Abstract

Leibniz offered two main defences of contingency, the per-se view and the analytic account. 1 I argue that an acceptance of either account requires a rejection of what is now known as ‘the characteristic claim of S5 modal logic’, If possibly P then necessarily possibly P , and that apart from an affirmation of that claim Leibniz could not have either offered an a priori argument for God's existence or considered God exists to be a necessary truth. Since Leibniz considered God to be, by definition, the most perfect being and took existence to be a perfection, it follows that Leibniz could not have consistently accepted either account of contingency without abandoning theism