SEMPY: Henry Straughan (Yale)

Location: 451 College St., room B04

Title: Against Combinatorialism: An Alternative Account of Leibnizian Individuation

Abstract:

There is a broad consensus that Leibniz’s account of individuation is “combinatorialist”. In brief, according to the combinatorialist interpretation, substances are individuated by the combinations of primitive properties they instantiate. More precisely, substances are individuated by their corresponding complete concepts, which are taken to be conjunctions (or, on some accounts, sets) of primitive predicates. There are, on the combinatorial view, an infinite number of primitive predicates and each complete concept is a unique combination of such predicates. Two substances differ in number if and only if they differ in their primitive properties.

In this paper, I argue that the combinatorialist interpretation is systematically untenable. I argue that Leibnizian substances cannot differ in their primitive properties and, therefore, cannot be individuated by such differences. I further argue that, for Leibniz, there are a finite, rather than infinite, number of primitive properties, which undermines a central presupposition of the combinatorialist view.

Instead, I propose that Leibniz understands individuation in terms of the limitation of primitive properties. On this account, the properties of created substances are formed through the “addition of limits” to absolute, unlimited properties. All Leibnizian substances possess the same primitive properties, but in creatures these primitive properties are limited to different degrees. Thus, substances are not individuated by possessing different combinations of primitive properties, but by possessing different degrees of the same primitive properties.

Sponsored by The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund at Yale University.