Leibniz and Kant on the Syntheticity of Existential Statements

I take up two related questions in this paper. The first is whether Leibniz takes existential propositions to be an exception to the so called in-esse principle that in every true affirmative proposition the predicate is contained in the subject. This has been a question of serious interest in 20th century Leibniz scholarship. One view, defended most famously by Bertrand Russell (1900) and Edmund Curley (1972), is that Leibniz is required to hold such an exception for the sake of a consistent account of divine liberty in creation and the contingency of the actual world; the opposing view, expressed by Louis Coutarat (1901) and Robert M.Adams (1994), is that neither does the text of Leibniz verify the claim of exception, nor does he need to appeal to such an exception in order to solve the problem of contingency. Here I will present a new a position which ultimately converges with the Coutarat-Adams view, but with an important qualification that will also give some credit to the Russell-Curley view. I claim that for the in-esse to be a principle that applies to all true affirmative propositions including the existential ones, a strict concept containment interpretation must be given up for a metaphysically more modest interpretation which suggests only that all true predication has some basis in the nature of things.

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Work Title Leibniz and Kant on the Syntheticity of Existential Statements
Subtitle Kant und die Philosophie in weltbürgerlicher Absicht. Akten des XI. Kant-Kongresses
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  1. Uygar Abaci
License In Copyright (Rights Reserved)
Work Type Article
Publication Date October 1, 2013
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  1. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110246490.4157
Deposited January 23, 2025

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