The issue is whether Leibniz can consistently advocate all of the following: 1) God's freedom; 2) God's perfection; and 3) the principle of sufficient reason. Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz was a seventeenth century philosopher who also had many other occupations: mathematician, scientist, lawyer, diplomat, engineer, inventor, and historian. He believed that his work in all these fields was supported by his metaphysical system, and he believed in the application of reason to the development of a philosophy. Analysts find that Leibniz was indeed able to advocate the three statements noted above in a consistent fashion because his philosophy contained a unity of philosophic thought, just as he was able to apply that thought to many different fields. The inner unity of Leibniz' thought has to be grasped to understand his work in its totality.
Accomplishing this task is difficult, however, because Leibniz never systematically exhibited the unity of his philosophy in his writings. Instead, that underlying unity has to be reconstructed, which is made more difficult by the fact that much of his work remains unpublished. a secondary problem arises because of the variety of his interests, for this makes any adequate interpretation require searching for the hidden unity in his thought (Schrecker ix). The indispensable basis of all of the thought of Leibniz is found in the same source:
. . . the infinitesimal analysis and the theory of minute perceptions, the monadologic metaphysics and the dynamic laws of the shock of bodies, the new kind of formal logic and the pacifistic projects in politics and in religion. All these theories and doctrines are but applications of the method of the characteristic universal language to special problems (Schrecker x).
Most philosophers give rise to divergent interpretations, an in the case of Leibniz the differences have been pronounced. Couturat and Bertrand Russell state that Leibniz's metaph...