An important posthumous collection of Leibniz’s philosophical works in French and Latin, containing the first appearance of the fundamental Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, one of the most important refutations of Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding and a defence of the existence of nonmaterial substance.
Leibniz refers to the Nouveaux essais in a letter of 1714, clarifying that, having written it in 1704-5, he had renounced going to press, unwilling to publish a radical refutation of a recently dead author. In his introduction, Raspe surmises that reasons of prudence and unwillingness to be distracted from the dominant controversies on calculus and on metaphysics might have prevented Leibniz from entering another contest. The publication of the Nouveaux essais in this 1765 edition was momentous and influential, and informed Hume’s and Kant’s reading of Leibniz.
The title is something of a misnomer: the essais are couched in the form of a dialogue between Locke’s spokesman Philalethes, who quotes from Coste’s translation of the Essay, and Theophiles who replies for Leibniz. Modern commentators consider this text a high-water mark: Catherine Wilson calls it ‘undoubtedly Leibniz’s best composition: the richest, the most tightly argued, the most fertile …’ ; and Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett say in the introduction to their Cambridge edition ‘any attentive reader of the New Essays must receive a dominant impression of being in the presence of a powerful, restless, superbly sharp intelligence’.
The Nouveaux essais takes up almost the entirety of the present volume (496 of the 540 pages). The other shorter pieces in the collection include a number of works concerning language (‘Dialogus de connexione inter res & verba’, ‘Difficultates quaedam Logicae’ and ‘Historia commendatio charactericae universalis quae simul fit ars inveniendi’), the ‘Examen du sentiment du P. Malebranche que nous voyons tout en Dieu’, and ‘Discours touchant la methode de la certitude & de l’art d’inventer’.
Provenance: from the library Count Joseph Ferdinand of Rheinstein and Tattenbach (1723-1802), with his engraved armorial bookplate to front pastedown and neat ownership inscription to title page.
Ravier, 472.
