Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz
1646 - 1716
1646 - 1716
Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz is known by many as the less-celebrated inventor of Calculus, along with Sir Isaac Newton. Along with his advances in mathematics, throughout his life Leibniz made enormously varied contributions to logic, philosophy,
Standing on the shoulders of the giants of Leibniz scholarship, this website often relies on the dedicated scholarship of Maria Rosa Antognazza, whose book "Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography" has been an invaluable resource. Leibniz was a diplomat, a lawyer, an amateur mathematician and then a great mathematician, a logician and philosopher, a theologian and a physicist. Some of his contributions had, of course, a greater impact on the development and advancement of those respective fields than others, but the scope of the work is itself a testament to the prolific life of one of the seventeenth centuries greatest thinkers. Since Antognazza can give a better introduction than I can, I cite the outline of her biography below to give context to Leibniz's early life:
Standing on the shoulders of the giants of Leibniz scholarship, this website often relies on the dedicated scholarship of Maria Rosa Antognazza, whose book "Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography" has been an invaluable resource. Leibniz was a diplomat, a lawyer, an amateur mathematician and then a great mathematician, a logician and philosopher, a theologian and a physicist. Some of his contributions had, of course, a greater impact on the development and advancement of those respective fields than others, but the scope of the work is itself a testament to the prolific life of one of the seventeenth centuries greatest thinkers. Since Antognazza can give a better introduction than I can, I cite the outline of her biography below to give context to Leibniz's early life:
“The opening section deals with the first thirty years of Leibniz’s life, when he was relatively free of professional responsibility and even parental oversight to range at will, physically and intellectually, and thereby to develop in his youth the visions, aspirations, and great projects which he would pursue for the rest of his life. To an astonishing extent, these aspirations can be traced back to his earliest youth in the unpromising circumstances of provincial Liepzig, where access to his deceased father’s professorial library provided the precocious young boy with the means to reap extraordinary fruit from an otherwise conventional formal education.” (Antognazza, 2009, Chapter 1)
" Returning Leibniz to his Central European context thus provides the opportunity to portray him, not as a “modern” Western intellectual unaccountably marooned in the the politically and intellectually “backward” petty states of Central Europe, but as a distinctively central European variant of early modern thought which in fact draws upon a long and fruitful if largely neglected tradition. Many of the keys to the unity of Leibniz's life and thought are therefore to be found in the relatively uncelebrated places where few have thought to look for them: not merely or even primarily in Paris, London, and The Hague, but in Leipzig, Altdorf, and Nuremberg; in Herborn, Helmstedt, and Wolfenbuttle; and more obviously in Mainz, Hanover, Vienna, and Berlin - a further challenge, if any were needed, to decipher Leibniz’s NachlaB. (location 684) Returning Leibniz to his Central European context thus provides the opportunity to portray him, not as a “modern” Western intellectual unaccountably marooned in the the politically and intellectually “backward” petty states of Central Europe, but as a distinctively central European variant of early modern thought which in fact draws upon a long and fruitful if largely neglected tradition. Many of the keys to the unity of Lebniz's life and thought are therefore to be found in the relatively uncelebrated places where few have thought to look for them: not merely or even primarily in Paris, London, and The Hague, but in Leipzig, Altdorf, and Nuremberg; in Herborn, Helmstedt, and Wolfenbuttle; and more obviously in Mainz, Hanover, Vienna, and Berlin - a further challenge, if any were needed, to decipher Leibniz’s NachlaB. (Big beta, location 684)