Warning: this film features rapidly flashing images that can be distressing to photosensitive viewers.
The German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) believed that the Universe fundamentally consists of radically simple mind-like building blocks – separate, indivisible, indestructible – from which emerges the unified world of matter and substance. Borrowing a term from ancient Greek philosophy, he called these entities ‘monads’, and attributed their existence to a ‘God, who perceives all monads with utter clarity’. He laid out this theory of metaphysics in his seminal work, the Monadology (1714). This short video essay for Epoché Magazine pairs excerpts from the notoriously dense text with enigmatic archival imagery and original music, making for a whirlwind introduction to Leibniz’s celebrated and controversial conception of the Universe.
Video by Epoché Magazine
Editor and composer: John C Brady
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Evolution
How – and how not – to think about the role randomness plays in evolution
60 minutes
video
Meaning and the good life
A Japanese religious community makes an unlikely home in the mountains of Colorado
9 minutes
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Physics
The rhythms of a star system inspire a pianist’s transfixing performance
5 minutes
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Bioethics
Is it ethical to have a second child so that your first might live?
10 minutes
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Art
Watch as Japan’s surplus trees are transformed into forest-tinted crayons
4 minutes
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Meaning and the good life
‘Everydayness is the enemy’ – excerpts from the existentialist novel ‘The Moviegoer’
2 minutes
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Biology
A spectacular, close-up look at the starfish with a ‘hands-on’ approach to parenting
5 minutes
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Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
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Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes