ABSTRACT
I begin with the more familiar Idealist analyses of aggregates. They have their home in ‘‘Idealism’’ – which will in this chapter refer to the set of distinctively Idealist doctrines taken to be Truths rather than theory-relative truth-claims. I will try to capture all the possible ways of construing Leibnizian bodies as ‘‘ideas’’ or appearances in minds. Each one has a foothold in the texts, though some receive more attention than others. I don’t need to try to narrow it down to one view he ‘‘really’’ held. Theory-Pluralism has plenty of room for all of them. He ‘‘plays the field’’ a bit even within the category of Idealism. Just as he withholds unqualified assent to Idealism or to Realism, the same provisional attitude seems evident towards subvarieties of those broader doctrines. After examining two such accounts – ‘‘Reductive Phenomenalism’’ and
‘‘Mental Constructions,’’ – I conclude with a third: ‘‘Well-Founded Phenomena.’’ The third one looks to be the best supported and most fleshed out view of this sort.
