Leibniz’s empirical, not empiricist methodology

Abstract

The object of inquiry in these pages is to arrive at a better understanding of a frequently used but seldom explained terminology in the history of modern philosophy. The distinction is that ostensibly between seventeenth-century Rationalism and eighteenth-century Empiricism. The division is of immediate relevance in historically situating the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. A historian may want to know whether Leibniz swims with or against the current of his times, whether or not Rationalism rightly characterizes “mainstream” seventeenth-century European thought, what it means to be a Rationalist as opposed to an Empiricist, and whether or not there is anything to be gained by considering Leibniz as a thinker promoting specifically Rationalist rather than Empiricist philosophy.