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Yeah, McCarthy's one of the (simply the, perhaps?) most famous living English-language "literary" fiction authors around (had a somewhat-popular movie made base

Yeah, McCarthy's one of the (simply the, perhaps?) most famous living English-language "literary" fiction authors around (had a somewhat-popular movie made based on his The Road, even) so if you don't keep up with that sort of thing you might not know him. Leibniz' work on monads[0] would be at least passingly familiar to anyone with even a little philosophy background, but could otherwise have been missed. If it makes you feel any better, I may as well be badly afflicted by dyslexia when I try to read a mathematical statement with more than a couple simple terms. [0] I'm digging way back so this might be a little off, but fundamentally it's a solution to the Problem of Evil[1]: Leibniz puts us each in a "windowless monad" of a universe—sort of individual pocket universes—such that all the people we interact with are actually automatons of a sort. In this way, a person can do evil (i.e. sin still exists), but not actually inflict it on anyone else, if that makes sense. Meanwhile, bad things happening to you in your personal monad aren't actually evil because... I dunno, it's been a while so I don't remember exactly, but I'm guessing it comes down to "God works in mysterious ways". Basically, he replaces true causality with a kind of divine harmonic dance of actually-not-affecting-one-another things and people that make up what we call "reality". Nb. his actual argument is far less dumb than I'm making it seem. [1] The Problem of Evil can be summed up in the child's question: "if God's perfectly good, and created the universe, why does evil (apparently—that part will matter a ton for some people who try to address this) exist?" Lots and lots of theologians and philosophers over many centuries took a crack at the seemingly-simple question—and in fact, one of Leibniz' notions, that the world one experiences is "the best of all possible worlds", was famously parodied in Voltaire's Candide, which is another way someone with a humanities background might have become familiar with his philosophy.

irrational 4y ago
> if God's perfectly good, and created the universe, why does evil exist? Doesn't this depend on your definition of "created"? It seems this presupposes certain things like ex nihilo creation (matter out of nothing) and god being able to create people (i.e., people are not co-existent with god).
- brimble 4y ago
  Sure, needing to deal with the question at all is a result of a certain set of cosmological and metaphysical assumptions—but it happens to be a problem that a ton of Western philosophers dealt with, over the years, because they were starting from such a set of assumptions, and so did feel a need to address it, so if you're reading (or reading about) Western philosophy—especially before the 20th century—you're gonna see a lot of it. In Leibniz' case, his work on that problem just happens to be probably his second-most-famous work at all, and better-known than most such efforts, even into our era of atheistic modernism (in part because of the Voltaire connection I mentioned—I'm sure Candide is far more widely-read than anything Leibniz wrote)

irrational 4y ago

> if God's perfectly good, and created the universe, why does evil exist? Doesn't this depend on your definition of "created"? It seems this presupposes certain things like ex nihilo creation (matter out of nothing) and god being able to create people (i.e., people are not co-existent with god).

brimble 4y ago
Sure, needing to deal with the question at all is a result of a certain set of cosmological and metaphysical assumptions—but it happens to be a problem that a ton of Western philosophers dealt with, over the years, because they were starting from such a set of assumptions, and so did feel a need to address it, so if you're reading (or reading about) Western philosophy—especially before the 20th century—you're gonna see a lot of it. In Leibniz' case, his work on that problem just happens to be probably his second-most-famous work at all, and better-known than most such efforts, even into our era of atheistic modernism (in part because of the Voltaire connection I mentioned—I'm sure Candide is far more widely-read than anything Leibniz wrote)