So it’s now common knowledge that Leibniz was the coolest philosopher ever to me, right?

Good.

I figure now is a good a time as any to actually attempt to explain (briefly, cause I could go on for reams) why I like him so.

Frivolous reason first: have you seen that wig? Dear LORD, that’s amazing. Go to Wikipedia and check it out. It will change your life.

Now serious reasons.

Though Leibniz gets crap for his “best of all possible worlds, pre-established harmony” ideas, the way he justifies them makes perfect sense to me. Why is this? Well, it’s because, I realized a few days ago, that if you remove the God factor from Leibniz’ ideas, you essentially have what I’ve always thought of the universe.

Demonstration:
Leibniz says: we live in the best of all possible worlds because God, being omnipotent and in possession of moral and metaphysical perfection, could not possibly choose and create anything but the best. It is impossible for God to have chosen anything but what has been chosen, because that would imply he chose things that are less than the best. God can’t do that—he’s got moral and metaphysical perfection! Also, Leibniz explains the pre-established harmony in a way that basically states that God has “pre-aligned” all of the different substance’s actions so that they work in harmony together, making it seem like we interact with each other when we really don’t.

I say: we live in the best of all possible worlds because the mere existence of what is essentially nullifies and “cancels out” the existence of any other possible things. We live in the best world because it’s the only one we’ve got—the way things are are the way things are, and because they are, they cannot be anything else. Anything else that could be considered “better” simply cannot exist, because that would mean that it would take up the same space as what already exists, and that’s not really possible. As for the pre-established harmony thing, the fact that things exist and the fact that things will play out in exactly the way they’re going to play out (I know that’s vague and confusing, I’ll clear it up in a later blog) eliminates the possibility of all other occurrences. If we were to have a priori knowledge of all the courses of action every single atom in the universe were to take, we would essentially have knowledge of pre-established harmony. It’s pre-established in the sense that what is going to happen is going to be the thing that happens. If we have two choices, A and B, and we choose A, then we essentially eliminate the possibility of B ever occurring, and thus eliminate all branching off probabilities from that one probability.

Yeah.

Like I said, I’ll clear this up later.

I just wanted to give you the main reason why Leibniz is so appealing to me. So there you go!