what are innate notions?

Question

what are innate notions according to leibniz?

Answer 1

Leibniz was a thoroughgoing rationalist. To ordinary thought it does not seem that a given blade of grass has to be green, or that a man's history had develop as it did. He thought this as an illusion of imperfect knowledge. With fuller insight we should see that everything had to have just these qualities and just this particular history. For him the world was rational, or logically necessitated, through and through.

Answer 2

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/leibniz.htm

I don't know that Leibniz used that expression.....but perhaps 'monad' is its equivalent.


http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpleibni.htm

'Leibnitz, by means of his fundamental principle of individuality, brings out the essentiality of the opposite aspect of Spinoza's philosophy, existence for self, the monad, but the monad regarded as the absolute Notion, though perhaps not yet as the "I."'


http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slobject.htm#SL194_1

'The definition, which states that the Absolute is the Object, is most definitely implied in the Leibnitzian Monad. The Monads are each an object, but an object implicitly 'representative', indeed the total representation of the world. In the simple unity of the Monad, all difference is merely ideal, not independent or real. Nothing from without comes into the monad: it is the whole notion in itself, only distinguished by its own greater or less development. None the less, this simple totality parts into the absolute multeity of differences, each becoming an independent monad. In the monad of monads, and the Pre-established Harmony of their inward developments, these substances are in like manner again reduced to 'identity' and unsubstantiality. The philosophy of Leibnitz, therefore, represents contradiction in its complete development.'