This seminar will focus on the relations between Leibniz and Kant. Leibniz's philosophy was one of the central streams in eighteenth-century German philosophical
thought, and provides an essential background to Kant's system. We will begin with a number of sessions on the philosophy of Leibniz, before turning to its reception in Kant's works.
Leibniz's philosophical corpus is vast, and many of the works that are now taken to be most representative
of his thought, such as the "Discourse on Metaphysics" and the "Correspondence with Arnauld", were only published in the nineteenth century. We will concentrate
on Leibnizian texts which were known to Kant and influential in shaping his thought. Topics discussed will include Leibniz's pre-established harmony and his doctrine
that God created the best of all possible worlds; Leibniz and Kant on innateness and the a priori; the Leibnizian doctrine that all truths are analytic and its rejection
by Kant; Leibniz and Kant on the status of space and time; and the debate on the relation between mathematics and the material world. A more general aim will be to illuminate
the mature Kantian doctrine that our substantive a priori cognition must have its foundation in a merely subjective form of our experience, a doctrine which immediately targets
Leibniz and his enthusiastic endorsement of 'transcendent' metaphysics.