Does Leibniz Abandon the Conception of Space as the Universal Place of Things after 1671? Critical Remarks to Federico Raffo Quintana’s Paper

Abstract

In this paper I introduce objections to Federico Raffo Quintana’s paper “The Notion of ‘Space’ in the Young Leibniz Writings”. Against Raffo, who considers that the Leibnizian conception of space as the universal place of things is an idea that Leibniz early abandons —Raffo says in 1671—, I will try to show that such a conception goes beyond the Leibniz’s young writings and that it is because of some conceptual confusions in Raffo’s survey that he, instead of seeing a harmonic continuity in Leibniz’s theory of space, sees a rupture in its historical evolution, associating to it some disputable or spurious dichotomies.