On 08 December 2022 from 17.00h to 18.30h (CET), Stephan Schmid, Professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Hamburg, will give a talk on Descartes and Leibniz on the Nature of the Will (see abstract below).

As usual, the session will take place online via zoom.

We will use the following link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/96427734479?pwd=RVIybVZQeVZSM09IZWR0amxWT1N3QT09

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Descartes and Leibniz on the Nature of the Will

While it is well known that Leibniz and Descartes disagree concerning questions about the cognitive side of our mind, it much less appreciated that Descartes and Leibniz defend two entirely different views about the nature of the will, which underlie their (again well-known) disagreements concerning the appetitive or conative side of our mind (such as their different views concerning freedom of indifference or the relation between will and intellect). Or so at least I will argue in this paper. Descartes conceives of the will as an irreducible capacity or faculty to assent or deny ideas perceived by the intellect (or to suspend judgment altogether). Given Leibniz’s rejection of doxastic voluntarism and of “bare faculties” this is no option for Leibniz. So, quite unlike Descartes, Leibniz construes the will as a rational appetite: the tendency to strive for the things we have come to conceive as being good. Appreciating this deep difference between Descartes’ and Leibniz’s conceptions of the will not only help to elucidate Leibniz’s notoriously debated stance on freedom, but also sheds new light on other fundamental questions of Leibniz’s philosophy of mind, such as the question of the mark of the mental or the grounds of the monads’ teleological striving.