Finding inspiration in the Far East: the two different best possible worlds of Leibniz

WHEN Voltaire gleefully shoves fun at the outrageously naive optimism of Dr Pangloss in Candide, the target of his unsparing laughter is not thus much an inept fictional character as single well-recognized major European religious and philosophical tradition and single of its most highly regarded early-eighteenth-century standard-bearers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. deep rooted in the creation theory of one as well as the other Christianity and Platonism, this is the so-called best possible world scenario which not absents the natural and human universe as a place well erected and well ordered by an all-powerful and all-benevolent supernatural agent and which explains the undesirable appearance of evil as