Abstract

Imitators of God: Leibniz on Human Freedom JACK DAVIDSON QUESTIONS CONCERNING DIVINE AND HUMAN FREEDOM mattered to Leibniz. He found the problems surrounding these issues important and difficult to solve, at one point writing: "There are two labyrinths of the human mind: one concerns the composition of the continuum, and the other the nature of freedom" : Although there is no unanimity among scholars about the details to his solution to the labyrinth of freedom, most have thought that Leibniz is a compatibilist: Lately, however, some commentators have charged that, appearances to the contrary, Leibniz is actually an incom- patibilist about freedom.3 This new reading is exciting and important because ' All works of Leibniz are cited by page number unless otherwise indicated. The first citation is to a source in the original language. Where they exist, the English translation of the same passage is cited next. I want to thank Robert Sleigh for making available original-language sources not available in libraries, and for his generosity in sharing translations. In this paper I follow his translation of the Confessio Philosophi and of ~Du Franc Arbitre" . I quote more than is customary in a scholarly work because some of the texts are relatively inaccessi- ble and many are not translated into English. 9 I understand causal determinism to be the view that every event has a set of events causally sufficient to..