ABSTRACT
In 1710 Leibniz published his one philosophical book, the Essays in Theodicy on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil. The term ‘theodicy’ (theos = God; dike = justice) was Leibniz’s own coinage; because of an ambiguity in the French, the word even misled some of Leibniz’s earliest readers into supposing that it was the author’s pseudonym; thus they interpreted the title to mean ‘Essays by a Theodicean’ (G II 428). But if the term was new, the project of the book was not; it marked a new departure neither in the history of philosophy nor in terms of Leibniz’s philosophical career. Indeed, the Theodicy simply represents the culmination of Leibniz’s lifelong concern with defending God’s character and justice before the bar of reason. And (as the full title indicates), the project of the work is also continuous with that of the last chapter. As we have seen, central to the defence of divine freedom is the claim that God makes a contingent, spontaneous, and intelligent choice among an infinity of possible worlds. At the heart of the defence of God’s character is the claim that the world which God freely chooses is the best.
