Leibniz's Optimism

Candy West: Leibniz's solution is kind of a version of a lot of earlier scholastic thinkers in Augustine for instance where you can say well on the whole the world is really good. But if you look at the big picture you would see that it's good and actually is the best because God would be required to pick the best of all possible worlds, he says. Voltaire calls out Leibnitz's rationalism by saying there's no empirical content whatsoever to his assertion. He also has a more sophisticated variation of this The whole is more than the sum of its evil parts, but it's interesting, you know, the way Voltaire goes at Leib