Abstract
The main purpose of the article is to get clear what Leibniz's concerns about relations were. His:
I do not believe that you will admit an accident that is in two subjects at the same time. My judgement about relations is that paternity in David is one thing, sonship in Solomon another, but that the relation common to both is a merely mental thing whose basis is the modifications of the individuals
is best seen as akin to:
‘Father’ is true of David. ‘Son’ is true of Solomon. But ‘Being a father of’ is not true of any individual.
Leibniz, like modern nominalist Nelson Goodman, could not allow the ordered pair <David, Solomon>. To establish this I must argue against Hidé Ishiguro's claim that Leibniz should have straightforwardly constructed a logic of relations, and Jaakko Hintikka's claim that Leibniz could have allowed the use of relational predicates in such forms as ‘(Ex) Rax’ and ‘(Ey) Ryb’. I must also argue that what they say about the windowlessness doctrine (especially the ‘as if’ formulation) is beside the point.
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References
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I wish to thank Susan Haack for her help in turning a draft into the present paper.
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Burdick, H. What was Leibniz's problem about relations?. Synthese 88, 1–13 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00540090
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00540090