Heritage

2 total works

Leibniz

by Robert McRae

Published 1 January 1976

Leibniz's theory of knowledge, unlike his logic and metaphysics, has until now received little attention from philosophers.

This book attempts to give coherence to the elements of his epistemology, scattered as they are throughout his writings, by seeking to determine what Leibniz meant when, on three occasions and each time without explanation, he said that thought and the faculty of understanding are the products of the conjoining of apperception and perception. To discover what he meant is to arrive at his conception of what on the side of the mind constitutes the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge.

Almost half of the study is taken up with Leibniz's theory of perception -- with its initially strange notion of perception as expression and as activity -- and with such questions as: What is sensation and how is it related to perception and apperception? How are the soul's perceptions produced? The answer to the last question involves a new look at Leibniz's theory of causation. In turn, consideration of the nature of thought raises questions as to how apperception can give rise to concepts, what different concepts there are, and what principles are operative in rational thought. Finally, the book examines the roles played by the senses and the understanding in the knowledge and experience of sensible phenomena.

Throughout the book Professor McRae endeavours to give teleology no less importance than that given it by Leibniz himself, especially in the consideration of perception and of the possibility of the knowledge and experience of phenomena.

The Problem of the Unity of the Sciences

by Robert McRae

Published 15 December 1961

The author has taken an important subject, one which has pervaded the thinking of scientists, philosophers, and historians, and with impeccable scholarship and great clarity has concerned himself with a specific aspect of it: the way in which the determination of how the unity of the sciences is to be conceived presented itself to philosophers as a specifically philosophical or logical problem. The study is not, therefore, an essay in the history of ideas showing the idea of unity at work in many cultural contexts, or in the history of the classification fo the sciences; nor does it discuss philosophers who suppose a unity but do not discuss it. Rather it is an exposition of what is directly said on the subject of unity by a number of philosphers who view it in their different ways as a problem for solving. Those chosen for discussion belong to the classical period of modern philosophy, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and chapters take up the contributions of Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, Condillac, Diderot and D'Alembert, and Kant. This will be an important book for students and teachers in the history of philosophy, of science, of ideas; and will also be useful to students of English and French literature in the period it covers.