Boundaries of the Future and a Future without Boundaries: Uses and Knowledge of the Future in Leibniz

The paper presents the various ways in which the future comes into play in Leibniz's philosophy, moving from the phrases that characterize his attitude to both the everlasting future of beatitude beyond this life, and the limited future that is an obvious subject of human preoccupations. Leibniz has, as they say, mixed feelings when he considers ‘the ebb and flow of fortune’—that the world can enter a future better than the past is something Leibniz would not commit to, although he likes to think that it can happen locally. But his pre-established harmony ‘links the future with the past, and the present with what is absent.’ The moving boundary between these three components is permeable: this is prominently expressed by the statement, to which the second part of the paper is devoted: “le temps present est gros de l’avenir”. Leibniz makes various uses of it, and it will be made use of by others in quite different ways.