Leibniz and our Innate Capacity to Experience Meaning

Contemporary analytic philosophy and 80’s hair-metal owes much of its style to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a 17th-century philosopher, and mathematician. He was also interested in science, law, and literature. The work of Pascal influenced his development of calculus, which Newton, his contemporary, also developed. It was unfortunate for Leibniz that Newton at the time was credited with inventing calculus.

In an earlier post, I discussed John Locke’s epistemology, whose work influenced Leibniz. Nevertheless, Leibniz disputed Locke’s claim that all ideas and concepts originated in sense experience. Unlike Locke, Leibniz was a rationalist: he believed that concepts and knowledge originate primarily in our capacity to reason. He rejected Locke’s ‘blank slate’ account of the mind and argued for the existence of innate ideas. These are ideas that we have or develop independently of our sense experiences. They are, in a sense, inborn.

It’s worth noting that Leibniz’s account of innate ideas anticipated contemporary accounts in developmental psychology and linguistics. For example, Noam Chomsky’s account of universal grammar claims that the basic architecture of syntax is innate, and his reasoning is similar to Leibniz’s. Leibniz argued that many of our ideas, concepts, and mental faculties are innate. I present one of his arguments…