/lit/ - Literature

The senses, although they are necessary for all our actual knowledge, are not sufficient to give us the whole of it, since the senses never give anything but instances, that is to say particular or individual truths. Now all the instances which confirm a general truth, however numerous they may be, are not sufficient to establish the universal necessity of this same truth, for it does not follow that what happened before will happen in the same way again. … From which it appears that necessary truths, such as we find in pure mathematics, and particularly in arithmetic and geometry, must have principles whose proof does not depend on instances, nor consequently on the testimony of the senses, although without the senses it would never have occurred to us to think of them…

>>22508461
>They have the same mixture of academics and mysticism, so where are the neoplatonists?
they never left

>Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself.

>And compounds are in this respect analogous with [symbolisent avec] simple
substances. For all is a plenum (and thus all matter is connected together) and in
the plenum every motion has an effect upon distant bodies in proportion to their
distance, so that each body not only is affected by those which are in contact with
it and in some way feels the effect of everything that happens to them, but also is
mediately affected by bodies adjoining those with which it itself is in immediate
contact. Wherefore it follows that this inter-communication of things extends to
any distance, however great. And consequently every body feels the effect of all
that takes place in the universe, so that he who sees all might read in each what is
happening everywhere, and even what has happened or shall happen, observing in
the present that which is far off as well in time as in place: σύμπνοια πάντα
[sympnoia panta], as Hippocrates said. But a soul can read in itself only that
which is there represented distinctly; it cannot all at once unroll everything that is
enfolded in it, for its complexity is infinite.
>Paragraph 61 of Monadology

what does lit think of him?

Is Leibniz worth reading?I have finished reading Descartes and Spinoza
If so,where do i start?