Fatema Amijee: Plural Explanations in Leibniz

Online colloquium lecture by Fatema Amijee (University of British Columbia), organized by the Groningen Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Thought.

According to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR)—a central tenet of Leibniz’s metaphysics—every fact has a sufficient reason for why it obtains rather than fails to obtain. I first show that Leibniz has a robust commitment—one that ranges from his very early metaphysics through to his mature metaphysics—to a conception of sufficient reason on which a sufficient reason for a fact consists in the totality of requisites for the obtaining of that fact. I then show that this conception of sufficient reason is inconsistent with Leibniz’s commitment to the PSR, unless Leibniz is also committed to plural explanation, the thesis that some facts are such that they have a sufficient reason only in virtue of being members of explained pluralities of facts. Taken in isolation, independently of the relevant pluralities, they lack a sufficient reason. The plural explanation thesis is central to interpretations of Leibniz’s metaphysics, for it not only reconciles two central aspects of his metaphysics, but also clarifies and highlights the strength of Leibniz’s PSR.

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