ABSTRACT
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was never in danger of underestimating the difficulties surrounding the nature of human and divine freedom. Speculation about human and divine freedom had been one of the hallmarks of philosophy throughout the Middle Ages; Christian philosophers, in particular, had been concerned with the problem of whether and how human freedom could be reconciled with divine foreknowledge and predestination. Descartes’s point in saying that liberty of indifference is the lowest grade of freedom is thus clearly neutral on the issue of causal determinism. Liberty of indifference may be the lowest grade of freedom for human beings who should ideally be guided in their choices by a perception of the good. Leibniz is determined to resist Spinoza’s extreme theory of necessitarianism since he rightly supposes that it is inconsistent with any traditional conception of freedom. Leibniz’s best hope of upholding the contingency of such a claim seems to lie in appealing to the machinery of infinite analysis.
