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the existence of voids but arises instead due to the fact that at the
locus of a discontinuity between neighboring bodies, those bodies
are moving with different motions while still remaining in contact.
“This happens,” he says,
when the parts stay together [immediata] but are moved in different directions.
For example, two spheres, one included in the other, can be moved in different
directions and yet remain contiguous, though they cease to be continuous. (1669.
A VI,2,435–6)
This idea about motion and matter – the “Cartesian motion thesis”
that bodies are individuated by motion – crystallizes nicely in
Leibniz’s account of cohesion as, for example, when a few years
after the Thomasius letter he writes:
Heterogeneous ôr agitating [turbans] matter is bound into one !body" by a motus
generalis. (PQP, 1672. A VI,3,42)7,8
86 SAMUEL LEVEY
Thus the binding of matter into cohesive bodies and the dividing
of it into distinct parts emerge as two sides of the same coin:
cohesion and division are the opposing faces of motion in the
material plenum. One face is harmony, and the other, disorder.9
Let me sum up a few conclusions about Leibniz’s views of matter
and continuity circa 1669. Continuity is taken to be a form of
indefiniteness and is characterized specifically as unboundedness
– the lack of actually assigned interior termini or boundaries, and
hence the lack of actually assigned parts. Matter, by contrast, is
discrete, determinate, fully invested with shapes and interior bound-
aries, and it is made so by motion. The differing motions within
the plenum of matter assign a variety of boundaries in it, cutting it
into an infinite mosaic of discontinuous parts, each enclosed within
its own separate outer boundaries. Neighboring parts that share a
common motion form cohesive bodies, though such bodies are still
strictly divided into smaller discontinuous parts by further internal
motions; and all the parts of matter in the universe are so packed
together that the boundaries of contiguous parts are “indistant” from
one another, leaving no empty spaces anywhere.
Thus one finds in these later writings that the main elements of his
view of matter and continuity that were first outlined in 1669 still
command the center of Leibniz’s account circa 1704–1705. That
later account trades on the idea that continuity is a form of indeter-
minacy, a concept he repeatedly calls by name. He writes to Sophie
in 1705 that in matter “nothing has remained indeterminate, whereas
indeterminacy is the essence of continuity” (G VII,563). And the
ancient notion being unlimbered in that analysis of continuity, but
mainly not being called upon by name, is the concept of potentiality.
Looking back from this perspective at the very early hylomorphic
account of physical bodies, we can readily find marks of the
role being played by the “indeterminist” or “potentialist” view of
continuity: for example, recall how Leibniz writes to Thomasius that
continuous matter is unbounded “ôr indefinite” [seu indefinitam]
(A VI,2,435). The terms primarily in play in the early discus-
sions of continuity, however, are “part,” “motion” and “boundary”
– ones, we might note, with impeccable Cartesian credentials. Yet
Leibniz still manages to capture a notion of potentiality in those
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 89
we shall soon see, however, the transition from the earliest account
to his account of 1676 is interrupted by fairly dramatic changes
of mind. But before turning to consider what happens in Leibniz’s
thought during that turbulent interval between 1669 and 1676, I want
to look one last time to the 1705 account of matter and continuity
and draw out a few more of its relations to those earlier accounts.
The contrast between the continuous and the discrete laid out in
the priority thesis ties neatly together with Leibniz’s distinction
between indeterminate quantities, whose parts are only potential,
and determinate ones, whose parts are actually assigned.
The continuum, that is, involves indeterminate parts, whereas in actuals there
is nothing indefinite – indeed, in them any division that can be made, is made.
Actuals are composed as a number is composed out of unities [e.g., 6 = 1 + 1 +
1 + 1 + 1 + 1], ideals as a number out of fractions: the parts are actual in the real
whole, not in the ideal whole. (1706. G II,282)
Besides the obvious links to the Cartesian views about how varying
motions divide matter into separate parts while common motions
bind it into cohesive bodies, two features of this passage are espe-
cially noteworthy. First, observe how Leibniz allows his claims
94 SAMUEL LEVEY
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
The circle defines three families of points in the plane. First, there
are the points that lie on the circle itself. Second, there are those
falling strictly within the disk-shaped region enclosed by the circle
(but not actually lying on the circle). And third there are those points
falling strictly outside of the circle. Now, our paradigm case of an
open set is given by the second family of points: the set of those
points falling strictly within the circle. Those points make up an
open disk in the plane, a disk minus the boundary circle that encloses
it. The open disk is the paradigm open set for a two dimensional
space. For a three dimensional space, the paradigm open set will
be an open sphere – a sphere minus its boundary surface. In a one
dimensional space, the paradigm will be an open linear interval, a
finite line segment minus its two end-points.
In contrast to this, the disk plus its boundary circle is the
paradigm case of a closed set (and likewise the closed sphere and
the closed linear interval are paradigms for their spaces).
Let’s sometimes be willing to ignore the fine distinction between
open and closed sets, and in those times just speak of our disk as
D (see Figure 2). But when we need to be careful about it, we shall
distinguish the open disk enclosed by the circle, D-minus (for “disk
minus the circle”), from the closed disk made up of all the interior
points plus the boundary circle, D-plus. And we shall distinguish the
space containing all and only those points that lie strictly outside the
circle as the exterior.
With the idea of an open set in hand, we can now use it to define
an array of other topological concepts, most importantly the concept
of a limit point of a region of a given space. We identify a region with
98 SAMUEL LEVEY
D-plus. But notice that in doing so we shall be slicing off limit points
belonging to the exterior space; for the points on the circle are limit
points of the exterior as well as limit points of D (this holds equally
for D-plus and D-minus, both of which include the points on the
circle as limit points). The disk D and the exterior space around it
share the circle as a common boundary. Of course this means that
if we should cut into the plane in such a way that leaves all of the
points on the circle attached to the exterior space, we’ll thereby be
cutting limit points off the disk D; what we’ll then detach is D-
minus, a disk denuded of its limit points. (And we could cut into
the plane in such a way that distributes the limit points in greater
or lesser portions between the disk D and the exterior, thus leaving
some of the boundary attached to each piece – but thereby stripping
off some limit points of each one as well.)
So, no matter how deftly we impose a cut to separate the whole
space into disjoint parts, some limit points of one part will always
wind up inside the other part. It is in exactly this sense that a
connected space such as our plane is a seamless whole that has no
“natural joints” at which it can be divided. Rather, any cut into a
connected space must be arbitrary and, indeed, disordering.
And, once again, this view which we are finding expressed in the
1670 letter to Hobbes and in the TMA is recapped with especial
clarity in the 1672 piece “On the Cohesiveness of Bodies,” where
Leibniz writes,
it is clear that any conatus whatsoever already begins to have an effect [iam
incipere efficere], even if the effect is smaller than any assignable. Hence it
follows that whatever endeavors to move into another’s place already at its bound-
ary [extremo] begins to exist in the other’s place, i.e. their boundaries [extrema]
are one ôr [sive] penetrate each other, and consequently one cannot be impelled
without the other. And consequently these bodies are continuous. (A VI,3,96)
off one part and leave it attached only to the other. If cohesion indeed
requires numerically distinct bodies to share a common boundary,
then it can be said to generate continuity in the physical world,
in a clear proto-topological sense of the term ‘continuity’. And
consequently it seems that bodies distinguished by their individual
motions could, nonetheless, still be parts of a continuum, precisely
by being connected in this way.
There is a point worth emphasizing about this Leibnizian account
of cohesion that ascribes connectedness to cohesive bodies. Properly
understood, Leibniz’s view should be that connectedness supervenes
on cohesion – and not that connectedness explains or causes it.
Cohering parts of matter come to be continuous because they are
interpenetrating at their boundaries, and as those boundaries coin-
cide they “become one.” But the shared boundary at the locus of
contact between cohering parts of a cohesive body is not a “glue”
that holds those parts together; it is the result of cohesion, not
a source of it. While this point should be clear enough from the
account, it is not hard to get the order of explanation running back-
wards and treat the cohesiveness of a body as due to its parts
being joined by common boundaries; and indeed we can sometimes
find Leibniz himself reversing the order, as for example in the last
passage quoted above where near the end he says, “their boundaries
are one ôr penetrate each other, and consequently one cannot be
impelled without the other.” This is an error, if only a slip. In the
very next sentence Leibniz sets the account right again, drawing out
the metaphysical consequence from the physical theory of cohesion:
“And consequently these bodies are continuous.”
The conatus physics of 1671 now stands vividly in contrast with the
earlier view of 1669, especially regarding the analysis of continuity
and the structure of matter. Whereas in 1669 matter is discontinuous
and the continuum is defined as lacking an assignment into parts,
now in 1671 parts are assigned in a continuum and cohesive material
bodies are continuous. But Leibniz’s allegiance to the thesis that
the continuum has actually assigned parts is very short-lived, as his
enthusiasm for that “first principle” dries up along with the conatus
physics of the TMA and its specific claim that cohering bodies share
an extremum or boundary. By the autumn of 1676 he shifts back,
this time permanently, to the 1669 view that the continuum has no
actual parts and that a variety of boundaries cannot arise in matter
without some discontinuity.
Why does Leibniz switch back and forth on those basic principles
concerning matter and continuity? Part of the answer is simply that
he abandons the interpenetration account of cohesion, and so far
I have attributed his doing so to the fact that the conatus physics,
upon which that account of cohesion is based, falls through when
in March of 1676 Leibniz comes to reject the notion of an infinites-
imal quantity. So we can see his retreat from the view that matter is
continuous as in part a consequence of his views in the philosophy
of mathematics evolving in a way that undermines his original basis
for holding cohesive bodies to be connected quantities.
And there is another element in his thought that should also be
mentioned as a possible contributing factor in his abandoning the
interpenetration account of cohesion. Sometime between 1672 and
1676 Leibniz comes to accept an ancient line of argument for the
impossibility of a “state of change” or “middle state,” i.e., a state
which could serve as the common boundary between two contrary
states, such as a state of dying that lies between life and death, or
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 103
a state of perfect rest that lies between the rise and fall of a stone
that is tossed straight up in the air.21 On the view he comes to adopt,
there are no such middle states mediating change from one state to
another but rather change is to be analyzed as a “composite” or “the
point of contact or aggregate of two opposite states” (A VI,3,541).
If this thesis covers not only cases of alleged middle states joining
two opposing states that exist one after another but also the case
of boundaries between distinct bodies that exist one adjacent to
another, it yields an argument against the possibility of cohesion
of two bodies via their sharing a common boundary. For the alleged
common boundary would be just such a middle state between the
one body and the other, and allowing the existence of this bound-
ary would then contradict Leibniz’s denial of middle states. Since
cohering bodies would therefore have to be joined only by contact
in which their separate boundaries are touching, the interpenetration
account of cohesion would be disqualified; and the view of material
bodies as continuous (i.e. connected) quantities that rests on it would
again be left ungrounded.22 So we can also see Leibniz’s shift away
from the c. 1671 thesis that matter is continuous as due in part to his
acceptance of an argument against middle states.
While both of those developments in Leibniz’s thought can be
seen as factors that contribute to his abandoning the interpene-
tration account of cohesion, and thus can offer us some rationale
to explain why he shifts back and forth between opposing views
about the structure of matter (whether it’s discrete or continuous)
and the nature of the continuum (whether it’s indeterminate or actu-
ally assigned with parts), in fact I think his wavering here is a clue
to something still more philosophically interesting and instructive.
And this brings us to the interpretive point highlighted in the title
of this paper. I suggest that his changes of mind – especially about
whether the continuum has actually assigned parts – signal the pres-
ence of two subtly different concepts at work in Leibniz’s thinking,
either one of which might be expressed by the term ‘continuity’.
On the one hand, there is the concept of connectedness, or at any
rate a similar proto-topological concept that finds expression in
Aristotle’s dictum, “Continuous things are those whose boundaries
are one.” On the other, there is the more metaphysically-oriented
concept of continuity as potentiality, where this is opposed to actu-
104 SAMUEL LEVEY
the name implies, they are “stuck together” [sunechêtai]. But this is not possible
if the extrema are two. It is clear from this definition that continuity belongs to
those things from which a unity naturally arises in virtue of their being joined
together [kata tên sunapsin]. (Physics, 227a6, 227a10–15)
There are, therefore, always actual divisions and variations in the masses of exist-
ing bodies, to whatever degree of smallness one might go. It is the imperfection
of our senses that makes us conceive physical things as mathematical beings in
which there is some indeterminacy. (1705. G VII,562–3)
There is a bounty of such examples, and even where the texts are
not so explicit in emphasizing how the actuality of matter’s internal
structure of parts and boundaries sets it apart from the indeter-
minacy of a continuum, the basic idea that matter is actually divided
– indeed, actually infinitely divided – and not just divisible into
parts is a resounding and pervasive theme in the theory of matter.
“Created things are actually infinite,” Leibniz writes in a fragment
dated sometime between 1677 and 1685, “For any body whatever
is actually divided into several parts” (VE 1129); and similarly: “I
suppose that every body is actually divided into several parts, which
are also bodies” (VE 1127). In a letter to Burcher de Volder he
states unequivocally, “In truth, matter is not continuous but discrete,
and actually infinitely divided” (G II,278). And – once again in the
31 October 1705 letter to Sophie – the actually infinite division
of matter is enlisted directly in illuminating the contrast between
the determinacy of the structure of matter and the indeterminacy
essential to continuity:
The better to conceive the actual division of matter to infinity, and the exclu-
sion that there is of all exact and indeterminate continuity, we must consider that
God has already produced there as much order and variety as it was possible to
introduce there until now, and thus nothing has remained indeterminate there. (G
VII,562f.)
It might not be overstating the case to say that the actuality of matter
is just about Leibniz’s deepest commitment of all in metaphysics (or,
at any rate, a commitment than which none is deeper).
Keeping the actuality of matter in mind, it becomes easier to
see how Leibniz can come, even temporarily, to reject the require-
ments laid down by the potentiality concept of continuity. We might
reconstruct the path of his thought summarily as follows: (1) On
the strength of the interpenetration account of cohesion, cohesive
material bodies are connected, for their parts share common bound-
aries; (2) by Aristotle’s dictum (which the new account of cohesion
has now raised to salience) what is connected is continuous; and so,
cohesive material bodies are continuous; (3) but matter is actual:
108 SAMUEL LEVEY
its parts and boundaries are actually assigned; hence, (4) there are
actually assigned parts and boundaries even in a continuum.
Yet as I mentioned before, the interpenetration account of
cohesion is fleeting, and once it has gone the connectedness concept
no longer holds full sway in Leibniz’s thought. By autumn of 1676,
at the latest, the potentiality concept reëmerges in what is to be its
permanent place at the center of his analysis of continuity.
Each and every part of matter has “its own separate boundaries,”
and thus no body made up of them, however cohesive, can truly be
connected.
Yet consider how this will be equally true of any mass of matter
you like, for the parts of any mass of matter are themselves always
just more bits of matter, and are therefore discrete rather than
continuous quantities. Thus having still finer parts of their own
whose boundaries are two and actually separate, these bits of matter
are likewise not connected; and neither are the finer parts of the
bits, nor the finer parts of the finer parts, and so on, ad infinitum.
Matter as a discrete quantity is fully actual and actually unconnected
everywhere.
That consequence is disastrous for Leibniz’s metaphysics of
matter. It entails, among other thing, that matter ultimately resolves
into a powder, so to speak, of isolated points; or if not points,
exactly, then at least isolated simple indivisible particles – what
Leibniz in various places in the early writings calls ‘minima’. This
is a deep problem because on his view minima can be only modes
of extended things and never parts of them nor things in their own
right; and he is often at pains to declare that a resolution of matter
into isolated minima is impossible. Indeed, as I have argued at length
elsewhere, much of the design his theory of matter is controlled
specifically by the task of avoiding even the possibility that any
part of matter, however small, should turn out to be minimal.25
Matter’s being actually unconnected everywhere, however, shatters
that commitment by requiring the existence of isolated minima or
point-like particles of matter.
Figure 3.
Here is Leibniz:
Let there be a line ab, to be traversed by some motion. Since some beginning of
motion is intelligible in that line, so also will be a beginning of the line traversed
by the beginning of the motion. Let this beginning of the line be ac. But it is
evident that dc can be subtracted from it without subtracting the beginning. And if
ad is believed to be the beginning, from it ed can be subtracted without subtracting
the beginning, and so on ad infinitum. For even if my hand is unable and my soul
unwilling to pursue the division to infinity, it can nevertheless be understood at
once that everything that can be subtracted without subtracting the beginning does
not involve the beginning. And since the substraction can be done to infinity (for
the continuum, as others have demonstrated, is divisible to infinity), it follows
that the beginning of the line, i.e. that which is traversed in the beginning of the
motion, is infinitely small. (1672–3, A VI,3,98–9)
NOTES
1 The open territory here remains very large. In this paper I shall leave aside
(among the many related topics in Leibniz) many of the nuances of Leibniz’s
later thought concerning continuity and continuous orderings, his views about the
construction of points, lines, and planes, his account of a link between continu-
ity and possibility, etc. For a good discussion of some aspects of Leibniz’s later
accounts of continuity not taken up in the present paper, see Timothy Crockett,
“Continuity in Leibniz’s Mature Metaphysics,” also in this issue.
2 I am responsible throughout for translations of Leibniz and Descartes, but
hypothesis is A, VI,525 dated to March 1676. And there he takes pains to point
out that the hypothesis is not merely presupposed; rather, he argues for it. But
the view of nature as a plenum seems clearly to be a backdrop for many of his
discussions from 1671 to 1672 onward.
4 In fact in this letter Leibniz presents two possible ways in which discontinuity
might arise: “first, in such a way that contiguity is at the same time destroyed,
when the parts are so pulled apart from each other that a vacuum is left; or in
such a way that contiguity remains” (A VI,2,435). His ensuing discussion makes
it clear that it is the latter possibility which keenly interests him, and that it is the
one he holds to be how discontinuity is actually introduced into matter.
5 Aristotle’s definition occurs at Physics 231a21, 227a10–15, and Metaphysics
1069a5–8.
6 Perhaps we should say it is a mere contiguum: a contiguum that is not also a
continuum. For on the usual Aristotelian account that Leibniz observes here, the
continuous is a special case (the limiting case) of the contiguous: the continuous
are both “those whose boundaries are together” and “those whose boundaries are
one.” See, for example, Aristotle, Physics 227a10f., and Leibniz’s remarks about
the continuous and the contiguous at A VI,3,94, and 537.
7 It’s hard to capture the subtle imagery at work here in a close translation.
anywhere between 1677–1695), Leibniz writes in much the same vein: “The prin-
ciple of cohesion is harmonizing motion [motus conspirans], and that of fluidity
is varying motion” (VE 495).
9 This is to remain Leibniz’s view, in the slightly evolved form of the thesis that
nothing is absolutely fluid or solid, but rather that all matter is to some degree
or other pliant, and that motion accounts for this. In a piece dated to 1683–6,
“On the Existing World,” he writes: “Therefore it must be said that no point can
be assigned in the world which is not set in motion somewhat differently from
any other point however near to it, but, on the other hand, that no point can be
assigned which does not have some motion in common with some other given
point in the world; under the former head, all bodies are fluid; under the latter, all
are cohering. But to the extent that a common or proper motion is more or less
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 115
“Space and Time in the Leibnizian Metaphysic,” Noûs 22 (1988): 493–519. See
also, J.E. McGuire, “ ‘Labyrinthus Continui’: Leibniz on Substance, Activity
and Matter,” in Machamer and Turnbull (eds.), Motion and Time, Space and
Matter (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976) 290–326; Glenn Hartz,
“Leibniz’s Phenomenalisms,” The Philosophical Review 101 (1992): 511–49;
Richard Arthur, “Russell’s Conundrum: On the Relation of Leibniz’s Monads
to the Continuum.” In Brown and Mittelstrass (eds.), An Intimate Relation
(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1989) 171–201; and Chapter III of my “Matter, Unity
and Infinity in Early Leibniz” (Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University, 1997).
Although the period of Leibniz’s writings that I have in mind here is a vaguely
bounded one, spanning more than a decade, I believe the purest expressions of
the views hat he holds during this time emerge near its end, in the years closely
surrounding 1705. For that reason, and for brevity, I shall refer to the accounts
of matter and continuity that Leibniz defends in this period as belonging to “the
1705 metaphysics.”
11 Elsewhere is “Leibniz’s Constructivism and Infinitely Folded Matter,” forth-
Leibniz would have seen it. For in Descartes’ Optics one can find an ideas of
an “action or tendency to move” (which “it is necessary to distinguish from”
movement itself) that could naturally be read as a cousin concept to Leibniz’s
conatus (cf. AT VI,88). But while Leibniz certainly read Principles 1–2 closely,
there is no clear evidence to suggest that he is (in 1670–2, at any rate) aware of
that particular element of Descartes’ views in the Optics. My thanks to Alison
Simmons for bringing that element of the Optics to my attention.
13 In one important sense, however, the conatus physics does stay alive. The
picture of the material world as invested throughout with centers of motion – the
picture of the conatus world with its principles of action that are in each of the
infinitely many parts of matter and ground their physical properties – this will
quietly keep its grip on Leibniz’s thought for some time, and rearise explicitly in
his later efforts to found physics upon a metaphysics of immaterial and “active”
first principles: another role that is to be ascribed to the monads. In this way one
might say that the ontology of conati “transforms” into the ontology of monads
in the later years. But as a basic account of physical phenomena – of motion,
cohesion, impact, and so on – the early theory of endeavors has run its course by
late spring of 1676. For some (albeit brief) discussion of Leibniz’s rejection of
infinitesimals see fn. 8 of my “Leibniz on Mathematics and the Actually Infinite
Division of Matter,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 107, No. 1 (January 1998).
14 Michael White is the first to make this point that the concept of a seamless
(1) The whole space S and the empty set are elements of %.
(2) The union of any number (finite, countable or uncountable) of sets of from %
is in %.
(3) The intersection of any finite number of sets from % is in %.
18 We shall assume throughout that all the point spaces discussed have the “usual
topology” for Euclidean spaces, namely, the order topology and its self-products.
19 In fact, this definition of a limit point is broad enough to include all the interior
points of a set as limit points, as well as those that fall on the boundary. For our
purposes, we shall be considering only those limit points that are also boundary
points (i.e. those limit points that are not also interior points).
20 A separation of a topological space S is more usually defined as a pair of
nonempty, disjoint, open sets S and V such that the union (U ∪ V) = S. Our
definition in terms of limit points is equivalent, but brings out more clearly the
issues of our immediate concern.
21 Leibniz’s fullest expression of the argument for this conclusion, which I won’t
rehearse here, occurs near the outset of Pacidius Philalethi (cf. A, VI,3,534–41),
though when he writes the Pacidius in autumn of 1676 he has been warming up
to that line of argument for some time.
22 It should be noted that in a passage near the end of the Pacidius’s main discus-
sion of middle states there is a remark that poses a prima facie challenge to my
suggestion here that the argument against middle states might be seen as ruling
out the existence of common boundaries and with it the related account of cohe-
sion. The primary interlocutor, Charinus, while offering an example of a perfectly
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 117
round sphere resting on a perfectly flat table, says in passing: “It is clear that the
sphere does not cohere with the plane, and that they have no extrema in common,
otherwise one would not be able to move without the other” (A VI,3,537). This
certainly suggests that the account of cohesion as boundary-sharing is in the air
(even if it’s not exactly asserted), and the interlocutors do not go on later to point
out that the argument against middle states defeats that account of cohesion. But in
my view, also to be defended in “Discontinuity and the Structure of Motion,” this
account of cohesion, like so many of the ideas mentioned early in the Pacidius, is
rehearsed as a feature of Leibniz’s previous thought, and it is not an element of
the most considered views that are ultimately endorsed in the dialogue; moreover,
Leibniz’s final commitments in the Pacidius, and the overall gist of his remarks
about middle states and continuity that occur as the dialogue progresses, do seem
to militate against the account of cohesion as boundary-sharing.
23 This is not to say that the texts are always unwaveringly clear on this point.
As Robert Adams has pointed out, Leibniz can be “quoted on both sides of
the question whether bodies are continuous or whether they only appear to be
continuous” (Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994), p. 233). Yet I do not believe there is a very serious
worry about Leibniz’s views even in most of the passages (after 1676) in which
he can be quoted apparently on the other side of the question. In the years
shortly following 1676 Leibniz will sometimes call matter ‘continuous’, but I
think it is fairly clear in those contexts that he only means that matter is not
interrupted by void spaces (which accords with a use of ‘continuous’ that he
mentions occasionally in 1676; cf. A VI,3,542). Adams cites a troubling passage
at G IV,394, from 1702, where Leibniz seems to say outright that body [corpus]
is continuous. Though continuity itself does seem to be at stake there, it is
less than clear to me that in the crucial sentence Leibniz is characterizing the
nature of actual material bodies and not, say, an abstract concept of “body” that
simply does not weigh-in on the question whether actual bodies are ultimately
discrete or continuous. Still, even if Leibniz wavers in places, his considered
view about material bodies is abundantly clear and a deeply committed feature of
his metaphysics.
24 The Latin term cointegrantes derives from integro = “to make a whole,” so
op. cit.
26 The relevant principles are: (1) No infinite aggregate can form a true whole, or
be truly one; and (2) what is not truly one does not truly exist (cf. G II,97,251). The
first of those is especially motivated by the link between the concept of an infinite
whole and Galileo’s paradox. I take this up in detail in “Leibniz on Mathematics,”
op. cit.
27 Leibniz’s own statement of the regress problem – and the argument it yields
for the existence of immaterial substantial unities – can be found at, for example,
118 SAMUEL LEVEY
G II,261, 267, 296. I discuss the regress problem together with some others
(including the “unity problem” mentioned in the previous footnote) in “Leibniz’s
Constructivism and Infinitely Folded Matter,” op. cit.
28 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Dartmouth College and
Department of Philosophy
Dartmouth College
New Hampshire, USA