The best of all possible web pages,we have WindowlessMonads
? as well as Monads with a view.
Yet, in the 'best of all possible web pages' Monads can
well afford not to have windows: They know anyway what
is going on elsewhere, or atually, they have always
known it. (By means of that 'PrestabilizedHarmony?'
Leibniz avoids the problem to explain how mind affects
matter and vice versa. "Car je ne trouvois aucun moyen
d'expliquer comment le corps fait passer quelque chose
dans l'ame , ou vice versa, ny comment une substance
peut communiquer avec une autre substance creee."
Systeme Nouveau de la Nature etc.(12). Descartes'
followers had introduced the "Systeme des Causes
occasionelles" to solve the problem: God creates
movements according to our will to move, and
thoughts according to movements of exterior things.
The idea of a God permanently busy to maintain
the harmony of the universe seemed much less
attractive to Leibniz then the harmony established
once for all. --- )
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a
philosopher, scientist, mathematician, diplomate
and lawyer. Independently of Isaac Newton he
'invented' the infinitesimal calculus (and also
the notation df/dx still used.) His philosophical
contribution to metaphysics is based on the
Monadology, which introduces MonaDs? as 'substancial
forms of being. They are a kind of spiritual atoms,
eternal, indecomposable, individual. In the way
sketched above the notion of a monad solves the problem
of the interaction of mind and matter that arises
in Descartes' system, as well as the individuation
that seems problematic in Spinoza's system, which
represents individual creatures as mere accidental
modifications of the one and only substance.
The "theodicee" claims to justify the
apparent imperfections of the world by its
being optimal among all possible worlds.