How Did Leibniz’s God Create the World?

I show that Leibniz’s account of divine concurrence is constrained in a surprising way by his commitment to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, where a sufficient reason for the existence of an entity or a state of affairs is understood to be the totality of requisites for existence. I argue first that Leibniz endorses, in both his early and later metaphysics, the ‘totality of requisites’ conception of sufficient reason. I then show that this conception of sufficient reason is in tension with some prominent interpretations of Leibniz’s doctrine of divine concurrence. In particular, it is in tension with those interpretations that attribute to Leibniz the view that God stands in a distinct causal relation to each state of a substance. Finally, I argue that this tension can be avoided if we attribute to Leibniz the view that states of substances are caused plurally by God, in a single act.