Type of Document	Dissertation
Author	Puryear, Stephen Montague
Author's Email Address	stp11@pitt.edu
URN	etd-04242006-131346
Title	Perception and Representation in Leibniz
Degree	Doctor of Philosophy
Program	Philosophy
School	School of Arts and Sciences
Advisory Committee	Advisor Name Title Nicholas Rescher Committee Chair J.E. McGuire Committee Member Robert Brandom Committee Member Stephen Engstrom Committee Member
Keywords	secondary qualities sensible qualities
Date of Defense	2005-12-05
Availability	unrestricted
Abstract Though Leibniz’s views about perception and representation go to the heart of his philosophy, they have received surprisingly little attention over the years and in many ways continue to be poorly understood. I aim to rectify these shortcomings. The body of the work begins with an exploration of Leibniz’s proposed analysis of representation (Chapter 2). I argue that on this analysis representation consists in a kind of structural correspondence-- roughly an isomorphism--between representation and thing represented. Special attention is given to the application of this analysis to the challenging cases of linguistic and mental representation. The next two chapters concern what I take to be the central issue of the work: the nature of distinct perception. I explain the multifarious ways in which this concept figures into Leibniz’s system, and argue that the three most prominent accounts of distinct perception proposed in recent decades fall short of what we should expect from an adequate theory (Chapter 3). Then, building on the account of representation defended in Chapter 2, I propose and develop an alternative theory, which I call the explicit content account (Chapter 4). It not only enjoys significant textual support, I contend, but sorts well with and sheds considerable light on the various uses to which Leibniz puts the concept of distinct perception. Finally, I argue that the explicit content account of perceptual distinctness also provides us with the correct account of the sense in which concepts (or ideas) are distinct, that is, with the correct account of conceptual distinctness (Chapter 5). In doing so I set myself against the received view that concepts are not distinct (or confused) in the same sense as perceptions. Taken together, these points paint a simpler, more comprehensive, and more enlightening picture of the Leibnizian mind than those suggested by previous work.
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