Description
Book SynopsisRichard Halpern argues that Leibniz offers a powerful, productive model for transdisciplinary thinking that can push back against the narrowness of the humanities today.
Trade ReviewThis 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. -- Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of
Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of LifeIn 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. -- Steven Shaviro, author of
The Universe of Things: On Speculative RealismRichard 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. -- Justin E. H. Smith, coeditor of
Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the SensesTable of ContentsPreface: 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
