Suchergebnisse

"As there is neither recent nor updated scholarship regarding the connection between Leibniz' thought and protestant theology, this book, based on a wide cross section of Leibniz's writings including important new and unexplored material tackles the question from the point of view of the history of ideas showing that Leibniz' efforts in view of a confessional union especially the one between the Lutherans of Hannover and the Calvinists of Brandenburg were based on Leibniz' Lutheran religious convictions, and at the same time and to the same extent on his philosophical doctrines, especially those relating to the problem of substance and to the vexed questions of freedom, necessity, and theodicy. The book is organized in seven chapters and contains a separate introduction and conclusion. For sections on the eucharist and predestination especially, care is taken to present the philosophical counterpoints of these issues: substance and necessity. The section on Leibniz as historian of the sacred is intended to show how Leibniz, as opposed to Newton in particular, views sacred history and the place of God in it. It is meant to fill in the gap left by various recent studies on Leibniz as historian, which have not taken his position as historian of the sacred into account. The conclusion highlights the ways Leibniz's basically Lutheran nonorthodox theology coincides with his philosophy. This means inevitably that Leibniz was not a standard Lutheran but that the solutions he sought to the problems of confessional division were rather more philosophical than theological and that his view of sacred history was intended to vindicate his theodicy. Leibniz's unique integration of theology into philosophy proved satisfactory neither to theologians nor to many philosophers of his time"--