Leibniz and Judaism
Hi,
Do you know of any research on the attitude of contemporary and somewhat later Jewish thinkers and Torah scholars towards Leibniz’s philosophy?
For example, the influence of ideas on currents in Hasidism, Kabbalah, etc.?
No. I don’t know of any studies of this kind at all (not that there aren’t any. I’m not interested).
As far as I remember, Moshe Mendelssohn based his “theory of tolerance” on Leibniz’s monadological pluralism. Leibniz, who was a devout Christian, accepted a “Jewish” interpretation based on Mendelssohn’s claim that Judaism allows for and encourages a plurality of worldviews and perceptions, unlike Christianity (which strives for privileged theoretical truth). In Judaism, he claimed, there is consensus on the centrality of halakha but not on “theory.” In his view, this is analogous to the system of monads that Leibniz describes (each monad reflects the entire universe in a different way).
The only difference is that Leibniz's monads don't really interact with each other.
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