KANT’S REEVALUATION OF MONADOLOGY: A HISTORICAL - PHILOSOPHICAL PUZZLE

Abstract

In the Critique of pure reason (1781), as is well known, Kant offers a schematic presentation of Leibniz’s philosophy, interpreted as a paradigmatic case of conceptual “amphiboly”, where the fundamental distinction between the conditions of sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge is missed: accordingly, Leibniz’s mistake would consist in handling phenomena, i.e. the objects of sense, as if they were ‘things in themselves’, modeled on pure intellectual cognition. Among other theses, the monadological view would directly arise from this mistake: more precisely, from the idea that simple beings would be prior to composite ones, and their intrinsic properties would be basic with respect to their external, i.e. spatial, relations (KrV A 260/B 316).