Leibniz on Eternal Punishment
2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09608780902761695
ISSN1469-3526
Autores Tópico(s)Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought
ResumoLeibniz on eternal punishmentAround fifty years after Leibniz's death, a debate erupted in Germany concerning his views on the Christian doctrine of eternal punishment of the wicked.On the one side was Johann August Eberhard, who argued in his Neue Apologie des Sokrates [New Apology for Socrates] (1772) that Leibniz secretly rejected this doctrine in favour of the view that all humans would eventually be saved.On the other side was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who argued in his Leibniz von den Ewigen Strafen [Leibniz on eternal punishment] (1773) that Leibniz had in fact been an adherent of the doctrine of eternal punishment. 1 Although the debate between Eberhard and Lessing is not without historical interest, and certainly worthy of study in its own right, my intention here is not to give a commentary on their debate but rather to reopen it, in response to recent claims made by a number of Leibniz scholars.The issue, in a nutshell, is over Leibniz's orthodoxy on the matter of eschatology, or more precisely, on the fate of the wicked.Broadly speaking, in Leibniz's day there were three different positions one could take on this matter.The traditional view stated that the wicked would be damned, i.e. suffer eternal punishment in hell, though there was obvious disagreement among supporters of this view as to how many would be damned and why those people in particular.The second view, which we might call the annihilationist view, stated that the wicked would be punished in hell for a certain period of time before being annihilated.The third view, universal salvation, stated that the wicked would experience 'corrective' punishment of finite duration, after 1 Lessing's essay is now available in an English translation in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,
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