Both Natural and Supernatural: Leibniz’s Integrated Model of Life

There is a sense in which Leibniz’s naturalism, long before ours, had come to terms with the problem of normativity. The core of his mature reflections was in fact inhabited by a strong conflict of ontological as well as of epistemological models. On the one hand there was in fact the lexicon of the Aristotelian ontology, made up of individual substances endowed with ‘forms’ or ‘natures’, whereas on the other there was the new lexicon of mechanical events described by the laws of physics. At the center of the stage, Leibniz put a powerful nominalist strategy, according to which only individuals really exist, namely living substances endowed with perceptual states and appetitions. The question thus arises: in a world of events saturated by mechanical explanations, who is the proper subject of agency? How can the ontological dimension of life be justified in a natural world dominated by a mechanical epistemology? This is the heart of Leibniz’s placement problem.