Leibniz on Primitive Concepts and Conceiving Reality

In this paper, we consider what is commonly referred to as Leibniz’s argument for primitive concepts. After presenting and criticizing (in sections 1 and 2) one recent rather straightforward way of interpreting this argument, by Paul Lodge and Stephen Puryear, which takes the argument to be merely about the structure of concepts, we offer an alternative way of looking at the argument. We think it is best seen as being fundamentally about the relation between thought and reality. In order to prepare the ground for our reconstruction (which we present in section 5), we have to introduce his view of ideas or concepts (section 3), as well as some metaphysical principles concerning reality-dependence (section 4).