Abstract

Leibniz claims to hold divine concurrence, but doesn't give the details of how his notion of substance incorporates divine activity. I construct a Leibnizian account, motivated partly by Leibniz's criticisms of occasionalism and meeting the conditions set out in the Theodicy and Monadology. ;I begin the dissertation with an explanation of the notion of constant creation and its three interpretations: conservationism, occasionalism and concurrence, with emphasis on Scholastic interpretations and debates. I show in Chapter Two that Leibniz was committed to constant creation and divine concurrence from his youthful philosophical period, 1668--70. Moreover, I show that during this early period Leibniz was committed to basic conditions that will later be applied either as criticisms of occasionalism or as outlines for a model of concurrence. In Chapter Three I give a brief overview of Malebranche's occasionalism, the paradigm model and often, Leibniz's explicit target. Then, I detail Leibniz's three criticisms of occasionalism, noting their development during the middle and late periods, and show their final formulations as they appear in 1695. I end with an analysis of how the criticisms of occasionalism function as conditions for substances and divine activity in their joint production of natural events. In Chapter Four I discuss recent scholarly arguments regarding the possibility of a coherent Leibnizian account of concurrence and what I see as their inadequacies. Finally, in Chapter Five I offer what I take to be Leibniz's account of divine concurrence in the mature period. I show that Leibniz gives conditions for divine concurrence in the Theodicy, and that these conditions are met in the metaphysics of substance and causation of the Monadology. Thus, I argue that Leibniz has a coherent account of divine concurrence: a metaphysics of substance and causation that incorporates both the constant creation of causally active substances and a divine causal contribution that completes that of substances, resulting in the efficacy of substances to produce natural events. Thus, I argue that Leibniz's account of divine concurrence is not only compatible with his metaphysics, but that his metaphysics relies on constant divine activity to complete the efficacy of causally active substances