Leibniz ve McTaggart'ın Cevherin Birliği Sorusuna Yaklaşımları

Abstract

For McTaggart, existence can be classified into three categories: substance, quality and relation. Neither one of these can be reduced to one another. Substance, in such a framework,is described as that which has characteristics (i.e., qualities and relations) without itself being a characteristic. McTaggart claims that every substance is a whole that is differentiated into infinite number of parts each of which is again a substance. The substance that has all other substances as its parts is Universe and there is no simple substance. Each substance is related to other substances by the relation of determining correspondence, which is essentially a whole-and-part relation. Since all substances are parts of the Universe, the determining correspondence determines the order of the Universe. According to McTaggart, a substance, in order to satisfy the formal conditions of the determining correspondence, should either be a perception, a collection of perceptions or a perceiver. Then, the content of the whole existence is perceptional and is dependent upon the existence and the activity of selves; in that sense, it is ideal. McTaggart's conception of substance might seem to be Leibnizian in two fundamental respects; firstly, substance has a perceptional content and secondly, it is completely determined. According to Leibniz, each substance is a simple unity, that is, has no parts; and there can be no real relation between substances. Although every created substance is determined,it is not determined by others but by its individual idea. Such an idea is related to the individual ideas of other substances through the harmony pre-established by God. In other words, a substance's relations to others are not actual or real, but ideal. It is argued in this paper that McTaggart's conception of substance cannot essentially be Leibnizian since Leibniz's conception of substance as simple, indivisible and independent unity is replaced by a completely opposite conception of substance in which each substance is infinitely divisible and completely dependent on others through the relations it really bears to them.