Perception and Sign. Leibniz on Thinking with the Body

VARGAS, EVELYN

Leibniz-Universität Hannover (Alemania)

Congreso; VIII. Internationaler Leibniz-Kongress; 2006

Leibniz Geselschaft

Leibniz´s logical projects are commonly recognized as influential for XIXth century developments in formal logic. Also, the dominating syntactical point of view would emphasize those aspects of his project of a characteristica universalis  as a purely formal language and lesser attention was paid to the Leibnitian solution to the problem of the relation between characters (or signs in general) and signification which he embodied in his theory of expression. The cognitive value of the relation of expression is recognized by Leibniz for whom “that is said to express a thing in which there are relations [habitudines] which correspond to the relations of the thing expressed. (…) What is common to all these expressions is that we can pass from a consideration of the relations in the expression to a knowledge of the corresponding properties of the thing expressed” (GP VII 263; L 207). Now, in order to understand how a mere formal structure can express the content of our ideas we must evaluate: (i) the role Leibniz attributes to perception and ‘bodily traces’ in our distinct knowledge; (ii) the role he assigns to purely intelligible ideas, that is, ideas which are not provided by the senses but results from the reflection of the mind on its own acts. By complementing those roles one can see that the relation between thought and its object in our distinct knowledge does not involve some privileged representation whose only function would be to refer to independent external things. Finally, I propose to conclude with some reflections on the relevance of certain features of the previous analysis for Peirce’s semeiotic model of the mind.