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Biography of the noted philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Leibnitz or von Leibniz) by Gottschalk Eduard Guhrauer. Facing the title page is a portrait of Leibniz. There is a dedication to Dr. Eichorn, an introduction from Guhrauer, who was Privatdocent at the Universitat Breslau, a table of contents, and the text. This is volume one of what is a two part work. It is in turn, in two parts.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 –1716) was a German polymath who wrote mostly in Latin and French. He was educated in law and philosophy, and serving as factotum to two major German noble houses (one becoming the British royal family while he served it), Leibniz played a major role in the European politics and diplomacy of his day. He occupies an equally large place in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He invented calculus independently of Newton, and his notation is the one in general use since. He also invented the binary system, foundation of virtually all modern computer architectures. In philosophy, he is most remembered for optimism, i.e., his conclusion that our universe is, in a restricted sense, the best possible one God could have made. He was, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, one of the three great 17th century rationalists, but his philosophy also both looks back to the Scholastic tradition and anticipates modern logic and analysis. Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in biology, medicine, geology, probability theory, psychology, and information science. He also wrote on politics, law, ethics, theology, history, and philology, even occasional verse. His contributions to this vast array of subjects are scattered in journals and in tens of thousands of letters and unpublished manuscripts. To date, there is no complete edition of Leibniz's writings, and a complete account of his accomplishments is not yet possible.
Leibniz is the most important logician between Aristotle and 1847, when George Boole and Augustus De Morgan each published books that began modern formal logic. Leibniz enunciated the principal properties of what we now call conjunction, disjunction, negation, identity, set inclusion, and the empty set. The principles of Leibniz's logic and, arguably, of his whole philosophy, reduce to two: 1) All our ideas are compounded from a very small number of simple ideas, which form the alphabet of human thought; and 2) Complex ideas proceed from these simple ideas by a uniform and symmetrical combination, analogous to arithmetical multiplication. With regard to (1), the number of simple ideas is much greater than Leibniz thought. As for (2), logic can indeed be grounded in a symmetrical combining operation, but that operation is analogous to either of addition or multiplication. The formal logic that emerged early in the 20th century also requires, at minimum, unary negation and quantified variables ranging over some universe of discourse. Leibniz published nothing on formal logic in his lifetime; most of what he wrote on the subject consists of working drafts. In his book History of Western Philosophy Bertrand Russell went as far as claiming that Leibniz had developed logic in his unpublished writings to a level which was reached only 200 years later.
The following episode from the life of Leibniz illustrates the breadth of his genius, and the difficulties awaiting those who try to come to terms with it. While making his grand tour of European archives to research the Brunswick family history he never completed, Leibniz stopped in Vienna, May 1688 – February 1689, where he did much legal and diplomatic work for the Brunswicks. He visited mines, talked with mine engineers, and tried to negotiate export contracts for lead from the ducal mines in the Harz mountains. His proposal that the streets of Vienna be lit with lamps burning rapeseed oil was implemented. During a formal audience with the Austrian Emperor and in subsequent memoranda, he advocated reorganizing the Austrian economy, reforming the coinage of much of central Europe, negotiating a Concordat between the Habsburgs and the Vatican, and creating an imperial research library, official archive, and public insurance fund. He wrote and published an important paper on mechanics. Leibniz also wrote a short paper, first published by Louis Couturat in 1903, later translated as LL 267 and WF 30, summarizing his views on metaphysics. The paper is undated; that he wrote it while in Vienna was determined only in 1999, when the ongoing critical edition finally published Leibniz's philosophical writings for the period 1677-90. Couturat's reading of this paper was the launching point for much 20th century thinking about Leibniz, especially among analytic philosophers. But after a meticulous study of all of Leibniz's philosophical writings up to 1688 - a study the 1999 additions to the critical edition made possible - Mercer (2001) begged to differ with Couturat's reading; the jury is still out. |
