AI Overview

Gottfried Leibniz's idea of windowless monads is that monads are completely independent of each other and are unable to interact

No interaction: Monads are windowless, meaning they have no way to influence or be influenced by other monads. They are also not directly affected by other monads, but instead exist in a causal relationship with God.

No entry or exit: Nothing can enter or leave a monad. This means that when a monad changes, it does so by changing its properties or affections, rather than by adding or subtracting anything.

Each monad represents the universe: Each monad represents the entire universe from its own perspective.

Leibniz's idea of monads is considered one of his most distinctive philosophical concepts. He believed that monads are mental substances that have no parts. He also believed that whatever can be called "substance" is without parts and contains all of reality's diversity.

"What is a possible world? We might assume it to be not merely a collection of possible monads, but an arrangement of some sort. However, there is much to preclude this in Leibniz. Moreover, there is much to preclude the existence of a monad in more than one possible world. Therefore, many sets of possible monads cannot constitute possible worlds, which Leibniz is committed to in any case he because acknowledges incompossibility between monads (that is, mutual exclusion).

All monads have two qualities: they are ‘windowless’ and they ‘mirror the whole world’. Windowless means that “neither substance nor accident can enter [it] from without” – this is a kind of imperviousness. Each monad is “a world apart”, “whatever happens to each [monad] would flow from its nature and its notion even if the rest were supposed to be absent”, and “‘it is as if there were as many different universes [sc. as there are monads]’. It would not effect the existence of any given monad if, ‘nothing else existed but only God and itself’. As Moore observes, it follows from this that making sense of anything outside of ourselves relies on our ability to understand a kind of deep transcendence.

All that distinguishes a monad is its representation of the world – monads are differentiated by the fact that this representation is grounded in a particular point of view.

Comprehension is grounded in the perspectival aspect of representation. As Moore has it: “each representation is more distinct either the closer its subject matter is to the corresponding monad or the larger its subject matter is… If the question concerns something about which your representation is very indistinct, then you will need to apply effort of some appropriate kind to ‘reposition’ yourself and make it more distinct. And this may in practice, if not in principle, be beyond you.” Or, as per Leibniz: “[A] soul can read in itself only what is distinctly represented there; it is unable to develop all at once all the things that are folded within it, for they stretch to infinity".

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