Russell’s Conundrum: On the Relation of Leibniz’s Monads to the Continuum

In his influential book on Leibniz (1900), Bertrand Russell often let his new-found anti-Hegelianism come between him and his subject, attacking doctrines held by the likes of Bradley and MacTaggart in the belief that he was attacking one of their main sources. This is particularly true of his chapter on Leibniz’s treatment of the continuum, where after rather wildly accusing Leibniz of courting “the essentially Hegelian view that abstraction …