"One of the great historic controversies in philosophy," according to Bertrand Russell, is that between empiricists--"best represented by the British philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume"--and rationalists. This book sets the empiricists in their contemporary and cultural context, examines their various approaches to philosophy, and highlights the significance of their ideas to 20th-century thinking. By focusing on what the "empiricists" actually have to say, rather than on their classification as such, Woolhouse incidentally shows how unreliable these conventional labels can be.

Offering an invaluable introduction to Leibniz's philosophy, this volume collects many of his most important texts, beginning with the Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) and ending with the Monadology (1714). Also included in this work are critical reactions to Leibniz's work by his contemporaries (Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Bayle, and Simon Foucher), together with Leibniz's responses. The editors provide new English translations for all of the texts, preceding each with a summary explaining its background, structure, and content.

This volume gathers together for the first time are all the key texts in a crucial debate in modern philosophy, centered on Leibniz's famous 1695 essay, the "New System of the Nature of Substances and their Communication," in which he introduced his strikingly original theory of metaphysics. His "system" became increasingly famous and drew him into discussion and development of these ideas, both in public and in private, with a variety of thinkers, most notably the great French philosopher Pierre Bayle. Woolhouse's and Francks's new English edition gives the only full representation of this...