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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1 July 1646 [O.S. 21 June] – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat who invented calculus in addition to many other branches of mathematics and statistics.
- Bartholomäus Leonhard von Schwendendörffer [de] (Dr. jur. thesis advisor)
- Overview
- Early life and education
Leibniz was born on June 21 (July 1, New Style), 1646.
When did Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz die?
Leibniz died on November 14, 1716.
What did Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz write?
Leibniz’s voluminous writings include the Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas; the Discourse on Metaphysics; the Correspondence with Arnauld; New Essays on Human Understanding; the Theodicy; the Monadology; the Correspondence with Clarke; and numerous works in mathematics, science, history, and jurisprudence.
Why is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz famous?
Leibniz was born into a pious Lutheran family near the end of the Thirty Years’ War, which had laid Germany in ruins. As a child, he was educated in the Nicolai School but was largely self-taught in the library of his father, who had died in 1652. At Easter time in 1661, he entered the University of Leipzig as a law student; there he came into contact with the thought of scientists and philosophers who had revolutionized their fields—figures such as Galileo, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and René Descartes. Leibniz dreamed of reconciling—a verb that he did not hesitate to use time and again throughout his career—these modern thinkers with the Aristotle of the Scholastics. 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.” In 1666 he wrote De Arte Combinatoria (“On the Art of Combination”), in which he formulated a model that is the theoretical ancestor of some modern computers: all reasoning, all discovery, verbal or not, is reducible to an ordered combination of elements, such as numbers, words, sounds, or colours.
After completing his legal studies in 1666, Leibniz applied for the degree of doctor of law. He was refused because of his age and consequently left his native city forever. At Altdorf—the university town of the free city of Nürnberg—his dissertation De Casibus Perplexis (“On Perplexing Cases”) procured him the doctor’s degree at once, as well as the immediate offer of a professor’s chair, which, however, he declined. During his stay in Nürnberg, he met Johann Christian, Freiherr von Boyneburg, one of the most distinguished German statesmen of the day. Boyneburg took him into his service and introduced him to the court of the prince elector, the archbishop of Mainz, Johann Philipp von Schönborn, where he was concerned with questions of law and politics.
King Louis XIV of France was a growing threat to the German Holy Roman Empire. To ward off this danger and divert the king’s interests elsewhere, the Archbishop hoped to propose to Louis a project for an expedition into Egypt; because he was using religion as a pretext, he expressed the hope that the project would promote the reunion of the church. Leibniz, with a view toward this reunion, worked on the Demonstrationes Catholicae. His research led him to situate the soul in a point—this was new progress toward the monad—and to develop the principle of sufficient reason (nothing exists or occurs without a reason). His meditations on the difficult theory of the point were related to problems encountered in optics, space, and movement; they were published in 1671 under the general title Hypothesis Physica Nova (“New Physical Hypothesis”). He asserted that movement depends, as in the theory of the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, on the action of a spirit (God).
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In 1672 the prince elector sent the young jurist on a mission to Paris, where he arrived at the end of March. In September, Leibniz met with Antoine Arnauld, a Jansenist theologian known for his writings against the Jesuits (Jansenism was a nonorthodox Roman Catholic movement that spawned a rigoristic form of morality). Leibniz sought Arnauld’s help for the reunion of the church. He was soon left without protectors by the deaths of Freiherr von Boyneburg in December 1672 and of the prince elector in February 1673; he was now, however, free to pursue his scientific studies. In search of financial support, he constructed a calculating machine and presented it to the Royal Society during his first journey to London, in 1673.
Dec 22, 2007 · Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was one of the great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is known as the last “universal genius”. He made deep and important contributions to the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of religion, as well as mathematics, physics, geology ...
Jan 26, 2024 · Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a German polymath who became well-known across Europe for his work, particularly in the fields of science, mathematics, and philosophy. Leibniz's rationalist philosophy attempted to reconcile traditional religious beliefs with the new discoveries of the Scientific Revolution , and his work was ...
- Mark Cartwright
A comprehensive overview of the life and works of the universal genius and early modern rationalist philosopher. Learn about his metaphysical idealism, his theory of possible worlds, his logic, his ethics, and his influence on Christian theology.
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Apr 18, 2019 · Learn about the life and achievements of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a prominent German polymath who invented differential and integral calculus independently of Sir Isaac Newton. Discover his contributions to math, philosophy, history, diplomacy, and more.
Jul 1, 2011 · Gottfried Leibniz was a German mathematician who developed the present day notation for the differential and integral calculus though he never thought of the derivative as a limit. His philosophy is also important and he invented an early calculating machine. View ten larger pictures. Biography.
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