The Leibniz-Stahl Controversy

Editors François Duchesneau and Justin E. H. Smith offer readers the first fully annotated English translation of the eighteenth-century correspondence commonly known as the Leibniz-Stahl controversy. The written exchange of opposing philosophical views on divine action, the order of nature, causality and teleology, and the relationship of the soul to the body that took place from 1709 to 1711 between the mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Georg Ernst Stahl, a chemist and physician at the court of King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, is acknowledged as one of the most important intellectual contributions on theoretical issues concerning pre-biological thinking. Featuring an illuminating introduction by the editors, this innovative, insightful volume presents the “controversy” in full, offering a fascinating overview of the divergent theories of the esteemed correspondents, including Stahl’s argument that the soul holds the body together, countered by Leibniz’s firm belief in miniature “mechanized” systems bonding the human body together from within.

Francois Duchesneau is a professor at the Universite de Montreal and a member of the Royal Society of Canada.Justin E. H. Smith is professor of history and philosophy of science at the Universite Paris 7 Diderot.