Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Idea of the Best of All Possible Worlds

Abstract

This article deals with the idea of the best possible world which was proposed by German philosopher Leibniz. He is regarded as a creator of theodicy – a philosophical discipline that is searching for some arguments to defend God against accusations of evil present in the created world. One of such arguments is included in Leibniz’s thesis that all the possible worlds exist potentially in the mind of God, and from this infinite collection of possibilities God chooses the best option and calls it into being. What is important is that the best of all possible worlds is not a perfect world devoid of evil. Such a world cannot exist because it is internally contradictory. It is the best possible world in a sense that it’s an optimal configuration of things and events, which contains maximum of the possible good and minimum of the inevitable evil. In this paper the main points of Leibniz’s argumentation that concern this issue are presented and critically analysed.