Leibnitz's Concept of Monads

Whether Leibniz's philosophical premises are true cannot be answered with surety either affirmatively or negatively. For undoubtedly, competing philosophical systems could call the validity of monadology into question and demonstrate the presumed validity of the competing system in a way that could point up deficiencies or inconsistencies in Leibniz's approach.

But this does not mean that Leibniz's scheme of thought is incapable of establishing a structure for considering fundamental metaphysical questions of truth, knowledge, understanding, or even ethics or aesthetics. What does seem clear from the text is that Leibniz intends his concept of monads to (at minimum) account for perplexing difficulties with various metaphysical conceptions of reality. In significant part, Leibniz appears to be

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y analogy, if we compare a monad to an atom and the plurality of properties to electrons, protons, and neutrons, which physics tells us are constantly in motion. We may set aside for the moment the fact that these atomic properties have been further split and reduced by scientific discovery. The point is that Leibniz appears to be close to arguing that fundamental realities are in some sense relative, unchangeable substance when compared to the wash of ever-changing phenomenological, temporal experience but within themselves, as "incorporeal automata" (632), sufficient to the task of shifting from moment to moment in the cosmic scheme. Thus, too, the monad's internal logic makes it a vital (i.e., not dead) principle of reality. This is the basis for Leibniz's term appetition, which refers to the fact that "the appetite cannot always completely reach the whole perception toward which it tends, but it always obtains something of it, and reaches new perceptions" (632). Elsewhere he restates the idea in terms of a monad's momentary states of being: "since every present state of a simple substance is a natural consequence of its preceding state, the present is pregnant with the future" (633). To put it another way, the monad is always
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Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)