Il posto di Leibniz nella riflessione storico-teoretica di Sandro Mancini

The essay discusses Sandro Mancini’s interpretation of Leibniz, a philosopher studied by Mancini in an ideal comparison with Nicola Cusano. The essay shares the hypothesis that Leibniz, like Cusanus, was in search of a “third way” between intellectualism and voluntarism in theology and examines three crucial elements of Leibniz’s response to this problem: the doctrine of the necessity of the existence of all the possible, the conception of the monad as an expression of both God and the world, monadological pluralism and the doctrine of reciprocal mirroring between monads. These three doctrines all arise in the same period – the early years of his stay in Hanover, years dominated by his confrontation with Descartes and Spinoza – and this confirms that they are converging answers to the fundamental question of the relationship between absolute power and ordered power in God. The peculiarity of Leibniz’s position lies in the fact that he accompanied his solution of this theological problem with an ethical and no longer simply cosmological reinterpretation of the traditional notion of “world”.