Dear Denis,The attraction of Leibniz's view for me is that it fits precisely with modern physics and requires nothing else (I suspect he threw the God label in just because 'nature' was not quite so popular with his readership). But we will agree to differ.

What may be more germane to the thread is the issue of monads being 'windowless' and therefore, you imply, isolated. I am interested in this reading because it is not how I read GWL. The monad perceives the whole universe and clearly apperceives a domain of most relevance. I do not see how that can be consistent with being 'isolated'. As I understand Leibniz the absence of 'windows' in the monad has a different meaning. It means that there is no geometric feature of the monad, such as having parts between which an incoming influence can pass (like the windows of a mill with internal machinery), that allows us to describe the ultimate immediate act of perception in mechanical terms. Perception is ultimately just a fact governed by the laws of nature (God). The key point is that you cannot go on reducing mechanical dynamics to smaller and smaller mechanisms ad infinitum. At some point one has to say interaction is just a rule based fact with no parts - which is what modern physics says. Similarly the monad cannot act on the basis of rules determined within itself by the interaction of its mechanical parts because the ultimate monad can have none. Leibniz's account of the monad being informed by the laws of nature may not be ideal but I challenge anyone to describe modern physics in better terms using ordinary language.

This is crucially relevant to the debate on realism in perception because it puts the act of perception right at the final immediate interaction with the monad, which must be well inside the brain.

Have I misread? Or is the idea that windowless means 'blind' a popular misreading as I suspect it is?

Best wishes

Jo