A review of Futch's book on Leibniz' natural philosophy of time and space.

Following the lead of Hans Reichenbach in the early twentieth century, many authors have attributed a causal theory of time to Leibniz. My exposition of Leibniz’s theory of time in a paper of 1985 has been interpreted as a version of such a causal theory, even though I was critical of the idea that Leibniz would have tried to reduce relations among monadic states to causal relations holding only among phenomena. Since that time previously unpublished texts by Leibniz have become (...) available in which he himself explains temporal precedence in terms of causal precedence, and these texts have been given careful scrutiny by other scholars, such as Jan Cover, Stefano Di Bella and Michael Futch. In this paper I respond to their analyses, and try to make precise the way in which Leibniz’s views on time and on causality fit together in his metaphysics. (shrink)

Most discussions of Leibniz's metaphysics of time and space begin and end with the correspondence between Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, Newton's friend and defender. But Leibniz's ideas about time and space are far richer than this exchange suggests, and Michael Futch shows that the study of those investigations will enhance current discussion among philosophers and cosmologists. Futch's scholarly attention to a wide range of texts is matched by his philosophical acuity. His detailed expositions of texts are not tedious (...) or pedantic because he never fails to bring out their philosophical interest and pertinence. So, too, the book's bibliography is especially valuable.The book opens with a discussion of Newton's substantivalism, which treats time and space as substance-like structures that exist independent of the objects located in them, versus Leibniz's reductionism, which holds time and space to be merely relations, ontologically dependent on the things that exist: space is the order of coexistences, time the order of successions. Futch gives useful historical background that explains why the debate takes the form that it does and what. (shrink)