Leibnizing: A Philosopher in Motion(Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)

Why read Leibniz today? Can we still learn from him and not just about him? This book argues that Leibniz offers a powerful, productive model for transdisciplinary thinking that can push back against the narrowness of the humanities today.

Richard Halpern recasts Leibniz as a great writer as well as a great philosopher, demonstrating that his philosophical project cannot be fully understood without taking its literary elements into account. He shows Leibniz to be a prescient thinker about art and beauty whose insights into the relationship between aesthetic experience and thought remain invaluable. Leibnizing asks readers to follow the dynamic movement of Leibniz's writing instead of attempting to grasp a static philosophical system and to pay careful attention to the rhetorical and stylistic registers of Leibniz's work as well as its conceptual and logical dimensions.

For philosophers, this book offers a novel approach to reading and interpreting Leibniz. For literary and other theorists, it showcases the relevance of Leibniz's thought to areas from aesthetics to politics and from metaphysics to computer science. Written in a lucid and even witty style, Leibnizing provides readers with an accessible entryway into Leibniz's sometimes forbidding but ultimately rewarding philosophical vision.

Table of Contents:
Preface: Leibniz Among the Disciplines
1. Leibniz in Motion
2. Tinkering
3. How to Read a Leibnizian Sentence
4. Metaphorical Clumping
5. The Mathematics of Resemblance
6. Cognitive Mapping and Blended Spaces
7. Chemical Wit
8. Perspective
9. Expression
10. How to Build a Monad
11. Monadic Politics
12. The Mind-Body Problem
13. Microperceptions
14. The Je Ne Sais Quoi and the Leibnizian Unconscious
15. Mind Is a Liquid
16. The Confused and the Distinct
17. Philosophy as Aesthetic Object
18. Blind Thought
19. Dark Leibniz
20. Things Fall Apart
21. The Monad as Event: Alfred North Whitehead
22. The Monad as Strange Loop: Douglas Hofstadter
23. The Godless Monad: Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela
24. The Quantum Monad: David Bohm
25. Afterword: Leibniz in My Latte
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

About the Author :
Richard Halpern is the author of six books on topics ranging from Shakespeare to Norman Rockwell. At his retirement, he was Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature at New York University.

Review :
This engaging and highly original book welcomes the reader into the experience of meeting Leibniz with Richard Halpern as our guide. Proceeding little by little—monad by monad as it were—we go on a journey that is unexpectedly festive, funny, and full of surprises. By carefully selecting themes and passages and providing occasional illustrations from Leibniz’s papers, Halpern has deftly created a dazzling series of windows into the world of Leibniz. In this brilliant and sprightly book, Richard Halpern reinvents the philosopher and polymath G. W. Leibniz for the twenty-first century. For Halpern, Leibniz is both a proto-science fiction writer and a mad tinkerer who invents a perpetual-motion machine. Speculative thought in the manner of Halpern’s Leibniz leads us to continually new insights and offers us continually new occasions of delight. Richard Halpern's Leibnizing is a thrilling and original investigation of the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz from an angle that will be completely unfamiliar to most philosophers: the angle of style. But the philosophers' Leibniz is a mere shadow of the hot-blooded Leibniz that comes through in Halpern's masterful treatment, which shows that there can be no easy distinction between style and substance. This work both stands apart from the past several centuries of Leibniz scholarship, and at the same time holds the rare promise of renewing this field, and causing us to see the object of our scholarly interest in a fundamentally new way. Highly recommended.