Causality, power and laws of nature at Leibniz

This paper deals with Leibniz's conception of laws of nature, which is fundamentally the expression of natural invariances. It shows that this conception cannot be disconnected from that of causal interaction, which contrary to a widespread opinion and in spite of what some of his writings seem to suggest, he never denied, and which exerts a considerable conceptual pressure on his view on laws of nature. Indeed, the modern notion of law of nature and the scholastic notion of causal interaction, which Leibniz needed in order to make intelligible the notion of force, pull in opposite directions. It is shown how Leibniz transformed the Aristotelian notions of action and change, inventing the concept of intransitive change, to argue that symmetries in nature should be grounded in the distribution of activities of substances.