Adams, Robert Merrihew - Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist

The last twenty years or so have seen a flowering of Leibniz studies. The organizers of a recent international workshop called it "the Leibniz renaissance."¹ In the United States interest in the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was enhanced in the 1970s by the excitement over modal logic and "modal metaphysics." The idea of a possible world was central to these developments, and that gave them an obvious connection with Leibniz. I think there was also a subtler and deeper, though perhaps more debatable, connection between Leibniz and the new work in modal metaphysics.