Leibniz, Gottfried Withelm
Leibniz, Gottfried Withelm
(1646-1716) Born in Leipzig, where his father was a professor in the university, he was educated at Leipzig, Jena, and Altdorf University, where he obtained his doctorate. Jurist, mathematician, diplomat, historian, theologian of no mean proportions, he was Germany’s greatest 17th century philosopher and one of the most universal minds of all times. In Paris, then the centre of intellectual civilization (Moliere was still alive, Racine at the height of his glory), where he had been sent on an official mission of state, he met Arnauld, a disciple of Descartes who acquainted him with his master’s ideas, and Huygens who taught him as to the higher forms of mathematics and their application to physical phenomena. He visited London, where he met Newton, Boyle, and others. At the Hague he came face to face with the other great philosopher of the time, Spinoza. One of Leibniz’s cherished ideas was the creation of a society of scholars for the investigation of all branches of scientific truth to combine them into one great system of truth. His philosophy, the work “of odd moments”, bears, in content and form, the impress of its haphazard origin and its author’s cosmopolitan mode of large number of letters, essays, memoranda, etc., published in various scientific journals. Universality and individuality characterize him both as a man and philosopher.
Leibniz’s philosophy was the dawning consciousness of the modern world (Dewey). So gradual and continuous, like the development of a monad, so all-inclusive was the growth of his mind, that his philosophy, as he himself says, “connects Plato with Democritus, Aristotle with Descartes, the Scholastics with the moderns, theology and morals with reason.” The reform (if all science was to be effected by the use of two instruments, a universal scientific language and a calculus of reasoning. He advocated a universal language of ideographic symbols in which complex concepts would be expressed by combinations of symbols representing simple concepts or by new symbols defined as equivalent to such a complex. He believed that analysis would enable us to limit the number of undefined concepts to a few simple primitives in terms of which all other concepts could be defined. This is the essential notion back of modern logistic treatments.
In contributing some elements of a “universal calculus” he may be said to have been the first serious student of symbolic logic. He devised a symbolism for such concepts and relations as “and”, “or”, implication between concepts, class inclusion, class and conceptual equivalence, etc. One of his sets of symbolic representations for the four standard propositions of traditional logic coincides with the usage of modern logic He anticipated in the principles of his calculus many of the important rules of modern symbolic systems. His treatment, since it was primarily intensional, neglected important extensional features of recent developments, but, on the other hand, called attention to certain intensional distinctions now commonly neglected.
Leibniz is best known in the history of philosophy as the author of the Monadology and the theory of the Pre-established Harmony both of which see.
Main works
De arte combinatoria, 1666 ;
Theoria motus concreti et abstracti, 1671 ;
Discours de la metaphysique, 1686;
Systeme nouveau de la nature, 1695;
Nouveaux Essais sur l’entendement humain, 1701 (publ. 1765, criticism of Locke’s Essay);
Theodicee, 1710;
Monadologie, 1714 (letter to Prince Eugene of Savoy).
No complete edition of L. exists, but the Prussian Academy of Sciences began one and issued 4 vols. to date. Cf. Gerhardt’s edition of L’s philosophical works (7 vols., 1875-90) and mathematical works (1849-63), Foucher de Careil’s edition, 7 vols. (1859-75), O. Klopp’s edition of L.’s historico-political works, 10 vols. (1864-77), L. Couturat’s Opuscules et fragments inedits de L., 1903. — K.F.L.