Why the World Must Contain Evil |
The philosopher Leibniz, who trained as a lawyer, envisioned himself as God’s own attorney.
In the Theodicy, Leibniz defends God against the charge of having allowed evil into the world.
God, says Leibniz, does not cause evil but permits it for the greater good.
Many people who have heard of Gottfried Leibniz first heard of him through Voltaire’s satirical Candide (1759), in which Leibniz is caricatured as the deluded Dr Pangloss, “the greatest philosopher of the Holy Empire,” a parody that is a hard to get past. Insofar as Leibniz is remembered, it is for holding, in the words of Voltaire, that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
Unlike his predecessors Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz received a university education in philosophy, even though, in his day, university philosophy amounted to little more than Aristotelian-Christian Scholasticism. In April 1661, at the age of 14, he enrolled at Leipzig University to study liberal arts. Five years later, in 1666, Altdorf University granted him a doctorate in law, along with the offer of a professorship. However, he declined the professorship, deeming, perhaps, that a university might not be the........