Tanya Suarez

“I have so many ideas that may perhaps be of some use in time if others more penetrating than I go deeply into them someday and join the beauty of their minds to the labour of mine.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

“[...] c’est que jamais rien n’arrive, sans qu’il y ail une cause ou du moins une raison déterminante, c’est-à-dire quelque chose qui puisse servir à rendre a priori, pourquoi cela est existant plulôt que de toute autre façon. Ce grand principe a lieu dans tous les événements, et on ne donnera jamais un exemple contraire : et quoique le plus souvent ces raisons déterminantes ne nous soient pas assez connues, nous ne laissons pas d’entrevoir qu’il y en a.
Essais de Théodicée, 1.44”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man & the Origin of Evil

“I don't really eliminate body, but reduce it to what it is. For I show that corporeal mass, which is thought to have something over and above simple substances, is not a substance, but a phenomenon resulting from simple substances, which alone have unity and absolute reality.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays

“The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don’t do anything. As long as people had only the haziest concept of what a mind was or how it might work, the metaphor of a blank slate inscribed by the environment did not seem too outrageous. But as soon as one starts to think seriously about what kind of computation enables a system to see, think, speak, and plan, the problem with blank slates becomes all too obvious: they don’t do anything. The inscriptions will sit there forever unless something notices patterns in them, combines them with patterns learned at other times, uses the combinations to scribble new thoughts onto the slate, and reads the results to guide behavior toward goals. Locke recognized this problem and alluded to something called “the understanding,” which looked at the inscriptions on the white paper and carried out the recognizing, reflecting, and associating. But of course explaining how the mind understands by invoking something called “the understanding” is circular. This argument against the Blank Slate was stated pithily by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) in a reply to Locke. Leibniz repeated the empiricist motto “There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses,” then added, “except the intellect itself.”8”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature