Abstract

When referring to his first efforts in philosophy, particularly those contained in his Hypothesis Physica Nova and Theoria Motusa, Leibniz would often introduce them with vaguely disparaging remarks, such as “When my philosophy was not yet mature…,” or “Before I became a mathematician….” This is understandable, I would think, in terms of his desire to show how much his thought had progressed since that time, especially in mathematics. But some commentators, on being confronted with the unsystematic style of these early works and the apparent contradictions of the theory of the continuum contained in them, seem to have interpreted Leibniz’s disclaimers as amounting to a complete renunciation of them. At any rate, they have been correspondingly dismissive in their estimation of the content of these early works.