The Platonism at the Core of Leibniz’s Philosophy

Abstract

In 1714, Leibniz makes a striking pronouncement about the relation between the explicit claims of a philosopher and the underlying sources of those claims. He says that in order to understand the intellectual ‘discoveries’ of others, it is often necessary ‘to detect the source of their invention’. Historians of philosophy have missed much about Leibniz’s ‘discoveries’ because they have not identified the sources of his philosophical ‘inventions’.