In April 1661, Gottfried Leibniz enrolled at the University of Leipzig with philosophy and mathematics. On June 9, 1663, Leibniz defended his baccalaureate thesis, Disputatio Metaphysica de Principio Individui (Metaphysical Disputation on the Principle of Individuation).
In 1663 he was working for his Master of Arts in philosophy, defending his dissertation, Specimen Quaestionum Philosophicarum ex Jure collectarum (An Essay of Collected Philosophical Problems of Right) on February 7, 1664. Thereafter he began to study law.
On September 28, 1665, on defending his dissertation entitled De conditionibus (On Conditions), he earned his bachelor’s degree in law. Next he started working for his habilitation, defending his thesis in March 1666. It was later published in book form as, Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (On the Combinatorial Art).
Gallery of Gottfried von Leibniz
Jena, Thuringia, Germany
Gottfried Leibniz spent the summer term at Jena, studying mathematics with Erhard Weigel.
Gallery of Gottfried von Leibniz
Altdorf bei Nürnberg, Bavaria, Germany
At Altdorf University, Leibniz quickly submitted the thesis, which he had begun writing at Leipzig. Entitled, Disputatio Inauguralis de Casibus Perplexis in Jure (Inaugural Disputation on Ambiguous Legal Cases), it earned him his doctorate in law and also his license to practice in February 1667.
Career
Achievements
Membership
French Academy of Sciences
1700
Prussian Academy of Sciences
1700
Unter den Linden 8, Berlin, Germany
Entrance to the former Prussian Academy of Sciences on Unter Den Linden 8. Today it houses the Berlin State Library.
In April 1661, Gottfried Leibniz enrolled at the University of Leipzig with philosophy and mathematics. On June 9, 1663, Leibniz defended his baccalaureate thesis, Disputatio Metaphysica de Principio Individui (Metaphysical Disputation on the Principle of Individuation).
In 1663 he was working for his Master of Arts in philosophy, defending his dissertation, Specimen Quaestionum Philosophicarum ex Jure collectarum (An Essay of Collected Philosophical Problems of Right) on February 7, 1664. Thereafter he began to study law.
On September 28, 1665, on defending his dissertation entitled De conditionibus (On Conditions), he earned his bachelor’s degree in law. Next he started working for his habilitation, defending his thesis in March 1666. It was later published in book form as, Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (On the Combinatorial Art).
At Altdorf University, Leibniz quickly submitted the thesis, which he had begun writing at Leipzig. Entitled, Disputatio Inauguralis de Casibus Perplexis in Jure (Inaugural Disputation on Ambiguous Legal Cases), it earned him his doctorate in law and also his license to practice in February 1667.
(The Monadology is one of Gottfried Leibniz’s best-known w...)
The Monadology is one of Gottfried Leibniz’s best-known works representing his later philosophy. It is a short text which sketches in some 90 paragraphs a metaphysics of simple substances, or monads. The monad, the word and the idea, belongs to the western philosophical tradition and has been used by various authors. Leibniz, who was exceptionally well-read, could not have ignored this, but he did not use it himself until mid-1696 when he was sending for print his New System.
Theodicy Essays on the Goodness of God the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil
(The theodicy essays of Gottfried Leibniz are considered l...)
The theodicy essays of Gottfried Leibniz are considered landmark examples which treat the subject thoroughly and comprehensively with lengthy and incisive philosophical discussions.
(Leibniz (1645 -1716) had a lifelong interest in things Ch...)
Leibniz (1645 -1716) had a lifelong interest in things Chinese and accorded China an important role in his ecumenical endeavors. This collection of his writings presents his comparisons of Chinese and European civilizations and his thoughts on future relations between the two.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz was a German polymath and philosopher in the history of mathematics and the history of philosophy. He made deep and important contributions to the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of religion, as well as mathematics, physics, geology, jurisprudence, and history.
Background
Gottfried Leibniz was born on July 1, 1646, in Leipzig, Electorate of Saxony, Holy Roman Empire (present-day Saxony, Germany). His father, Friedrich Leibniz, was a Professor of Moral Philosophy and the Chairman of the faculty of philosophy at Leipzig University. He was also a lawyer and notary register. Gottfried’s mother, Catharina nee Schmuck, was his third wife.
His father died in 1652. Thereafter, he was brought up by his mother, gaining his moral and religious values from her. These would one day play an important part in his philosophy.
Education
In 1653, Leibniz was admitted to Nicolai School in Leipzig, where his education was confined mainly to the study of a small canon of authorities. But at home, he had his father’s vast library opened to him and there he started reading books much advanced for his age. By the age of twelve, Gottfried had taught himself advanced Latin and also a little bit of Greek in order to read his father’s collection of books. By thirteen, he had gained enough expertise to be able to compose 300 hexameters of Latin verses for a school event.
In April 1661, Gottfried Leibniz enrolled at the University of Leipzig with philosophy and mathematics. In addition to that, he also had to study rhetoric, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Unfortunately, the standard of teaching in mathematics was not good at Leipzig. On June 9, 1663, Leibniz defended his baccalaureate thesis, Disputatio Metaphysica de Principio Individui (Metaphysical Disputation on the Principle of Individuation). Thereafter, he spent the summer term at Jena, studying mathematics with Erhard Weigel.
By October 1663, Leibniz was back at Leipzig, working for his Master of Arts in philosophy, defending his dissertation, Specimen Quaestionum Philosophicarum ex Jure collectarum (An Essay of Collected Philosophical Problems of Right) on February 7, 1664. Thereafter he began to study law.
On September 28, 1665, on defending his dissertation entitled De conditionibus (On Conditions), he earned his bachelor’s degree in law. Next he started working for his habilitation, defending his thesis in March 1666. It was later published in book form as, Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (On the Combinatorial Art).
He next started working for his doctorate in law. But possibly because of his young age and limited tutorships in law, the University of Leipzig refused permission, as a result of which, he immediately shifted to the University of Altdorf.
At Altdorf, he quickly submitted the thesis, which he had begun writing at Leipzig. Entitled, Disputatio Inauguralis de Casibus Perplexis in Jure (Inaugural Disputation on Ambiguous Legal Cases), it earned him his doctorate in law and also his license to practice in February 1667.
In 1667, on completion of his education, Leibniz received an offer from the University of Altdorf for an academic post; but as he had other ideas and dreams, he declined the offer. Instead, he took up the position of a salaried secretary to an alchemical society in Nuremberg. In Nuremberg, he met Johann Christian von Boyneburg, who immediately became his mentor, introducing him to Elector of Mainz, Johann Philipp von Schönborn. Impressed with his knowledge of law, the Elector asked him to assist with the redrafting of the legal code, a position he happily accepted.
In 1669, Leibniz was appointed the Assessor in the Court of Appeal. In the same year, he received an invitation from John Frederick, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg to visit Hanover, but declined. At that time, King Louis XIV of France was posing a serious threat to Germany, which was already devastated by the Thirty Year War. In 1670, Leibniz published a pamphlet, in which he proposed a defensive coalition of the northern European Protestant countries. He also conceived a plan, through which he hoped to divert Louis XIV’s attention, by persuading him to engage in a holy war to non-Christian Egypt and later occupy territories under Dutch East Indies. This, he hoped would give Germany a chance to revive its economy.
All the while, he continued with his intellectual pursuit, publishing his fourth book, Hypothesis Physica Nova in 1671. By then, he had also started making a calculating machine, which he hoped would create an interest in the scientific fraternity.
He also made contact with Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society of London and Carcavi of the Royal Librarian in Paris, dedicating some of his scientific works to the Royal Society and Paris Academy. He now wanted to meet them in person. The opportunity came when in 1672 Leibniz was invited by the French government to discuss his plan on Egyptian expedition. But as he reached Paris, the Franco-Dutch War broke out, making his plan irrelevant. But the visit proved profitable from a more important angle. In Paris, he met Dutch physicist and mathematician Christiaan Huygens and talking to him, he realized that his knowledge of mathematics and physics was highly superfluous. Under Huygens’ mentorship, he now began to study the subjects, gaining more in-depth knowledge in them.
By early 1673, it was clear that France was in no mood to take part in the Egyptian mission. The Elector now sent Leibniz to England with a similar objective. Their mission ended abruptly when the news about Elector’s death in February 1673 reached England; but Leibniz greatly profited from the visit. In London, he visited the Royal Society where he demonstrated his calculating machine, capable of executing the four basic operations. With the death of Boyneburg in December 1672 and the Elector of Mainz in February 1673, Leibniz was left without a patron. Sometime in 1673, while he was living in Paris, Duke John Frederick of Brunswick offered him the post of counselor.
More interested in a position in Paris, Leibniz managed to delay his joining until December 1676. Meanwhile in late 1675, he laid the foundations of both integral and differential calculus.
Some time now, Newton, who was also working on the same subject, wrote a letter to Leibniz, in which he listed many of his results, without describing the methods. The letter took long time to reach Leibniz in Paris. Not realizing the situation, Leibniz thought he had time to answer the letter. Newton’s letter also made him realize that he must quickly publish a fuller account of his own method, which he did. Newton wrote another letter, accusing Leibniz of stealing his formula. In his reply, Leibniz provided certain details on his work, but the conflict continued to persist.
Although he would have liked to remain in Paris with a position at the Academy of Science no such offer came his way mainly because there were already too many foreigners there. Therefore in October 1676, he left for Hanover, making a short visit to England and Holland on the way. If he had hoped to resolve his conflict with Newton during his visit to England, it did not happen. Ultimately, he reached Hanover in December 1676, remaining there for the rest of his life. In Hanover, Leibniz was initially appointed librarian of the ducal library, where he was given mundane responsibilities like looking after general administration, purchase of books, etc. In doing so, he established the foundation of library science.
In 1678, he was appointed Privy Counselor of Justice of the House of Hanover. Apart from his official duties, he also took up a number of other projects, devising tools and draining water from the mines of the Harz Mountains, using water pumps run by windmills and water power. He also continued with his intellectual pursuit, developing a coherent system on calculus by 1677 and perfecting the binary system of numeration by March 1679. Towards the end of the same year, he proposed the basis for topology. Later he started working on his theory of dynamics.
After the death of Duke John Frederick on January 7, 1680, Ernest Augustus I became the next ruler. Continuing to serve him, Leibniz suggested ways to increase linen production and techniques for the desalinization of water. Concurrently, he continued to develop his theories in the metaphysical system and mathematics.
In 1682, he co-founded a journal called Acta Eruditorum with Otto Mencke, publishing most of his important papers in it until 1692. It also became his mouthpiece in his conflict with Newton, which continued until his death. In 1684, he began his studies on the resistance of solids. In the same year, he published Nova Methodus pro Maximis et Minimis (New Method for the Greatest and the Least), which dealt in differential calculus. In 1685, he was named a historian of House of Brunswick and was commissioned to write its history. He was expected to go back to the time of Charlemagne and prove that the House had its origin in the House of Este, allowing it to lay claim on ninth electorate.
Beginning his travel in November 1687, he first traveled to Germany, from there to Austria and Italy, returning to Hanover in July 1690, collecting a huge amount of material on the history of the House. Concurrently, he continued with his scholarly works, meeting scholars and publishing works everywhere he went.
Wanting to write a meticulously researched history and busy with other projects, Leibniz failed to produce the book. By then, Ernest Augustus I had died and George Louis, the future British king, was the new Elector. Annoyed with Leibniz for his apparent procrastination, he began to treat him shabbily. In later years, Gottfried Leibniz lost much of his influence in the Court of Hanover and became more embroiled in his dispute with Newton with Royal Society taking Newton’s side. Yet, he continued to enjoy the patronage of some powerful ladies, including Electress Sophia, Sophia Charlotte of Hanover and Caroline of Ansbach.
In 1714, under the terms of the 1701 Act of Settlement, Elector George Louis became King George I of Great Britain. Although Leibniz had contributed significantly to finalizing the Act, George I forbade him to join him in London in fear of upsetting Newton and other dignitaries of the court. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz died on November 14, 1716, in Hanover. At that time, he was so much out of favor that nobody but his personal secretary attended his funeral.
Achievements
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a prominent philosopher, mathematician, and political adviser, important both as a metaphysician and as a logician and distinguished also for his independent invention of the differential and integral calculus.
In 1985, the German government created the Leibniz Prize, offering an annual award of 1.55 million euros for experimental results and 770,000 euros for theoretical ones.
The collection of manuscript papers of Leibniz at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek - Niedersächische Landesbibliothek were inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2007.
Gottfried Leibniz was a Lutheran. He was not a Catholic and turned down an offer to become Vatican librarian as it would have necessitated the conversion to Catholicism. However, despite this unwillingness he was ecumenical and believed that the splits within Christianity could be overcome, both between Catholicism and Lutheranism and with other forms of Christianity.
Views
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz made substantial contributions to a host of different fields such as mathematics, law, physics, theology, and most subfields of philosophy. One of Leibniz's lifelong aims was to collate all human knowledge. As part of this scheme, Leibniz tried to bring the work of the learned societies together to coordinate research. Leibniz put much energy into promoting scientific societies. Later in life, he was involved in moves to set up academies in Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, and St. Petersburg.
His baccalaureate thesis, De Principio Individui (“On the Principle of the Individual”), which appeared in May 1663, was inspired partly by Lutheran nominalism (the theory that universals have no reality but are mere names) and emphasized the existential value of the individual, who is not to be explained either by matter alone or by form alone but rather by his whole being (entitate tota). This notion was the first germ of the future "monad."
Late in 1675 Leibniz laid the foundations of both integral and differential calculus. With this discovery, he ceased to consider time and space as substances - another step closer to monadology. He began to develop the notion that the concepts of extension and motion contained an element of the imaginary so that the basic laws of motion could not be discovered merely from a study of their nature. Nevertheless, he continued to hold that extension and motion could provide a means for explaining and predicting the course of phenomena. Thus, contrary to Descartes, Leibniz held that it would not be contradictory to posit that this world is a well-related dream. If visible movement depends on the imaginary element found in the concept of extension, it can no longer be defined by simple local movement; it must be the result of a force. In criticizing the Cartesian formulation of the laws of motion, known as mechanics, Leibniz became, in 1676, the founder of a new formulation, known as dynamics, which substituted kinetic energy for the conservation of movement. At the same time, beginning with the principle that light follows the path of least resistance, he believed that he could demonstrate the ordering of nature toward a final goal or cause.
Leibniz continued to perfect his metaphysical system through research into the notion of a universal cause of all being, attempting to arrive at a starting point that would reduce reasoning to an algebra of thought. He also continued his developments in mathematics; in 1681 he was concerned with the proportion between a circle and a circumscribed square and, in 1684, with the resistance of solids.
Leibniz disclosed his dynamics in a piece entitled Brevis Demonstratio Erroris Memorabilis Cartesii et Aliorum Circa Legem Naturae ("Brief Demonstration of the Memorable Error of Descartes and Others About the Law of Nature"). Further development of Leibniz’s views, revealed in a text written in 1686 but long unpublished, was his generalization concerning propositions that in every true affirmative proposition, whether necessary or contingent, the predicate is contained in the notion of the subject. This notion seemed to imply determinism and thus to undermine human freedom - as did Leibniz’s conception of monads, the soul-like individual substances that make up the universe, as in a sense “containing” all of their pasts and futures. Leibniz’s solution was to argue that, even though each monad already contains all of its future actions, God can create those actions as "free."
Within the philosophy of mind, his chief innovations include his rejection of the Cartesian doctrines that all mental states are conscious and that non-human animals lack souls as well as sensation. Leibniz’s belief that non-rational animals have souls and feelings prompted him to reflect much more thoroughly than many of his predecessors on the mental capacities that distinguish human beings from lower animals. Relatedly, the acknowledgment of unconscious mental representations and motivations enabled Leibniz to provide a far more sophisticated account of human psychology. It also led Leibniz to hold that perception - rather than consciousness, as Cartesians assume - is the distinguishing mark of mentality.
The capacities that make human minds superior to animal souls, according to Leibniz, include not only their capacity for more elevated types of perceptions or mental representations but also their capacity for more elevated types of appetitions or mental tendencies. Self-consciousness and abstract thought are examples of perceptions that are exclusive to rational souls, while reasoning and the tendency to do what one judges to be best overall are examples of appetitions of which only rational souls are capable. The mental capacity for acting freely is another feature that sets human beings apart from animals and it in fact presupposes the capacity for elevated kinds of perceptions as well as appetitions.
Another crucial contribution to the philosophy of mind is Leibniz’s frequently cited mill argument. This argument is supposed to show, through a thought experiment that involves walking into a mill, that material things such as machines or brains cannot possibly have mental states. Only immaterial things, that is, soul-like entities, are able to think or perceive. If this argument succeeds, it shows not only that our minds must be immaterial or that we must have souls, but also that we will never be able to construct a computer that can truly think or perceive.
Finally, Leibniz’s doctrine of pre-established harmony also marks an important innovation in the history of the philosophy of mind. Like occasionalists, Leibniz denies any genuine interaction between body and soul. He agrees with them that the fact that my foot moves when I decide to move it, as well as the fact that I feel pain when my body gets injured, cannot be explained by a genuine causal influence of my soul on my body, or of my body on my soul. Yet, unlike occasionalists, Leibniz also rejects the idea that God continually intervenes in order to produce the correspondence between my soul and my body. That, Leibniz thinks, would be unworthy of God. Instead, God has created my soul and my body in such a way that they naturally correspond to each other, without any interaction or divine intervention. My foot moves when I decide to move it because this motion has been programmed into it from the very beginning. Likewise, I feel pain when my body is injured because this pain was programmed into my soul. The harmony or correspondence between mental states and states of the body is therefore pre-established.
Quotations:
"There are also two kinds of truths: truth of reasoning and truths of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; those of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible."
"I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity."
"I maintain also that substances, whether material or immaterial, cannot be conceived in their bare essence without any activity, activity being of the essence of substance in general."
"Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting."
Membership
French Academy of Sciences
,
France
1700
Prussian Academy of Sciences
,
Germany
1700
Royal Society of London
,
United Kingdom
1673
Personality
A distinctive feature of Leibniz from an early age was his genius, which did not fit into traditional educational schemes. Leibniz is considered one of the most comprehensive geniuses in the history of mankind. Leibniz’s contemporaries were amazed by his fantastic erudition, almost supernatural memory, and amazing working capacity. He learned foreign languages with extraordinary ease.
Leibniz's emotional mood was in harmony with his philosophical optimism: he was almost always cheerful and lively. According to Leibniz himself, he had a lack of "censorship spirit": he liked almost any book, he searched and memorized only the best parts of it. Leibniz possessed charm, good manners, sense of humor, and imagination. Leibniz was quick-tempered, but his anger easily stopped, he loved cheerful conversations, traveled willingly, and knew how to keep the conversation going with people of all ranks and professions.
Physical Characteristics:
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a man of medium height with a stoop, broad-shouldered but bandy-legged, as capable of thinking for several days sitting in the same chair as of travelling the roads of Europe summer and winter.
Quotes from others about the person
"The main ideas of his philosophy are to be attributed to his mathematical work, and not vice versa." - J. M. Child
"As to Leibnitz, he is certainly a good philosopher, but in his Theodicée he goes too far and would have all actions necessary. His foreordained harmony is not the least credible nor feasible. If you can get a book entitled: An Essay on the Origin of Evil, by Dr W. King, you will find a much better solution of the question: 'whence comes evil?' Leibnitz does indeed reconcile it all with the goodness of God, but not so reasonably as Dr. King." - William Herschel
"As an interpreter of nature ... Leibnitz stands in no comparison with Newton. His general views in physics were vague and unsatisfactory; he had no great value for inductive reasoning; it was not the way of arriving at truth which he was accustomed to take; and hence, to the greatest physical discovery of that age, and that which was established by the most ample induction, the existence of gravity as a fact in which all bodies agree, he was always incredulous, because no proof of it, a priori could be given." - John Playfair
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Holy Scripture, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine of Hippo, Scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Suárez, Giordano Bruno, Descartes, Hobbes, Pico della Mirandola, Jakob Thomasius, Gassendi, Malebranche, Spinoza, Bossuet, Pascal, Huygens, J. Bernoulli, Weigel, Thomasius, G. Wagner, Steno, Llull, Confucius
Connections
Gottfried Leibniz never married; neither did he have any other relative except his sister’s stepson, who was also his sole heir.
Father:
Friedrich Leibniz
Friedrich Leibniz was a German lawyer and a notary, registrar and professor of moral philosophy within Leipzig University.
Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz had a bitter battle over who invented calculus. Newton developed a version of calculus in the 1660s but didn’t publish his work at the time. In the 1670s, Leibniz formulated his own version of calculus, publishing his work a decade later. Newton later charged that the German scholar had plagiarized his unpublished writings after documents summarizing it circulated through the Royal Society. Leibniz contended he’d reached his results independently and implied that Newton had stolen from his published work. In an effort to defend himself, Leibniz eventually appealed to the Royal Society and in 1712 Newton, who’d served as the organization’s president since 1703, agreed that an impartial committee would be assembled to look into the issue. Instead, he packed the committee with his supporters and even penned the group’s report, which publicly credited him with discovering calculus. Today, however, Leibniz’s system of calculus is the one commonly used.
