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Part of
Controversies in the Contemporary World
Edited by Adriano Fabris and Giovanni Scarafile
[Controversies 15] 2019
► pp. 29–48

Chapter 2
Locke’s and Leibniz’s virtual debate over Of our knowledge of the existence of God

The paper tries to reconstruct a possible polemical dialog between Locke and Leibniz over Of our knowledge of the existence of God, which is the title of Chapter 10, book 4, of the Essay and the New Essays. God’s existence is crucial to Leibniz’s metaphysics as well as to Locke’s philosophical enterprise, however, Locke is a kind of a tabula-rasa empiricist and Leibniz is a kind of a rationalist, therefore any a priori argument will not gain their mutual consent. Furthermore, because the former is a kind of realist whereas the latter holds a kind of an anti-realist ‘no-windows-point-of-view’ of the world, any a posteriori argument will eventually likely fail too.

Keywords: Locke, Leibniz, Controversy, polemics, God’s existence, Dascal
Article outline
  • 1.The arguments Of our knowledge of the Existence of God
    • 1.1A cosmological (a posteriori) argument for the existence of God
    • 1.2The ontological (a priori) argument for the existence of God
  • 2.What type of polemic is the Locke-Leibniz virtual debate?
    • 2.1Locke-Burnett-Leibniz correspondences
    • 2.2Dascal’s typology of polemics
  • 3.A note on the rhetorical devices that would have been used by Locke and Leibniz
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cvs.15.03sho
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