Ramism
Leibniz was inaguarated into the field of logic as a more-or-less disciple of the Ramist school of logic and rhetoric. It was this first introduction to Ramism, made through his own reading in his late father's library, that equipped the young Leibniz tools to organize his thinking and novel ideas. Below are some of Leibniz's own words describing his use, as a schoolboy, of some of the methods of Ramism: I recall that, when I was a teenager, these things helped me to write on a certain matter in such a way that, upon reading what I had written, my friends wondered how I had managed to think of all these things. They had been supplied by a method not very different from the Ramist one. The basic law of Ramist method, according to Antognazza, was that "if one thing can be known without a second, but the second cannot be known without the first, the first should be put before the second." The application of this law would guide many of Leibniz's early efforts to systematically organize the knowledge he acquired through his reading, and to systematically organize the thoughts he thought. Such organization would become instrumental in capturing, organizing, and preserving the results of his creative imagination.
Enhancements to the Basic Works of Aristotle
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...if Leibniz was exceptional in his fascination with and appreciation of Aristotelian logic, he was still more precocious in the independence of mind with which he challenged and sought to improve it. From the very outset of his logical studies he bombarded his teachers with queries regarding of adequacy of the ten categories devised by the Aristotelian tradition for grasping all the different orders of things. Moreover, he sought to go beyond the received logic by proposing a new set of categories for ordering not only simple notions (as in Aristotelian logic) but also complex propositions and truths. He also immediately put these logical categories to use by assembling systems of topics or commonplaces which aided him in organising what he had learned, recalling it later, and assembling it in written compositions - nets of divisions and subdivisions, as he explained to one astonished classmate, which he used to catch fleeting thoughts before they could escape. (location 1247)