Kant's Evolving Conception of Monads in Light of the Eighteenth-Century Reception of Leibniz's Monadology

The monadology initiated by Leibniz has been rightly considered to have had a great impact on the development of eighteenth-century German philosophy up until Kant’s Physical Monadology of 1756. However, scholars tend to neglect Kant’s indebtedness to crucial elements of Leibniz’s monadology after his ‘critical turn’. The present project aims at reconstructing Kant’s evolving conception of monads throughout his pre-critical and critical texts. It does so (i) by giving a first and comprehensive account of the shift from Kant’s physical monadology of the 1750s and 1760s to what I take to be his non-physical monadology of the 1770s, 1780s and 1790s, (ii) by situating this shift within the broader framework of the development of monadologies in the eighteenth century, and (iii) by exploring how this framework was shaped by the rising modern science of the time. Thus, although the project primarily aims to contribute to Kant’ scholarship, it also sheds decisive light on Kant’s relationship to both preceding appropriations of Leibniz’s monadology and to Newton’s physics. Contrary to those readings that focus exclusively on the epistemological turn that characterizes Kant’s critical philosophy, the project provides new insights into Kant’s enduring engagement with the metaphysics of his predecessors.