Reinach’s Phenomenological Response to Leibniz

Those who engage with and comment on Adolf Reinach’s realist ontology of a priori, truth, propositions, states of affairs, and material necessity standardly compare it to Kant, Brentano, Meinong, and Husserl and then sometimes also analytic philosophers like Wittgenstein, Ryle, Searle, and Frege. While these approaches are not wrong, there is one important figure that is constantly absent—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. When we peruse Reinach’s published works, we find no more than a handful of superficial mentions of Leibniz; he typically focuses on Locke, Hume, Kant, and the Neo-Kantians. However, upon closer inspection, especially with regard to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), introduced most succinctly in his famous Monadology (1714), we discover a critical relationship between Reinach and Leibniz that is not unlike the one between Bolzano and Leibniz. I begin with a brief discussion of the PSR, the a priori, states of affairs, and material necessity, in order to then explicate Reinach’s phenomenological response to Leibniz.