Abstract

The first in an ambitiously planned and potentially valuable series of three volumes devoted to Leibniz’s philosophical development between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three. Moll’s account rests primarily on two letters Leibniz wrote to his former teacher Jacob Thomasius in 1668 and 1669, in which he laid out what Moll dubs his "first sketch of a system," a program for reconciling an anti-Scholastic Aristotelianism with the mechanistic physics of the "reformed philosophy" embraced by Descartes, Gassendi, and others. The theoretical mood of the letters is nicely conveyed by Leibniz’s declaration: "In fact, I venture to add that all eight books of Aristotle’s Physics can be accepted without injury to the reformed philosophy." Moll’s chief argument in this volume is that this program as a whole, as well as many of its detailed formulations, were inspired by another of Leibniz’s early teachers, Erhard Weigel.