Best of all possible worlds

The phrase "the best of all possible worlds" (French: Le meilleur des mondes possibles; German: Die beste aller möglichen Welten) was coined by the German polymath and Enlightenment philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in his 1710 work Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l'homme et l'origine du mal (Essays of Theodicy on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil),[1] more commonly known simply as the Theodicy.

[2] Proving that this is the best of all possible worlds would dispel such charges by showing that, no matter how it may intuitively appear to us from our limited point of view, any other world – such as, namely, one without the evils which trouble our lives – would, in fact, have been worse than the current one, all things considered.

But a unicorn, if defined as a horse with a horn, contains no contradiction, so that such a being is possible, even if none exist in the actual world.

For instance, it is logically possible that a meteor might have fallen from the sky onto Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's head soon after he was born, killing him.

Leibniz claims in §53, then, that there are infinitely many of these possible worlds, or combinations of compossible beings, in the ideas of God.

As the philosophers Michael Murray and Sean Greenberg interpreted it, this claim may be understood by the consideration that basing the choice on any other quality about the worlds would have been arbitrary, contrary to the PSR.

Hence, the best possible world, or "greatest good" as Leibniz called it in this work, must be the one that exists.

A little acid, sharpness or bitterness is often more pleasing than sugar; shadows enhance colours; and even a dissonance in the right place gives relief to harmony.

We wish to be terrified by rope-dancers on the point of falling and we wish that tragedies shall well-nigh cause us to weep.

[5]In other works, Leibniz also used his broader theory that there are no "purely extrinsic denominations" – everything that may be said about something is essential to it.

[2] The philosopher Calvin Normore has claimed that, according to the Stoics, this is the best of all possible worlds, and that this opinion was shared by Peter Abelard.

[1] Critics of Leibniz argue that the world contains an amount of suffering too great to permit belief in philosophical optimism.

[1] The claim that we live in the best of all possible worlds drew scorn most notably from Voltaire, who lampooned it in his comic novella Candide by having the character Dr. Pangloss (a parody of Leibniz and Maupertuis) repeat it like a mantra when great catastrophes keep happening to him and the titular protagonist.

Derived from this character, the adjective "Panglossian" describes a person who believes that the actual world is the best possible one, or is otherwise excessively optimistic.

The physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond, in his "Leibnizian Thoughts in Modern Science" (1870), wrote that Leibniz thought of God as a mathematician: As is well known, the theory of the maxima and minima of functions was indebted to him for the greatest progress through the discovery of the method of tangents.

Well, he conceives God in the creation of the world like a mathematician who is solving a minimum problem, or rather, in our modern phraseology, a problem in the calculus of variations – the question being to determine among an infinite number of possible worlds, that for which the sum of necessary evil is a minimum.Du Bois-Reymond believed that Charles Darwin supported a version of Leibniz's perfect world, since every organism can be understood as relatively adapted to its environment at any point in its evolution.

Russell maintains that Leibniz failed to logically show that metaphysical necessity (divine will) and human free will are not incompatible or contradictory.

The philosopher William C. Lane defended Leibniz from Plantinga's criticism and also claimed that Leibniz's theory has pandeistic consequences:If divine becoming were complete, God's kenosis – God's self-emptying for the sake of love – would be total.

Any separate divine existence would be inconsistent with God's unreserved participation in the lives and fortunes of the actualized phenomena.