Abstract

Upon mention of the logical structure of anything in the title of a book, many of us will, no doubt, recall a certain strain of philosophy of a few generations ago, one that ascribed to logic a centrality it has seldom enjoyed before or since. Thus might one easily be steered off course in trying to guess Andreas Blank’s primary thesis from the title he chose for his work. The reference to Carnap’s Der logische Aufbau der Welt is only an apparent one: not only does the author of Der logische Aufbau von Leibniz’ Metaphysik not believe that Leibniz’s metaphysics is constructed from logic in the same way that Carnap took the world to be logically aufgebaut, but indeed, one gets the impression that it is the main purpose of this informative and well-argued new book to downplay the role of logic in the development of Leibniz’s metaphysics.