Idealism and Well-Founded Phenomena in Leibniz

Leibniz maintained that the most real created entities are simple substances called monads, which according to Leibniz are minds or mind-like things. Furthermore, on a common reading of Leibniz, everything in the universe that is not a monad belongs to some inferior level of reality. One of the most important such inferior levels is that of phenomena, which, for Leibniz, are the representational contents of perceptions. This much is uncontroversial. However, an issue in Leibniz's philosophy which has received relatively little direct attention concerns the nature of what he calls "well-founded phenomena." More specifically, very few commentators have discussed what exactly the property of "well-foundedness" might entail. In this paper, I advance a reading of well-foundedness that takes it to be based on what Leibniz calls coherence. In so doing, I argue against an alternative account of well-foundedness that has occasionally been defended by interpreters of Leibniz, according to whom well-foundedness is simply equivalent to the property of representing a real thing.