuation’’ for any objects.1
