tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post4754701070479479303..comments2024-03-27T20:37:09.185-05:00Comments on Alexander Pruss's Blog: Leibniz's doctrine of mirroringAlexander R Prusshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05989277655934827117noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-322457260284209972008-11-17T08:42:00.000-06:002008-11-17T08:42:00.000-06:00Heath,The claim is non-trivial at least in the bes...Heath,<BR/><BR/>The claim is non-trivial at least in the best of all worlds: on Leibniz's view, the <EM>intrinsic</EM> properties of each monad encode the rest of the universe in the best world.<BR/><BR/>I vaguely recall a claim that that in his pre-critical days, Kant tried to explain this by means of gravitation. (If you observe the motions of one of the objects, you can--or so the claim goes--read off the motions of all the other objects.)Alexander R Prusshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05989277655934827117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-8501145242494217212008-11-17T08:12:00.000-06:002008-11-17T08:12:00.000-06:00Insofar as I've ever understood Leibniz's claim he...Insofar as I've ever understood Leibniz's claim here, I thought it was the relatively trivial (when you think about it) idea that if you knew _all_ the facts about X, you would know all the relational facts about X. Since X stands in some relation to every Y, you would know all the facts about Y.Heath Whitehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13535886546816778688noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-81329306850203689042008-11-16T12:50:00.000-06:002008-11-16T12:50:00.000-06:003. If to the assumptions in (2) we add the postula...<I>3. If to the assumptions in (2) we add the postulate that no item in the universe could have existed with the laws being different, then we get the stronger claim that no item in the universe could have existed in any other world—i.e., that the items in the universe are world-bound individuals.</I><BR/><BR/>I'm missing how you arrive at this. Let w and w' be exactly alike up to time t. You are born at t-5. At t, w' diverges from w, since God performs some miracle in w'. But you have precisely the same origin in w and w' and you exist in w and w'. You are not world-bound. These worlds differ with respect to their futures after t on the basis of a divergence miracle. Certainly the divergence after your birth cannot affect whether you were born. If it did, we'd have one amazing backtracking counterfactual!Mike Almeidahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12001511002085064198noreply@blogger.com