About This Site

What this is

The Leibniz Bookshelf (book.themodel.be) is a book guide for people who have been defeated by philosophy books before. This English edition selects five titles currently available on amazon.com and presents them in a reading order that won't defeat you — from a short introduction, through the Monadology and the Discourse on Metaphysics, to the major works. A Japanese edition is also maintained, alongside sister shops such as The Socrates Bookshelf and The Nietzsche Bookshelf.

The editorial room runs a family of philosopher bookshelves and a section-by-section reading archive of the primary texts (in Japanese). Every review and reading-order recommendation on this site rests on that first-hand reading and on explicit bibliographic checking. Leibniz is a thinker who admits many interpretations; this site does not push one, but concentrates on handing you the map and his own words.

How the English lineup maps to the Japanese one

Leibniz wrote in Latin and French, and there are excellent English translations, so this edition is not a translation of the Japanese shelf but its English-language counterpart. The roles line up as follows:

• The introduction. The Japanese shelf opens with a Japanese-language primer (Shirō Yamauchi's Leibniz) that has no English edition. In its place we use the standard English introduction, Maria Rosa Antognazza's Leibniz: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford).
• The short primary works. Where the Japanese shelf uses the Iwanami Monadology and Discourse on Metaphysics, we use the standard scholarly translations in Hackett's Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays (Garber & Ariew), which contains both.
• The fuller reader. In place of the Japanese combined edition of the two masterworks, we use Hackett's Philosophical Essays — the standard one-volume English reader, which reprints those texts and adds the Arnauld and Clarke correspondence and more.
• The major work. The Japanese shelf's big book, the New Essays on Human Understanding, maps directly to the Cambridge Texts edition (Remnant & Bennett).
• The study. As the capstone we add Antognazza's Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge) — the standard English-language study of the whole mind.

Just as the Japanese edition is honest that its Iwanami and Chūō-Kōron editions overlap, this edition is honest that the slim Hackett Discourse and the larger Philosophical Essays share texts: you need only one of the two. The reviews and the comparison table say which to choose.

How books are chosen and rated

• Judgements about the works themselves rest on the editorial room's first-hand reading. Star ratings are our own; no Amazon customer reviews are reproduced.
• We recommend only editions currently in print and available on amazon.com, from established publishers (Oxford University Press, Hackett, Cambridge University Press).
• Where two editions overlap in content, we disclose it plainly and say that one is enough — recommending books you will finish, not books that merely sell.
• Each book's role — introduction, primary source, or biography — and its hard passages are named in its review.
• All descriptions are written by us; no publisher copy is reproduced. Where we quote, we use short, widely known passages, mark them with blockquote, and give our own editorial gloss with the section number rather than reproducing the translation under review.
• Cover images are jacket-style images of our own design and differ from the actual covers.
• Prices and availability change, so we do not print them; always check the Amazon product page.

Amazon link disclosure

As an Amazon Associate, this site (The Leibniz Bookshelf) may earn from qualifying purchases.

Book links on this edition go to product pages on Amazon (amazon.com). If a purchase is made through them, this site may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Commissions never influence the ratings — recommending books you will actually finish, and telling you plainly when one of two overlapping editions is enough, is in the end what serves readers best.

Privacy policy

This is a static site; no personal information is collected server-side. The browser's localStorage is used solely to count link clicks (to improve the ranking's accuracy); that data stays in your browser and is never transmitted. Once you follow a link to Amazon, Amazon.com's privacy policy applies.

Contact

For corrections and inquiries, please use the contact address on our sister site soqdoq.com.