Supervenience and (non-modal) reductionism in Leibniz’s philosophy of time

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Abstract

It has recently been suggested that, for Leibniz, temporal facts globally supervene on causal facts, with the result that worlds differing with respect to their causal facts can be indiscernible with respect to their temporal facts. Such an interpretation is at variance with more traditional readings of Leibniz’s causal theory of time, which hold that Leibniz reduces temporal facts to causal facts. In this article, I argue against the global supervenience construal of Leibniz’s philosophy of time. On the view of Leibniz defended here, he adopts a non-modal reduction of time to events, a form of reductionism that entails a strong covariation between a world’s temporal facts and its causal facts. Consequently, worlds discernible with respect to their temporal facts must be discernible with respect to their causal facts, and worlds discernible with respect to their causal facts must be discernible with respect to their temporal facts. This position strongly favors the standard identificatory reduction of time to causation often imputed to Leibniz.

Section snippets

Leibniz’s causal theory of time as global supervenience

By way of motivating the global supervenience reading of Leibniz’s causal theory of time, we need first to turn to global supervenience in general, and then to what it means to have a global supervenience causal theory of time. According to Jaegwon Kim, a class of properties A globally supervenes on a class of properties B ‘just in case worlds that are indiscernible with respect to B are also A-indiscernible’ (Kim, 1993, p. 68). If two worlds each have exactly three individuals, and the

Leibniz’s reduction of time

Thus far we have established that Leibniz might be led to claim that temporal facts globally supervene on, and are not identical to, causal facts insofar as he might allow for the possibility that worlds discernible with respect to their causal features can be indiscernible with respect to their temporal features. The ingeniousness of Cover’s argument notwithstanding, I would like to suggest that there is reason to doubt that Leibniz would allow such variation of causal facts without a

Time as an order of connected events

The second consideration inveighing against a global supervenience construal of Leibniz’s philosophy of time starts from his claim that a concrete temporal series is an order of connected events. Leibniz explains to Bayle that time is the order of things ‘inconsistent but connected’, or things which are ‘incompatible but which we nevertheless conceive as all existing’ (G 4.568/L 583). As an order, time is a system of relations among diverse things through which these diverse things are

Conclusion

In this paper I have tried to show that in Leibniz’s philosophy of time the temporal series of a world is constructed from the events actually taking place within that world. As Leibniz writes, a world’s temporal series is nothing distinct from the things that do occur at that time. This marks Leibniz’s philosophy of time as a type of non-modal reductionism, the reduction of a world’s time to the events actually occurring in that world. Any given temporal interval just is the set of events

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