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>Do you really argue that beaches have some sort of, well, “magic”, I guess, property which makes them a beach? That seems entirely unnecessary for something as simple as beaches.

And yet your caveat at the bottom illustrates that what a beach is isn't a trivial problem. Leibniz just wanted to avoid the regressive mechanical discussion by positing substances or monads as a solution to answering the question "What's a beach?". This isn't to say he's right than to say your trivialization doesn't work and that there's room for his speculation.

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No, that’s just my standard “definitions are boring, let’s just agree to not discuss them”-disclaimer. Ah, well.

Definitions don’t make the problem hard. There is just no one true definition of beach, that’s fine. We can agree to use the one most commonly used or you can pick one, it doesn’t matter as long as we communicate the definition we are using.

I again and again find it astonishing that so many people have problems understanding what definitions are all about. They are about communication. Arguing about definitions is rather pointless, at least if you goal is to learn something about the world. (Good definitions make communication easier so there is room for argument about definitions but not really in this case.)

I'm not trying to defend Leibniz' argument so much as point out the space in which he can make it. I think that you may be confusing the two in responding to me as, let's be clear, Leibniz is writing in an utterly distinct intellectual environment from us. The pragmatism of communication as a standard for assessing representations does not exist in the 17th century as human cognition is still being assessed in relation to a possibility of omniscience that sometimes goes by the name of God. Communication, or inter-subjective experience, only becomes a standard after Kant. So monads or Leibniz' way of talking about substances is a way to negotiate the unique problems of conscious perception in relation to that possibility of omniscience.

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