Nothing is without a reason.
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
These records present three works written in French: the Monadology, the Theodicy and the New Essays. The Discourse on Metaphysics, the correspondence with Arnauld and with Clarke, the New System, the mathematical papers and the vast manuscript legacy kept in Hanover are not indexed separately; the critical Academy edition of his writings, begun in 1923, is still in progress.
01written c. 1704 · published 1765
Leibniz wrote the work in French between about 1703 and 1705, using Pierre Coste’s French translation of Locke’s Essay. When Locke died in 1704 he chose not to publish a reply to a man who could no longer answer, and the manuscript stayed unprinted until Rudolf Erich Raspe included it in his 1765 edition of Leibniz’s philosophical works.
021710
Published without the author’s name in Amsterdam in 1710, it is the only philosophical book Leibniz brought out in his lifetime. It grew from conversations with Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia, who died in 1705, about the objections raised in Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, and it opens with a Preliminary Discourse on the conformity of faith with reason, followed by three parts.
031714
Leibniz wrote this untitled text in French in Vienna in 1714 as a compact statement of his system, adding marginal references to his Theodicy; the Principles of Nature and Grace, written the same year for Prince Eugene of Savoy, covers neighbouring ground. A German translation appeared in 1720 and a Latin one in 1721, but the French original was first printed only in 1840, by Johann Eduard Erdmann.