There has been a rough reference to the former epistemic limit in the introduction: namely the images of objects, persons, or relationships, either deictic or psychological, that form the structure of a fictional world and that, at the same time, are constructed in the language of
monads. The latter limit is represented by various discourse strategies used to create fictional worlds, equally revealing the character's or narrator's options in relation to ontic elements.
This obliges them to attribute to Leibniz trans-world identification of
monads. Most interpreters reject trans-world identity because (in effect) superintrinsicality together with a strict reading of pre-established harmony excludes it.
These different cosmologies were then used as supporting arguments for the different political arrangements of England and Germany, with the numerous petty states of Leibnitz's Germany in the role of self-sufficient
monads. The great political innovation of Newton's time, constitutional monarchy, was by contrast seen as an image of God's power to intervene in the affairs of the universe, a power whose exercise, in a well-regulated system, should hardly ever be required.
The distributive nature of the universal entirety means, consequently, that it is not a conglomerate of all
monads but is immanent in every
monad.
They were taken up again by the Renaissance Platonists and by their Cambridge successors in seventeenth-century England, and discussed in the circle of Leibniz, with whose doctrine of ever-developing
monads as the essence of all things t hey have obvious affinities.
God is the ultimate, necessary being who is the sufficient reason for the existence of all other beings and who is the creator and orderer of all
monads.
Similarly the theory of
monads founds an aristocratic ethics, but why one emphasizing charity and wisdom?
This result showed that
monads in general and continuations in particular satisfy exactly the same equations.
This article provides an introduction to the use of
monads to add interaction to a pure functional language, as described in previous work by Simon Peyton Jones and myself [Peyton Jones and Wadler 1993].
The image of notes (or rather
monads) going on their own way summons the spirit of Nietzsche, a Baroque ontologist par excellence, whose conception of the world as a vast field of interconnecting forces presents the paradoxical but highly contemporary image of a Leibnizian monadology without the all-regulating principle of universal harmony.
According to Leibniz, we are individual, active, but windowless
monads. This means that we are causally unrelated to worldly others.
However, all these roles are generic, and there are no sustained interactions between the component
monads of the various quartets; no plot, only the pattern of a typical night on the town.
