DOES THE PHRASE ET EO IPSO HAVE A REDUPLICATIVE FUNCTION IN LEIBNIZ’S “PARIS AMAT ET EO IPSO HELENA AMATUR”?

Resumo

In this paper, I will not discuss the wider philosophical issues concerning the nature and status of relations in Leibniz’s thought. This will be done another time. I will instead confine myself to reflect upon Leibnizian strategies of rewriting/reducing relational sentences, especially those that include relational predicates that express relations of connection or concurrence rather than of comparison. More precisely, I will deal with Leibniz’s analysis of the sentence “Paris est amator Helenae” (Leibniz also writes “Paris amat Helenam”) as reducible to “Paris amat et eo ipso Helena amatur” (Leibniz also writes “Paris est amator et eo ipso Helena est amata”). I intend to show, against Massimo Mugnai’s interpretative proposal, that the phrase “et eo ipso” does not perform a reduplicative function here.