Excellent, but with caveat | Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of...

Good argument hidden in an overly long book. | Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil | Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

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	• Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Open Court Publishing Company, 1988 - 452 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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This is the motherload!

This, and other of Leibniz's writings are, ..... I don't know. Profound? That is an understatement! Paradigm shifting? At least a few? These are some of the most powerful and poignant thoughts put into writing. This is the man who discovered the calculus with meaning (as opposed to Newton, who also gets credit, but had a different basis).

Leibniz gets some bad neglect in history, largely because Voltaire undermined his thoughts by creating a ridiculous straw-man of Leibniz's ideas - maybe Voltaire just couldn't grasp it! It is some of the hardest writing to read, especially since there was nothing before this like it. (for this reason, I recommend, if new to Leibniz, to NOT read an introduction or such. Many "scholars" still give Voltaire's slant on Leibniz. Read for yourself and then judge).

For hundreds of years Leibniz was put on the back shelf because Newton reigned supreme. But guess what? It turns out that Leibniz was right in his charges against Newton. The death of classical physics and the rise of the quantum started with Leibniz - it just took the world a while to catch up.

Also, if you have to deal with someone who gives that trite argument "If God is all powerful, If God is all good, How is there evil in the world," Plop, this book on his/her lap. Why people expect and easy and quick answer to this question is beyond me. Leibniz's answer, his treatment of free will and determinism, the soul and the individual - truly, if grasped, will change some part of your mind for the better.

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Excellent, but with caveat

I have nothing to add to the previous reviews concerning the importance of Leibniz's thought as expressed in this book. I would like to add this caveat, however: this translation is not a critical edition. Leibniz quotes numerous passages in Greek and Latin (he was enormously erudite), but these passages are not translated in this edition. Neither does the editor/translator identify where the quoted passages are from (this would be useful if one wanted to look up the original context of a passage that Leibniz is quoting). Fortunately, the quotations are usually not necessary to understand the argument, which is somewhat repetitive in any case.

The other disadvantage of this volume is that the index contains only proper names and not ideas. This is unfortunate, since much of the work is not clearly organized and the discussion of a given issue is often scattered throughout the book.

But since this is the best edition of the Theodicy currently available in English, one has to live with these disadvantages.

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Good argument hidden in an overly long book.

Leibniz's argument for the origin of evil in human freedom is perhaps the most famous of all the theodicies, and obviously if you want to read the source then this is it. The argument is easy to grasp and convincing - which made me wonder exactly why it required a book of this length (about 400 pages). The answer is that Leibniz sets out his argument within the first fifty pages and the rest of the book is devoted to meeting arguments that other thinkers (particularly Bayle) had made about theodicy. Leibniz really over did the treatment of Bayle's objections, to such a point that Leibniz himself admitted around page 300 that he was growing tired of refuting Bayle.

Fortunately this edition contains almost all of the original appendicies (bar one which set out the formal argument in Scholastic Latin), the first of which is the main arguments of the book stripped down into analytic logical arguments. This takes only 9 pages and to be honest, it's almost worth skipping the rest of the book and just reading this, as it contains all the important points. At the very least I find it very useful when I want to come back and remind myself what was said.

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Light years ahead of its time

_Theodicy_ by Leibniz is amazingly relevant and readable considering how long ago it was written. This book is far better than many other works of philosophy which came much later. Very few authors have been able to tackle the problem of the relationship between the existence of evil and the existence of God with as much skill and clarity as Leibniz. The issues discussed in this book are still very relevant today, and the questions concerning evil and the existence of God still have not been answered. That is what makes this work so timeless; if I had been told that it was written yesterday I would have believed it, so relevant are the questions and so readable is the style. This is a must-read for even the most modern and scientifically-minded philosophers. Leibniz adresses questions that are completely independent of science, and can never be answered through science alone. The only way to solve the ancient problem of evil is to continue to think about it in the same way as Leibniz, even though we may never find a solid answer.

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