Introduction to the Special Issue of “Relevant Tomorrow,” Dedicated to the Reflections of Leibniz's Theory in Philosophy and Painting

Abstract

The special issue of Relevant Tomorrow, titled Monadological Landscapes: Reflections of Leibniz’s Theory in Philosophy and Painting, is dedicated to exploring the intersections between visual art (painting) and philosophy. The issue builds on the scholarly symposium Monadological Landscapes: Reflections of Leibniz’s Theory in Philosophy and Painting, held on March 14, 2024 at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, organized by the Institute of Philosophy of the Faculty of Philosophy of Vilnius University. Using the work of Henrikas Čerapas as a focal point, the event sought to link philosophical and art-historical perspectives and to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue between metaphysics and visual art, idea and image, and thought and perception. The central question of the issue is whether—and if so, how—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s monadology could be understood as a metaphor for pictorial structure. Leibniz’s concept of the monad, expressing the operational principles of fundamental elements of reality, allows artwork to be understood as visual monads. The issue invites to reevaluate the relationship between artwork and reality, seeing the artistic surface as a mode of cognition, and philosophical thought as a visual structure, thereby opening a space where philosophy becomes visible and the painting transforms into a distinctive form of thought. Monadological landscapes thus serve as a metaphor for the multiplicity of perspectives and the shifting relationship between the whole and its parts, while painting becomes a means for developing philosophical reflection and the visualization of abstract structures of reality.