"When a truth is necessary, the reason for it can be found by analysis, that is, by resolving it into simpler ideas and truths until the primary ones are reached"
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Leibniz is doing something audaciously modern here: treating truth like a machine you can take apart on a workbench. If a truth is "necessary" - not just accidentally the case, but incapable of being otherwise - then its justification shouldn’t depend on authority, tradition, or even observation. It should be recoverable by analysis: break the claim into smaller components, keep decomposing, and you’ll eventually hit bedrock principles that carry their own clarity.
The intent is methodological, but the subtext is a power grab on behalf of reason. Leibniz is staking out a domain where philosophers (and mathematicians) can rule without asking permission from the senses. This is a rationalist manifesto in miniature, pitched against the messy contingencies of empiricism: experiments can tell you what happens, but only analysis can tell you what must happen. The line also smuggles in a confidence that language and thought have an underlying architecture - that ideas are compositional, and that complex truths are built from simpler ones like geometric proofs from axioms.
Context matters: Leibniz is writing in the wake of Descartes, in a Europe electrified by the success of mathematics and early modern science. His "analysis" echoes the dream of a universal calculus of reasoning, where disputes could be settled by computation rather than rhetoric. At the same time, it hints at his deeper metaphysics: necessary truths are analytic because their negation contains a contradiction, a view that anticipates later debates about analytic truth and the foundations of logic.
It works because it flatters a certain intellectual temperament: the promise that if you think clearly enough, the world will stop being noisy.
The intent is methodological, but the subtext is a power grab on behalf of reason. Leibniz is staking out a domain where philosophers (and mathematicians) can rule without asking permission from the senses. This is a rationalist manifesto in miniature, pitched against the messy contingencies of empiricism: experiments can tell you what happens, but only analysis can tell you what must happen. The line also smuggles in a confidence that language and thought have an underlying architecture - that ideas are compositional, and that complex truths are built from simpler ones like geometric proofs from axioms.
Context matters: Leibniz is writing in the wake of Descartes, in a Europe electrified by the success of mathematics and early modern science. His "analysis" echoes the dream of a universal calculus of reasoning, where disputes could be settled by computation rather than rhetoric. At the same time, it hints at his deeper metaphysics: necessary truths are analytic because their negation contains a contradiction, a view that anticipates later debates about analytic truth and the foundations of logic.
It works because it flatters a certain intellectual temperament: the promise that if you think clearly enough, the world will stop being noisy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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