Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German mathematician and philosopher, one of the greatest minds of Early Modern Philosophy and one of the most remarkable in the Western philosophical tradition. He is most famous for having developed the infinitesimal calculus (independently of Isaac Newton), for his doctrine according to which ours is the best of all possible worlds, and for his metaphysics of monads.

Leibniz’s parents both had received a very good education: his father was a professor of moral philosophy and his maternal grandfather was a professor of law. Born in Leipzig in 1646, he studied scholastic philosophy at the local university starting from 1661. At age twenty he defended his dissertation, which is to date an extremely innovative project of developing a universal calculus, that is a language and a logic that would be applicable globally, regardless of language and culture. The title was Dissertation on the Art of Combinations. It is worth remembering that Leibniz was born two years before the end of the Thirty Years’ War, one of the most bloody periods in the history of Europe, at the end of which Germany was subdivided in some hundreds small regions, with devastating economic effects.

At the end of his doctorate in law in 1647, Leibniz took up a position at the court of the Elector of Mainz, which secured him financial stability and sufficient time to devote himself to speculative matters and the possibility of traveling in places such as Paris, where he could meet with other great minds of the time, including former acquaintances of Descartes. From the mid 1670s till his death in 1716, Leibniz was employed at the court of Hanover in various capacities, mostly as a librarian and historian.

While, from the contemporary perspective, Leibniz’s life might not come across as a typical one for an academic of his ranking, it is quite common for the time at which he lived, when the most innovative philosophical ideas where produced outside the academic confines. Leibniz made ample use of correspondence: it is estimated that in his life he exchanged letters with over one thousand people; several missives where of intellectual content and, under this perspective, that was Leibniz "academic" environment.

The interpretation of Leibniz’s writings is extremely complex. First of all his positions may vary extensively between different phases of his life; moreover, a good number of works are or have been unpublished; finally, his correspondence often renders the understanding of key passages even more controversial.

Still, there are some clear doctrines that can be isolated. We shall limit ourselves here to Leibniz’s particularly famous positions in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.

Leibniz was convinced that the Cartesian conception of matter, which we find also in Newtonian physics, was not tenable. His position can be spelled out by means of two basic claims. First, space and time are relational concepts: space exists only when there are two or more individuals; time exists only when there are two or more moments at which at least one individual exists. Second, since each individual can – at least in principle – be divided ad infinitum, individuals do not occupy space.

According to Leibniz, the world is but an array of a infinity of individuals, each of which is non-extended, but some of which organize others. For example, for each person there will be one individual that organizes countless other ones (its particles) into a functional whole.

Perception is thus not an external relation between an object and a subject, but a process internal to the organizing individual. Leibniz’s position in epistemology is creative, radical, and unprecedented: God created individuals in such a way that there is a pre-established harmony between their activities, and this what makes reliable information possible.

Leibniz is famous also for having defended the view that our own is the best of all possible worlds that God could have created. His position is probably the most famous rational defense of God's activity against the attack moved to it by Descartes in the Meditations. Voltaire's Candide. was written as a sarcastic criticism of Leibniz's position.

"Leibniz" at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/

Leibniz’s Writings:
http://www.leibniz-edition.de/

Leibniz site, with useful sources and informations:
http://www.gwleibniz.com/