Abstract

In Immanuel Kant's pre-critical writings as well as in his main critical work, the Critique of Pure Reason, one finds a whole battery of fierce attacks on core doctrines of Leibnizian philosophy, e.g., the monadology, the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, the principle of sufficient reason, the doctrine of the pre-established harmony, or the relationalist theory of space and time. It is tempting to read Kant's philosophical development as a gradual emancipation from his Leibnizian upbringing, culminating in a thorough rejection of Leibnizian philosophy as a paradigm case of the kind of dogmatic metaphysics that Kant wants to overcome with his critical philosophy. But in addition to the familiar texts in which Kant attacks the Leibnizians there are several curious, less well-discussed passages in which Kant speaks in highly approving terms of Leibniz. In these passages Kant self-avowedly defends Leibniz against his Leibniz-Wolffian followers who, according to Kant, have seriously misunderstood Leibniz's original position. Kant maintains that a correct reading of Leibniz reveals that his own and Leibniz's views are in fact very close, and that with regard to many issues that are central to transcendental idealism Leibniz had already tried to say what Kant then made explicit in his critical work. The project of this essay is to lay the foundation for the examination of an unorthodox reading of the relation between Leibnizian metaphysics and Kantian transcendental idealism, according to which Kant's critical philosophy can correctly be described as the "true apology of Leibniz", as Kant claims, while Kant's sharply critical objections in the pre-critical works and in the Critique of Pure Reason for the most part don't apply to Leibniz's original theory but to Leibniz-Wolffian school-philosophy. The present essay provides the necessary groundwork for the examination of this unorthodox reading by showing that, and to what extent, these Kantian objections do not apply to Leibniz himself, and by arguing that Kant's reading of certain central Leibnizian doctrines in which Leibnizian metaphysics is represented as a forerunner of transcendental idealism is indeed defensible.