This is a new edition (2025) of Bertrand Russell’s celebrated A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (1900), with a new introduction by myself..
This book had a powerful influence on the reception of Leibniz’s philosophy in the English-speaking world, where Russell’s readings are still setting much of the frameword for discussion of Leibniz’s views a century and a quarter later. But it also layed a seminal role in the development of Russell’s own thought and the creation of Analytic Philosophy.
In my new Foreword I argue that Russell’s critique of Leibniz needs to be understood against the backdrop of the uncompromisingly idealist milieu in which he was schooled, and against which he was only just beginning to rebel, partly under Moore’s influence. His new understanding of propositions as mind-independent wholes formed by concepts and their relations, together with his own failed attempts to understand relations as internal, led him to see Leibniz’s treatment of relations as the Achilles heel of his entire system. But his understanding of that was compromised by his assimilation of Leibniz’s account to the relational theories of the German philosopher Hermann Lotze (1817–1881).
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