RTW Arthur

Quite inventive and very erudite. Arthur discusses at length Leibniz's philosophical indebtedness to the German logician and theologian Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld (1605–1655), whose vision of a world of relations of "immeation," or universal connection among things, based on the intrinsic activity and agency of things themselves and especially human actors is mystical no doubt but also highly Rationalistic, helping us understand the connections between those two strands in Leib. More than that, though, Arthur brings out the interactional, interpersonal aspect of Leibniz's understanding of the construction and expression of meaning on those grounds, showing that L isn't the austere Rationalist he's often made out as and in fact has a lot in common in his understanding of our motivations for engaging in natural language and the processes whereby it develops with his ostensible "opponents," the philosophes of the later Enlightenment. Chapter is posted online and will appear in Leibniz from Polity Press.… (altro)