Birth in Leipzig
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in Leipzig, the son of Friedrich Leibniz, professor of moral philosophy at the university.
Rationalism · metaphysics of monads · 1646–1716
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Nothing is without a reason.
Leipzig · Paris · Hanover
Biography
The thread of a life.
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.
Paris and the calculus
Sent to Paris on a diplomatic mission, he studied mathematics with Christiaan Huygens and worked out the differential and integral calculus.
Spinoza and Hanover
On his way back he visited Spinoza in The Hague, then entered the service of the duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg in Hanover as librarian and counsellor.
Berlin Society of Sciences
With the support of the Electress Sophie Charlotte, he founded the Brandenburg Society of Sciences in Berlin and became its first president.
The Theodicy
In Amsterdam he published the Essays of Theodicy, his only philosophical book to appear in his lifetime.
Death in Hanover
Leibniz died in Hanover on 14 November 1716, his history of the House of Brunswick unfinished and his priority dispute with Newton unresolved.
Understanding a life in depth
01Leipzig, law and the art of combinations
Leibniz was born in Leipzig in 1646; his father, a professor of moral philosophy, died in 1652, and the boy taught himself Latin and much else in the family library. He entered the university of Leipzig in 1661, defended a thesis on the principle of individuation in 1663 and spent a summer term in Jena with the mathematician Erhard Weigel. In 1666 his Dissertation on the Art of Combinations sketched an alphabet of human thoughts. Refused the doctorate in law at Leipzig, he received it at Altdorf in 1667, declined a chair there and entered the service of Johann Christian von Boineburg and of the elector of Mainz, Johann Philipp von Schönborn, for whom he worked on the reform of law and on plans to reunite the churches.
02Paris, Huygens and the calculus
In 1672 Leibniz went to Paris to urge Louis XIV to turn his armies against Egypt rather than the German lands; the plan came to nothing, but he stayed four years. Christiaan Huygens guided his study of the new mathematics, and early in 1673 a visit to London, where he showed a model of his calculating machine, brought his election to the Royal Society. He read papers left by Pascal and Descartes, met Antoine Arnauld and Nicolas Malebranche, and in the autumn of 1675 worked out the rules and notation of the differential and integral calculus. Having accepted a post in Hanover in 1676, he travelled by way of London and Holland, where he spent several days talking with Spinoza in The Hague.
03Hanover: mines, history and a new system
From 1676 Leibniz served three rulers of Hanover as librarian and court counsellor. From 1680 he spent years trying to drain the silver mines of the Harz with windmills, a scheme that failed. In 1684 he published the rules of the differential calculus in the Acta Eruditorum, and in 1686 he wrote the Discourse on Metaphysics, whose theses he debated by letter with Arnauld. A journey through southern Germany, Austria and Italy from 1687 to 1690 gathered documents for a history of the House of Brunswick and confirmed its kinship with the Este. In 1695 the New System of the Nature and Communication of Substances made his pre-established harmony public, and his dynamics replaced the Cartesian quantity of motion with living force.
04Berlin, Vienna and the last years
In 1700 Leibniz became the first president of the new Society of Sciences in Berlin, and in 1703 he presented his binary arithmetic, comparing it with the hexagrams of the Chinese Book of Changes sent to him by the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet. He gave up publishing his New Essays after Locke’s death in 1704, brought out the Theodicy in 1710 and advised Peter the Great on academies and reforms. During a stay in Vienna from 1712 to 1714 he wrote the Monadology and the Principles of Nature and Grace. Meanwhile a report of the Royal Society accused him in 1712 of taking the calculus from Newton. When his master became George I of Great Britain in 1714, Leibniz was left in Hanover to finish the history of the dynasty; he debated space, time and God with Samuel Clarke until his death in 1716.
Leibniz’s notation for the calculus, with the differential dx and the elongated integral sign, became the standard one, and his binary arithmetic and dream of a logical calculus are often cited in the prehistory of computing. Christian Wolff turned his ideas into a school philosophy that dominated the German universities in which Kant was trained; Voltaire’s Candide mocked his optimism, while Russell, modern logicians and the semantics of possible worlds have returned to his principles.
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