MATHESIS AND ANALYSIS: FINITUDE AND THE INFINITE IN THE MONADOLOGY OF LEIBNIZ

There is an infinity of figures and of movements, present and past, which enter into the efficient cause of my present writing, and in its final cause, there are an infinity of slight tendencies and dispositions of my soul, present and past. 1     

LEIBNIZ ON BODY, MATTER AND EXTENSION

This paper explores Leibniz's conception of body and extension in the 1680s and 1690s. It is argued that one of Leibniz's central aims is to undermine the Cartesian conception of extended substance, and replace it with a conception on which what is basic to body is force. In this way, Leibniz intends to reduce extension to something metaphysically more basic in just the way that the mechanists reduce sensible qualities to size, shape and motion. It is also argued that this move is quite distinct from the reduction of body to monads and their appetitions and perceptions, so prominent in his later writings.     

THE CHANGING WORLDS OF EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY: IMPRESSIONS AND DILEMMAS1

Two interrelated outcomes have emerged after a year's research on the nature of European scientific communication: on a tangible level, this research has led to an extensive analysis of the conditions related to communication and productivity in European psychology (See Krantz, in press, for a report of some initial findings); less concretely, the study has generated many impressions, unanswered questions, and dilemmas about the state of European and American psychology. These more ephemeral outcomes of the research provide the basis of the following discussion.     

WILLIAM WHEWELL,THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS,AND THE MODERN SOLAR SYSTEM

Astronomers of the first half of the nineteenth century viewed our solar system entirely differently from the way twentieth‐century astronomers viewed it. In the earlier period the dominant image was of a set of planets and moons, both of which kinds of bodies were inhabited by intelligent beings comparable to humans. By the early twentieth century, science had driven these beings from every planet in our system except the Earth, leaving our solar system (and perhaps others) as more or less desolate regions for the most part bereft of intelligent life. This essay traces this extinction and its relation to religious thought, noting the role played in it by Sir John Herschel and especially by William Whewell. The inverse square laws for gravitation, heat radiation, and light receive special attention, as does the question of the relevance of the Christian notions of a divine incarnation and redemption.     

THE BEST AND THE REST: REVISITING THE NORM OF NORMALITY OF INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE

We revisit a long‐held assumption in human resource management, organizational behavior, and industrial and organizational psychology that individual performance follows a Gaussian (normal) distribution. We conducted 5 studies involving 198 samples including 633,263 researchers, entertainers, politicians, and amateur and professional athletes. Results are remarkably consistent across industries, types of jobs, types of performance measures, and time frames and indicate that individual performance is not normally distributed—instead, it follows a Paretian (power law) distribution. Assuming normality of individual performance can lead to misspecified theories and misleading practices. Thus, our results have implications for all theories and applications that directly or indirectly address the performance of individual workers including performance measurement and management, utility analysis in preemployment testing and training and development, personnel selection, leadership, and the prediction of performance, among others.