The difference between the mirror and one who sees: The theological anthropology of G. W. Leibniz

This dissertation is an investigation into G.W. Leibniz's understanding of humanity. Throughout Leibniz's long career, he consistently attempts to understand human beings as both embedded in the natural world and yet unique within it. His initial attempts to resolve this tension issue from an early engagement with mechanism and appeal in various ways to the indispensable help of God. In the early period, Leibniz argues that God must be the ground of the new mechanical philosophy. His early texts reveal that his view of human beings as extended agents in a theo-mechanical world is developing alongside his concerns about God's authorship of sin, human freedom, and the challenge of the naturalist anthropologies of Hobbes and Spinoza. In the middle period, Leibniz confronts Cartesian dualist understandings of nature. In response, his view of the natural world becomes increasingly complex and seamless. Although he views humans as the paradigm of corporeal substances, it becomes difficult to justify humanity's uniqueness. Against the view that Leibniz holds humans to be uniquely rational animals, I argue that he joins metaphysics to morals and re-envisions humans as constituted by a unique relationship to God as citizens in the City of God. In Leibniz's New Essays on Human Understanding , this view is further developed into a general account of species. I find in this late period text that Leibniz has the resources for an innovative view of moral species which yields teleological, theological, and relational natural kinds. On this view of species, the human species is constituted by its unique end which for Leibniz is happiness and can only be achieved in relationship with God. Each major phase in Leibniz's philosophy reveals that his anthropology is natural because it embeds humanity in the natural order and theological because it requires the indispensable help of God.