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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
THE REACTION TO DECARTES
On the basis of their theories of knowledge, early modern philosophers are customarily divided between rationalists and empiricists, with Leibniz following Descartes among the Rationalists, primarily because of his espousal of innate ideas. Whatever one may think of this division of philosophers, Leibniz asserts something very like it. When confronting Lockets Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he remarks:
Our disagreements concern points of some importance. There is the question whether the soul in itself is completely blank like a writing tablet on which nothing has yet been written - a tabula rasa - as Aristotle and the writer of the Essay maintain, and whether everything which is inscribed there comes solely from the senses and experience; or whether the soul inherently contains the source of various notions and doctrines, which external objects merely rouse up on suitable occasions, as I believe and as do Plato and even the schoolmen. (New Essays, Preface, A VI.vi, RB 48)
Leibniz wrote an extensive commentary on and critique of Parts I and I1 of Descartes' Principles of Philosophy, but he has nothing in it to say about innate ideas because in the Principles neither does Descartes. Leibniz, in criticizing the theory of knowledge contained in Part I, of which he is in general highly contemptuous, has no occasion to mention them. Indeed, there is only one thing in the Principles for which he expresses approval: the “I think therefore I am.” This he considers to be “excellent” and relates it to his own distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact. Both kinds have their primitive truths. The first truth of reason is the principle of identity or contradiction.
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