Abstract

Both divine and creaturely freedom require contingency, and contingency is the condition of alternative possibility, i.e., the characteristic of being able to do otherwise. The philosopher "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz" was committed to certain views concerning the nature of truth and the nature of concepts that have the apparent implication that there is no such thing as contingency, and therefore, no such thing as either divine or creaturely freedom. ;Concerning Leibniz's conception of truth, he held the view that every true proposition is one in which the predicate concept is contained in the subject concept. In other words, for Leibniz every truth is analytic; and so, it seems that on his view every true proposition is one that could not have been false. Concerning Leibniz's conception of concepts, he held the view that for every individual, there is a "complete" concept that contains information about every detail of that individual's history. This seems to be a threat to contingency for the reason that everything that an individual has done or will do is predetermined insofar as that its entire history is conceptually mapped out prior to its creation. ;Leibniz was well aware of these apparent implications, and he devised several strategies for showing how they could be avoided or explained away. In the course of this dissertation, I discuss two of his most preferred strategies, which are known in the literature as "the doctrine of infinite analysis" and "the theory of possibilia." The main purpose of the discussion is to examine how these two strategies are logically related to one another, and to determine which one, if any, is the more sound of the two. ;My conclusion can be divided into the following three parts: the doctrine of infinite analysis is not a satisfactory solution to Leibniz's problem, because it has the implication that every true singular proposition could not be false , the doctrine of infinite analysis and the theory of possibilia are incompatible, because the conjunction of those two strategies entails a contradiction, and the theory of possibilia is by far the most promising of the two strategies