On Trans-world Identity of Self-Conscious Monads in Leibniz’ Monadology

A potential challenge in bridging Husserl’s egological approach to Leibniz’ monadological metaphysics, itself a promising project for various reasons as discussed throughout this collection, is the so-called world-boundedness of monads. If any monad is bounded to a possible world, then there hardly would be a room for transcendental monads. In other words, the view that the transcendental intersubjectivity is to constitute the world is in tension with the view that any transcendental subject, while considered as a monad, is already bounded to a world. However, all this arise when Leibinz’s monadology verily implies world-boundedness of all monads. In this chapter, I wish to show first that a well-known argument attributed to Leibniz which rejects the trans-world identity of individuals is invalid. Second, I argue that Leibnizian metaphysics indeed involves the trans-world identity of certain monads, namely, the self-conscious monads, and it offers a criterion for such an identity. Therefore, in this regard, there is no real tension between transcendental phenomenology and monadological metaphysics.