I'm reading The Best of All Possible Worlds by Stephen Nadler and he says Leibniz was fascinated by the Cartesian revolution in natural philosophy but thought going back to parts of Aristotle was important. He seemed to believe in forms as kinds of living energies. Descartes ascribed motion to the concept of tension, like in a clock. The universal vortex with the infinite vortexes within unfolded its tension, let go by God in the beginning, creating the cascading motion into the future. Leibniz believed in infinite monads and but needed a metaphysical unity to keep objects as individual. He worked on the idea of the continuum as early as 1671 in his New Physical Hypothesis and had generally more proto-Romantic ideas of nature than the Cartesians
From the book: "Strictly speaking, for Leibniz it is not possible for two worlds to differ only in a single detail. If one thing is different between two worlds, then every other substance must be different as well. This is because in Leibniz's philosophy, within any one world 'all is connected' and there are 'no purely extrinsic denominations,' and thus the differences in that thing will be reflected in concomitant differences in all other substances. For the same reason, it does not make sense to speak of one and the same thing existing in two worlds, because each thing expresses or is a reflection of the particular world which it belongs."
Leibniz insists there is something spontaneous in each monad (think hidden variables) which reflect each other monad but keeps each one individual at the same time. Unity in plurality. I don't know if this modal theo-philosophy accords better with Plato or Aristotle. For too idealistic for Cartesian extension however
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I'm reading The Best of All Possible Worlds by Stephen Nadler and he says Leibniz was fascinated by the Cartesian revolution in natural philosophy but thought going back to parts of Aristotle was important. He seemed to believe in forms as kinds of living energies. Descartes ascribed motion to the concept of tension, like in a clock. The universal vortex with the infinite vortexes within unfolded its tension, let go by God in the beginning, creating the cascading motion into the future. Leibniz believed in infinite monads and but needed a metaphysical unity to keep objects as individual. He worked on the idea of the continuum as early as 1671 in his New Physical Hypothesis and had generally more proto-Romantic ideas of nature than the Cartesians
From my faint memory, Descartes wasn't too keen on Aristotelianism. Maybe Leibniz was.
From the book: "Strictly speaking, for Leibniz it is not possible for two worlds to differ only in a single detail. If one thing is different between two worlds, then every other substance must be different as well. This is because in Leibniz's philosophy, within any one world 'all is connected' and there are 'no purely extrinsic denominations,' and thus the differences in that thing will be reflected in concomitant differences in all other substances. For the same reason, it does not make sense to speak of one and the same thing existing in two worlds, because each thing expresses or is a reflection of the particular world which it belongs."
Leibniz insists there is something spontaneous in each monad (think hidden variables) which reflect each other monad but keeps each one individual at the same time. Unity in plurality. I don't know if this modal theo-philosophy accords better with Plato or Aristotle. For too idealistic for Cartesian extension however