Brandon Look’s introduction to this long-awaited collection points to the range of Leibniz’s writings unknown to Kant and his contemporaries and to Kant’s general dislike of historical scholarship. Kant apparently owned not a single book authored by Leibniz, or for that matter by Spinoza or Locke, and only one volume of Christian Wolff, his Ontologia. Yet the name index of the Kant corpus renders Leibniz, Wolff, along with Newton as the most frequently cited authors.
One might well imagine that, from Kant’s perspective, Leibniz was the overestimated author of a mannered, fanciful, and generally incredible system, featuring ingeniously wrought monads and meticulous divine planning, a system that addressed no one’s serious concerns about moral good and evil, human agency, or providence and the future. Reciprocally, if Leibniz had happened on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, having been out of touch for sixty-five years, he would likely have dismissed...
