Leibniz's Mill Argument Against Mechanical Materialism Revisited

Abstract

Section 17 of Leibniz's Monadology contains a famous argument in which considerations of what it would be like to enter a machine that was as large as a mill are offered as reasons to reject materialism about the mental. In this paper, I provide a critical discussion of Leibniz's mill argument, but, unlike most treatments, my discussion will focus on texts other than the Monadology in which considerations of the mill also appear. My aim is to provide a survey of three previous interpretations of the argument and to provide a partial defence of one of them, namely the one that Marc Bobro and I offered in another paper. However, I shall also argue that a fourth interpretation is necessary to account for the appearances of Leibniz's mill in at least some of his writings.