Leibnizing - (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Art) by Richard Halpern (Paperback)

About the Book

Richard Halpern argues that Leibniz offers a powerful, productive model for transdisciplinary thinking that can push back against the narrowness of the humanities today.

Book Synopsis

Why read Leibniz today? Can we still learn from him and not just about him? This book argues that Leibniz offers a powerful, productive model for transdisciplinary thinking that can push back against the narrowness of the humanities today.

Richard Halpern recasts Leibniz as a great writer as well as a great philosopher, demonstrating that his philosophical project cannot be fully understood without taking its literary elements into account. He shows Leibniz to be a prescient thinker about art and beauty whose insights into the relationship between aesthetic experience and thought remain invaluable. Leibnizing asks readers to follow the dynamic movement of Leibniz's writing instead of attempting to grasp a static philosophical system and to pay careful attention to the rhetorical and stylistic registers of Leibniz's work as well as its conceptual and logical dimensions.

For philosophers, this book offers a novel approach to reading and interpreting Leibniz. For literary and other theorists, it showcases the relevance of Leibniz's thought to areas from aesthetics to politics and from metaphysics to computer science. Written in a lucid and even witty style, Leibnizing provides readers with an accessible entryway into Leibniz's sometimes forbidding but ultimately rewarding philosophical vision.

Review Quotes

Highly recommended.-- "Choice"

In this brilliant and sprightly book, Richard Halpern reinvents the philosopher and polymath G. W. Leibniz for the twenty-first century. For Halpern, Leibniz is both a proto-science fiction writer and a mad tinkerer who invents a perpetual-motion machine. Speculative thought in the manner of Halpern's Leibniz leads us to continually new insights and offers us continually new occasions of delight.--Steven Shaviro, author of The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism

Richard Halpern's Leibnizing is a thrilling and original investigation of the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz from an angle that will be completely unfamiliar to most philosophers: the angle of style. But the philosophers' Leibniz is a mere shadow of the hot-blooded Leibniz that comes through in Halpern's masterful treatment, which shows that there can be no easy distinction between style and substance. This work both stands apart from the past several centuries of Leibniz scholarship, and at the same time holds the rare promise of renewing this field, and causing us to see the object of our scholarly interest in a fundamentally new way.--Justin E. H. Smith, coeditor of Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses

This engaging and highly original book welcomes the reader into the experience of meeting Leibniz with Richard Halpern as our guide. Proceeding little by little--monad by monad as it were--we go on a journey that is unexpectedly festive, funny, and full of surprises. By carefully selecting themes and passages and providing occasional illustrations from Leibniz's papers, Halpern has deftly created a dazzling series of windows into the world of Leibniz.--Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life

About the Author

Richard Halpern is the author of six books on topics ranging from Shakespeare to Norman Rockwell. At his retirement, he was Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature at New York University.