Introduction

This volume stems from a colloquium held at the Sorbonne, in Paris, in February, 2008, which brought together a number of the world’s leading scholars of the natural philosophy of G. W. Leibniz. The theme of the colloquium was the very controversial question of the role and meaning of the concepts of corporeal substance and natural machine in Leibniz’s metaphysics. As scholars have come to terms with the fact that the wide range of Leibniz’s written works simply does not permit us to continue in the traditional view of him as an orthodox idealist, a tremendous new interpretative problem has emerged in the scholarship as to how to understand the entities that cannot be accommodated within Leibniz’s idealist ontology, and foremost among these are corporeal substances, natural machines, and organism. The papers in this volume contribute important new interpretative approaches to one or both of these concepts.