When Did Leibniz Read Maimonides?

Strickland, Lloyd ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2560-6909 (2023) When Did Leibniz Read Maimonides? In: Le present est plein de l’avenir, et chargé du passé: 11th International Leibniz Congress, 31 July 2023 - 04 August 2023, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany.

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Abstract

Leibniz’s detailed reading notes on the Guide of the Perplexed represent his deepest engagement with Maimonides. The existence of these notes have led some scholars to claim that Leibniz was not just influenced by Maimonides, but in fact developed some of the key doctrines of his later philosophy from ideas he encountered when reading Maimonides’ Guide. For example, Nicole Ulmann argues that Leibniz borrowed the notion of simple substance and his division of evil into metaphysical, physical, and moral. Lenn Goodman goes even further, suggesting that the impact of Maimonides on Leibniz can be seen in Leibniz’s theory of monads, his understanding of free will, and the issues of creation, determinism, and possible worlds. Such claims of influence of course presuppose that Leibniz read Maimonides’ Guide relatively early in his career, certainly before he had settled on his mature philosophy. Curiously, both Ulmann and Goodman are content to base their claims of influence on this presupposition: neither makes any attempt to show when Leibniz read Maimonides, simply assuming that it was early enough for Leibniz to be influenced by him, such that any points of contact in their respective philosophies must have been due to Leibniz drawing upon Maimonides as opposed to any other sources. In this paper, my aim is to answer the question of when Leibniz read Maimonides’ Guide. I am going to argue that it happened not early in his career, as Goodman and Ulmann suppose, but late, in fact very late, probably after 1707.