The Science of the Individual: Leibniz's Ontology of Individual Substance [Paperback]

In his well-known Discourse on Metaphysics, Leibniz puts individual substance at the basis of metaphysical building. In so doing, he connects himself to a venerable tradition. His theory of individual concept, however, breaks with another idea of the same tradition, that no account of the individual as such can be given.

Contrary to what has been commonly accepted, Leibnizs intuitions are not the mere result of the transcription of subject-predicate logic, nor of the uncritical persistence of some old metaphysical assumptions. They grow, instead, from an unprejudiced inquiry about our basic ontological framework, where logic of truth, linguistic analysis, and phenomenological experience of the minds life are tightly interwoven. Leibnizs struggle for a concept capable of grasping concrete individuals as such is pursued in an age of great paradigm changes  from the Scholastic background to Hobbess nominalism to the Cartesian way of ideas or Spinozas substance metaphysics  when the relationships among words, ideas and things are intensively discussed and wholly reshaped.

This is the context where the genesis and significance of Leibnizs theory of complete being and its concept are reconstrued. The result is a fresh look at some of the most perplexing issues in Leibniz scholarship, like his ideas about individual identity and the thesis that all its properties are essential to an individual.

The questions Leibniz faces, and to which his theory of individual substance aims to answer, are yet, to a large extent, those of contemporary metaphysics: how to trace a categorial framework? How to distinguish concrete and abstract items? What is the metaphysical basis of linguistic predication? How is trans-temporal sameness assured? How to make sense of essential attributions? In this ontological framework Leibnizs further questions about the destiny of human individuals andlãd