Leibniz/Des Bosses

Jeremy will be glad I put this one back up…

Leibniz and Des Bosses: almost 300 400 years
by doctorzamalek
January 19, 2009

There’s still time to start up a jubilee foundation of some sort… 2012-2016 will be the 300th 400th anniversary period of the important correspondence on the metaphysical status of body between Leibniz and the Jesuit thinker Batholomaeus Des Bosses. Samples should be available in any basic collection of Leibniz essays… on my desk right now is Hackett’s useful Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, in which excerpts from the correspondence run from pages 197-206.

This is where the end-of-life Leibniz tries (and fails to some extent) to develop the idea of body as a substantial chain, or vinculum. As more people turn to assemblage theory, the metaphysical question of how objects build up into larger objects is worth raising anew, and Leibniz is one of the godfathers of the problem.

It would be nice to commemorate the anniversary in some fashion, and we still have three years to figure out how. Normally an anniversary marks a discrete date rather than a period, so I’m not sure how this would be done… perhaps a collective Vinculum blog devoted to finding new ways to attack the problem. Or perhaps even a book series with an expiration window, publishing only in that small stretch of years, with all monographs dedicated to that problem.

Actually, as a NEW METAPHYSICS series editor now for OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS, I suppose I could just arbitrarily decree that all books published between 2012 and 2016 must come to grips with the Vinculum problem in some fashion. I’ll think it over, and will also field ideas.

But just read those 9 pages of sample correspondence, and you’ll already be somewhat up to speed.