Pre-established harmony - Wikipedia





	
	

	
	

	Pre-established harmony

	
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		Gottfried Leibniz's theory of pre-established harmony (French: harmonie préétablie) is a philosophical theory about causation under which every "substance" affects only itself, but all the substances (both bodies and minds) in the world nevertheless seem to causally interact with each other because they have been programmed by God in advance to "harmonize" with each other. Leibniz's term for these substances was "monads", which he described in a popular work (Monadology §7) as "windowless".


Contents


	1 Overview
	2 See also
	3 References
	4 External links





Overview[edit]

Leibniz's theory is best known as a solution to the mind–body problem of how mind can interact with the body. Leibniz rejected the idea of physical bodies affecting each other, and explained all physical causation in this way. 

Under pre-established harmony, the preprogramming of each mind must be extremely complex, since only it causes its own thoughts or actions, for as long as it exists. To appear to interact, each substance's "program" must contain a description of either the entire universe, or of how the object behaves at all times during all interactions that appear to occur.

An example:


	An apple falls on Alice's head, apparently causing the experience of pain in her mind. In fact, the apple does not cause the pain—the pain is caused by some previous state of Alice's mind. If Alice then seems to shake her hand in anger, it is not actually her mind that causes this, but some previous state of her hand.


Note that if a mind behaves as a windowless monad, there is no need for any other object to exist to create that mind's sense perceptions, leading to a solipsistic universe that consists only of that mind. Leibniz seems to admit this in his Discourse on Metaphysics, section 14. However, he claims that his principle of harmony, according to which God creates the best and most harmonious world possible, dictates that the perceptions (internal states) of each monad "expresses" the world in its entirety, and the world expressed by the monad actually exists. Although Leibniz says that each monad is "windowless," he also claims that it functions as a "mirror" of the entire created universe.

On occasion, Leibniz styled himself as "the author of the system of preestablished harmony".[1]

Immanuel Kant's professor Martin Knutzen regarded pre-established harmony as "the pillow for the lazy mind".[2]


See also[edit]

	Best of all possible worlds
	Determinism/hard determinism
	Noumenon
	Occasionalism
	Phenomenon
	Psychophysical parallelism
	Superdeterminism


References[edit]


	^  Leibniz Philosophischen Schriften hrsg. C. Gerhardt, Bd VI 539, 546; and also the  New Essays

	^ Porter, Burton (2010). What the Tortoise Taught Us: The Story of Philosophy. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. 133.





External links[edit]

	Leibniz's Philosophy of Mind from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy


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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

	Mathematics and
philosophy
	
	Alternating series test
	Best of all possible worlds
	Calculus controversy
	Calculus ratiocinator
	Characteristica universalis
	Difference
	Identity of indiscernibles
	Law of Continuity
	Leibniz wheel
	Leibniz's gap
	Pre-established harmony
	Principle of sufficient reason
	Salva veritate
	Theodicy
	Transcendental law of homogeneity
	Vis viva
	Well-founded phenomenon
	Rationalism




	Works	
	De Arte Combinatoria (1666)
	Discourse on Metaphysics (1686)
	New Essays on Human Understanding (1704)
	Théodicée (1710)
	Monadology (1714)
	Leibniz–Clarke correspondence (1715–1716)




	Categories	
►  Gottfried Leibniz

















Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pre-established_harmony&oldid=948433510"


		Categories: 	Arguments in philosophy of mind
	Gottfried Leibniz


Hidden categories: 	Articles containing French-language text




	




	





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		 This page was last edited on 1 April 2020, at 00:57 (UTC).
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