Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Nothing is without a reason.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher, mathematician, jurist and historian who spent forty years as librarian and counsellor to the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg in Hanover. He invented the differential and integral calculus independently of Newton, built a calculating machine, devised a binary arithmetic and founded the Berlin Society of Sciences, while writing mostly in French and Latin. His metaphysics describes a world of simple perceiving substances, the monads, which agree through a harmony pre-established by God, who chose the best of all possible worlds.
Why is there something rather than nothing, and why does this world exist rather than another?
The essentials
A life in dates
Biography- 1646Birth in Leipzig
- 1672–1676Paris and the calculus
- 1700Berlin Society of Sciences
- 1710The Theodicy
- 1716Death in Hanover
Biography
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher, mathematician, jurist and historian who spent forty years as librarian and counsellor to the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg in Hanover. He invented the differential and integral calculus independently of Newton, built a calculating machine, devised a binary arithmetic and founded the Berlin Society of Sciences, while writing mostly in French and Latin. His metaphysics describes a world of simple perceiving substances, the monads, which agree through a harmony pre-established by God, who chose the best of all possible worlds.
Philosophy
A monad is a simple substance without parts, extension or shape. Its whole life consists of perceptions, which represent many things in one, and appetitions, the tendencies that carry it from one perception to the next; monads have no windows through which anything could enter.
Reading guides
Original introductions to enter the works, discover their central questions and take the reflection further.
Bibliography
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
Who came before, who came after.
Above the timeline, each solid arc marks a documented reading, back in time or forward; dotted arcs pair kindred questions.
Read and answered5
In dialogue1
A first reading.
From simple substances to the city of God
Follow the Monadology from the definition of a simple substance through perception and the two great principles to the harmony of the whole universe.
MonadologyEvil, freedom and the best world
Examine how the Theodicy answers Bayle’s objections, from the three kinds of evil to the fable of the palace of the fates.
TheodicyInnate ideas and small perceptions
Read the New Essays as a debate about where knowledge comes from, comparing each claim of Theophilus with the passage of Locke it answers.
New Essays on Human UnderstandingLinked thinkers
- Read and answered
- In dialogue