Leib Glantz (; June 1, 1898, Kiev, Ukraine, Russian Empire - January 27, 1964, Tel Aviv, Israel) was a Russian-born lyrical tenor cantor (chazzan), Composer, Musicologist of Jewish music, Writer, Educator and Zionist leader. He was one of the greatest cantors of the “Golden Age of Chazzanut.”

He was born in 1898 in Kiev, the Ukraine, Russian Empire. His father and both grandfathers were important cantors with Chassidic backgrounds. Leibele, as he was fondly nicknamed, was eight years old when he first appeared as a cantor in Kiev. Word spread swiftly about the child prodigy, and he was engaged to appear in concerts all over Europe. In his teens he organized and conducted a large choir in his father’s Talner Chassidic synagogue, a choir that sang highly complex choral compositions by Baruch Schor, Solomon Sultzer, Louis Lewandowsky, Avraham Berkovitz Kalechnik, Joseph Goldstein, Nissan Belzer, David Novakowsky and Eliezer Mordechai Gerovitsch.

Glantz studied piano with the noted Ukrainian pianist and composer, Nikolai Tutkovski, and later graduated in piano and composition under the famous composer Reinhold Gliere at the Kiev Music Conservatory. In those years Glantz traveled numerous times as a delegate to congresses of the He’Chalutz movement and to World Zionist Congresses. He also assumed the position of chief editor of the Labor Zionist newspaper Ard Un Arbeit.

In July 1926, due to his intensive Zionist activism, and the growing antagonism towards the Jews by the Romanian regime in Besarabia, Glantz left Eastern Europe. His plan was to immigrate to Palestine, which was then governed by the British, in order to join those of his Zionist friends who had already immigrated to Israel. However, he first traveled to the United States to record with RCA his famous compositions Shema Yisrael and Tal. He was invited to appear in New York, made a great impression and was offered a prestigious position as chief cantor of the famous Ohev Shalom synagogue in New York.

In America Glantz continued to develop his musical education, under the guidance of professor Aspinol, the vocal teacher of the opera singers Enrico Caruso and Benjamino Gigli.

In 1929, as a recording artist with RCA, a series of LP recordings included Shema Yisrael, Tefilat Tal, Shomer Yisrael, Kol Adoshem, Lechu Neranena, Birkat Kohanim, Ki Ke’Shimcha, Ki Hineh Ka’Chomer and Ein Ke’Erkecha.

Glantz’s appeared in concert tours all over the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America, Western and Eastern Europe, South Africa, and Palestine.

In 1936 Glantz married Miriam Lipton. They had two sons, Kalman and Ezra [Jerry].

In 1941, the family moved to Los Angeles, California, where Glantz served as Chief Cantor of Sinai Temple, and from 1949 to 1954 at the Sha’arei Te’filah synagogue. He was also professor of Jewish Music at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles.

In 1948 he lectured before the delegates of the First Annual Conference of the Cantors Assembly of America on the subject: How the different Jewish Nuschaot (Prayer modes) were created.

He articulated his musical theories in a famous lecture to the delegates of the 5th Convention of the Cantors Assembly in 1952—a lecture that created serious debate, as his ideas were considered a new path toward the analysis of the ancient Jewish prayer modes, the Nusach.

Leib Glantz was one of the most important scholars researching the origins of Jewish music. His research and the theories he developed established a historical continuity of Jewish music from its beginnings in the Holy Temples of Jerusalem. Glantz theorized that many centuries ago the Jewish people transformed certain Greek scales and modes, in the process creating original Jewish combinations. These became the foundations for the Cantillation of the Torah (Ta’ameiHa’Mikrah) and the Jewish prayer modes (Nusach Ha’Tefila).

Glantz continued to be active in the Zionist movement as one of its outstanding leaders. He was nominated to be a delegate at no less than eleven World Zionist Congresses from 1921 till 1961—the last two as a delegate representing Israel.

Glantz lived in Israel for the last ten years of his life (1954–1964). In Israel he enjoyed a unique interaction with the members of his congregation, at the Tif'eret Zvi Synagogue in Tel Aviv, who clearly understood the language of the prayers, were able to appreciate his unique interpretations of the texts, his adherence to the ancient prayer modes and his authentic musical innovations. He was immensely popular in Israel – a household name. Many of his most important compositions were composed in this period of his life.

Midnight Selichot Service, composed by Leib Glantz, is considered by many cantors and scholars as one of the greatest cantorial works ever published. It was recorded live annually by Kol Yisrael radio directly from the Tiferet Zvi synagogue. In total, Leib Glantz composed 215 compositions of Cantorial, Chassidic and Israeli music.

In addition to his cantorial career, Glantz appeared in leading tenor roles in, among others, Alan Hovhaness’ “Shepherd of Israel”, Jacques Halevy’s “La Juive”, and Joseph Tal’s “Saul at Ein Dor”.

In 1959 Glantz founded the Tel Aviv Institute for Jewish Liturgical Music, and an academic level conservatory for training cantors—the Cantors Academy (Ha’Akademia Le’Chazanut). With Glantz at the helm, many important Israeli scholars, composers and musicians proudly joined the academic faculty.

Leib Glantz was a founding member of AKUM, The Israel Music Institute, The Israeli Composers League, and was a member of the editorial board of "Bat Kol." He functioned as one of the judges of the prestigious Engel Prize.

Following Glantz’s sudden passing on January 27, 1964, while in concert in Tel Aviv, the Tel Aviv Institute for Jewish Liturgical Music was transformed into the publishing organ of Leib Glantz’s musical compositions, as well as his research and literary work. This body, in conjunction with the Israel Music Institute, has published seven books of Glantz’s musical compositions, as well as the Hebrew book "Zeharim – In Memory of Leib Glantz."

In 2008, his son, Dr. Jerry Glantz, published a new book (in English): Leib Glantz -- "The Man Who Spoke To God." This book includes two compact discs with Leib Glantz singing 30 of his most important compositions.

External links

The Man Who Spoke To God

Category:1898 births Category:1964 deaths Category:Educators Category:Hazzans Category:Musicologists Category:People from Kiev Category:Ukrainian Jews Category:Zionists

he:לייב גלנץ ru:Гланц, Лейб yi:לייב גלאנץ

Region	Western Philosophy
Era	17th-century philosophy18th-century philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
Name	Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Birth date	July 1, 1646
Birth place	Leipzig, Electorate of Saxony
Death date	November 14, 1716
Death place	Hanover, Electorate of Hanover
Main interests	Mathematics, metaphysics, logic, theodicy
Doctoral advisor	Erhard Weigel
Doctoral students	Jacob BernoulliChristian von Wolff
Influences	Holy Scripture, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine of Hippo, Scholasticism, Ramon Llull, Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Suárez, Descartes, Hobbes, Pico della Mirandola, Jakob Thomasius, Gassendi, Spinoza, Bossuet, Pascal, Malebranche, Huygens, Steno
Influenced	Christian Wolff, Maupertuis, Vico, Boscovich, David Hume, Kant, Bonald, Russell, Varisco, Kurt Gödel, Heidegger, LaRouche, Nietzsche
Notable ideas	Infinitesimal calculusMonadsBest of all possible worldsLeibniz formula for πLeibniz harmonic triangleLeibniz formula for determinantsLeibniz integral rulePrinciple of sufficient reasonDiagrammatic reasoningNotation for differentiationProof of Fermat's little theoremKinetic energy EntscheidungsproblemAST
Signature	Leibnitz signature.svg }}

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (sometimes von Leibniz) ( or ) (July 1, 1646 – November 14, 1716) was a German philosopher and mathematician. He wrote in multiple languages, primarily in Latin (~40%), French (~30%) and German (~15%).

Leibniz occupies a prominent place in the history of mathematics and the history of philosophy. He developed the infinitesimal calculus independently of Isaac Newton, and Leibniz's mathematical notation has been widely used ever since it was published. He became one of the most prolific inventors in the field of mechanical calculators. While working on adding automatic multiplication and division to Pascal's calculator, he was the first to describe a pinwheel calculator in 1685 and invented the Leibniz wheel, used in the arithmometer, the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. He also refined the binary number system, which is at the foundation of virtually all digital computers. In philosophy, Leibniz is mostly noted for his optimism, e.g. his conclusion that our Universe is, in a restricted sense, the best possible one that God could have created. Leibniz, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, was one of the three great 17th century advocates of rationalism. The work of Leibniz anticipated modern logic and analytic philosophy, but his philosophy also looks back to the scholastic tradition, in which conclusions are produced by applying reason to first principles or a priori definitions rather than to empirical evidence. Leibniz made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in biology, medicine, geology, probability theory, psychology, linguistics, and information science. He wrote works on politics, law, ethics, theology, history, philosophy, and philology. Leibniz's contributions to this vast array of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of thousands of letters, and in unpublished manuscripts. As of 2011, there is no complete gathering of the writings of Leibniz.

Biography

Early life

Gottfried Leibniz was born on July 1, 1646 in Leipzig, Saxony (at the end of the Thirty Years' War), to Friedrich Leibniz and Catherina Schmuck. Leibniz's father, who was of Sorbian ancestry, died when he was six years old, and from that point on, he was raised by his mother. Her teachings influenced Leibniz's philosophical thoughts in his later life.

Leibniz's father, Friedrich Leibniz, had been a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Leipzig, so Leibniz inherited his father's personal library. He was given free access to this from the age of seven and thereafter. While Leibniz's schoolwork focused on a small canon of authorities, his father's library enabled him to study a wide variety of advanced philosophical and theological works – ones that he would not have otherwise been able to read until his college years. Access to his father's library, largely written in Latin, also led to his proficiency in the Latin language. Leibniz was proficient in Latin by the age of 12, and he composed three hundred hexameters of Latin verse in a single morning for a special event at school at the age of 13.

He enrolled in his father's former university at age 14, and he completed his bachelor's degree in philosophy in December of 1662. He defended his Disputatio Metaphysica de Principio Individui, which addressed the Principle of individuation, on June 9, 1663. Leibniz earned his master's degree in philosophy on February 7, 1664. He published and defended a dissertation Specimen Quaestionum Philosophicarum ex Jure collectarum, arguing for both a theoretical and a pedagogical relationship between philosophy and law, in December 1664. After one year of legal studies, he was awarded his bachelor's degree in Law on September 28, 1665.

In 1666, (at age 20), Leibniz published his first book, On the Art of Combinations, the first part of which was also his habilitation thesis in philosophy. His next goal was to earn his license and doctorate in Law, which normally required three years of study then. Older students in the law school blocked his early graduation plans, prompting Leibniz to leave Leipzig in disgust in September of 1666.

Leibniz then enrolled in the University of Altdorf, and almost immediately he submitted a thesis, which he had probably been working on earlier in Leipzig. The title of his thesis was Disputatio de Casibus perplexis in Jure. Leibniz earned his license to practice law and his Doctorate in Law in November of 1666. He next declined the offer of an academic appointment at Altdorf, and he spent the rest of his life in the paid service of two main German noble families.

As an adult, Leibniz often introduced himself as "Gottfried von Leibniz". Also many posthumously-published editions of his writings presented his name on the title page as "Freiherr G. W. von Leibniz." However, no document has ever been found from any contemporary government that stated his appointment to any form of nobility.

1666–74

Leibniz's first position was as a salaried alchemist in Nuremberg, even though he knew nothing about the subject. He soon met Johann Christian von Boineburg (1622–1672), the dismissed chief minister of the Elector of Mainz, Johann Philipp von Schönborn. Von Boineburg hired Leibniz as an assistant, and shortly thereafter reconciled with the Elector and introduced Leibniz to him. Leibniz then dedicated an essay on law to the Elector in the hope of obtaining employment. The stratagem worked; the Elector asked Leibniz to assist with the redrafting of the legal code for his Electorate. In 1669, Leibniz was appointed Assessor in the Court of Appeal. Although von Boineburg died late in 1672, Leibniz remained under the employment of his widow until she dismissed him in 1674.

Von Boineburg did much to promote Leibniz's reputation, and the latter's memoranda and letters began to attract favorable notice. Leibniz's service to the Elector soon followed a diplomatic role. He published an essay, under the pseudonym of a fictitious Polish nobleman, arguing (unsuccessfully) for the German candidate for the Polish crown. The main European geopolitical reality during Leibniz's adult life was the ambition of Louis XIV of France, backed by French military and economic might. Meanwhile, the Thirty Years' War had left German-speaking Europe exhausted, fragmented, and economically backward. Leibniz proposed to protect German-speaking Europe by distracting Louis as follows. France would be invited to take Egypt as a stepping stone towards an eventual conquest of the Dutch East Indies. In return, France would agree to leave Germany and the Netherlands undisturbed. This plan obtained the Elector's cautious support. In 1672, the French government invited Leibniz to Paris for discussion, but the plan was soon overtaken by the outbreak of the Franco-Dutch War and became irrelevant. Napoleon's failed invasion of Egypt in 1798 can be seen as an unwitting implementation of Leibniz's plan.

Thus Leibniz began several years in Paris. Soon after arriving, he met Dutch physicist and mathematician Christiaan Huygens and realised that his own knowledge of mathematics and physics was patchy. With Huygens as mentor, he began a program of self-study that soon pushed him to making major contributions to both subjects, including inventing his version of the differential and integral calculus. He met Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld, the leading French philosophers of the day, and studied the writings of Descartes and Pascal, unpublished as well as published. He befriended a German mathematician, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus; they corresponded for the rest of their lives. In 1675 he was admitted as a foreign honorary member of the French Academy of Sciences, which he continued to follow mostly by correspondence.

When it became clear that France would not implement its part of Leibniz's Egyptian plan, the Elector sent his nephew, escorted by Leibniz, on a related mission to the English government in London, early in 1673. There Leibniz came into acquaintance of Henry Oldenburg and John Collins. After demonstrating a calculating machine he had been designing and building since 1670 to the Royal Society, the first such machine that could execute all four basic arithmetical operations, the Society made him an external member. The mission ended abruptly when news reached it of the Elector's death, whereupon Leibniz promptly returned to Paris and not, as had been planned, to Mainz.

The sudden deaths of Leibniz's two patrons in the same winter meant that Leibniz had to find a new basis for his career. In this regard, a 1669 invitation from the Duke of Brunswick to visit Hanover proved fateful. Leibniz declined the invitation, but began corresponding with the Duke in 1671. In 1673, the Duke offered him the post of Counsellor which Leibniz very reluctantly accepted two years later, only after it became clear that no employment in Paris, whose intellectual stimulation he relished, or with the Habsburg imperial court was forthcoming.

House of Hanover, 1676–1716

Leibniz managed to delay his arrival in Hanover until the end of 1676, after making one more short journey to London, where he possibly was shown some of Newton's unpublished work on the calculus. This fact was deemed evidence supporting the accusation, made decades later, that he had stolen the calculus from Newton. On the journey from London to Hanover, Leibniz stopped in The Hague where he met Leeuwenhoek, the discoverer of microorganisms. He also spent several days in intense discussion with Spinoza, who had just completed his masterwork, the Ethics. Leibniz respected Spinoza's powerful intellect, but was dismayed by his conclusions that contradicted both Christian and Jewish orthodoxy.

In 1677, he was promoted, at his request, to Privy Counselor of Justice, a post he held for the rest of his life. Leibniz served three consecutive rulers of the House of Brunswick as historian, political adviser, and most consequentially, as librarian of the ducal library. He thenceforth employed his pen on all the various political, historical, and theological matters involving the House of Brunswick; the resulting documents form a valuable part of the historical record for the period.

Among the few people in north Germany to accept Leibniz were the Electress Sophia of Hanover (1630–1714), her daughter Sophia Charlotte of Hanover (1668–1705), the Queen of Prussia and his avowed disciple, and Caroline of Ansbach, the consort of her grandson, the future George II. To each of these women he was correspondent, adviser, and friend. In turn, they all approved of Leibniz more than did their spouses and the future king George I of Great Britain.

The population of Hanover was only about 10,000, and its provinciality eventually grated on Leibniz. Nevertheless, to be a major courtier to the House of Brunswick was quite an honor, especially in light of the meteoric rise in the prestige of that House during Leibniz's association with it. In 1692, the Duke of Brunswick became a hereditary Elector of the Holy Roman Empire. The British Act of Settlement 1701 designated the Electress Sophia and her descent as the royal family of England, once both King William III and his sister-in-law and successor, Queen Anne, were dead. Leibniz played a role in the initiatives and negotiations leading up to that Act, but not always an effective one. For example, something he published anonymously in England, thinking to promote the Brunswick cause, was formally censured by the British Parliament.

The Brunswicks tolerated the enormous effort Leibniz devoted to intellectual pursuits unrelated to his duties as a courtier, pursuits such as perfecting the calculus, writing about other mathematics, logic, physics, and philosophy, and keeping up a vast correspondence. He began working on the calculus in 1674; the earliest evidence of its use in his surviving notebooks is 1675. By 1677 he had a coherent system in hand, but did not publish it until 1684. Leibniz's most important mathematical papers were published between 1682 and 1692, usually in a journal which he and Otto Mencke founded in 1682, the Acta Eruditorum. That journal played a key role in advancing his mathematical and scientific reputation, which in turn enhanced his eminence in diplomacy, history, theology, and philosophy.

The Elector Ernest Augustus commissioned Leibniz to write a history of the House of Brunswick, going back to the time of Charlemagne or earlier, hoping that the resulting book would advance his dynastic ambitions. From 1687 to 1690, Leibniz traveled extensively in Germany, Austria, and Italy, seeking and finding archival materials bearing on this project. Decades went by but no history appeared; the next Elector became quite annoyed at Leibniz's apparent dilatoriness. Leibniz never finished the project, in part because of his huge output on many other fronts, but also because he insisted on writing a meticulously researched and erudite book based on archival sources, when his patrons would have been quite happy with a short popular book, one perhaps little more than a genealogy with commentary, to be completed in three years or less. They never knew that he had in fact carried out a fair part of his assigned task: when the material Leibniz had written and collected for his history of the House of Brunswick was finally published in the 19th century, it filled three volumes.

In 1711, John Keill, writing in the journal of the Royal Society and with Newton's presumed blessing, accused Leibniz of having plagiarized Newton's calculus. Thus began the calculus priority dispute which darkened the remainder of Leibniz's life. A formal investigation by the Royal Society (in which Newton was an unacknowledged participant), undertaken in response to Leibniz's demand for a retraction, upheld Keill's charge. Historians of mathematics writing since 1900 or so have tended to acquit Leibniz, pointing to important differences between Leibniz's and Newton's versions of the calculus.

In 1711, while traveling in northern Europe, the Russian Tsar Peter the Great stopped in Hanover and met Leibniz, who then took some interest in Russian matters for the rest of his life. In 1712, Leibniz began a two-year residence in Vienna, where he was appointed Imperial Court Councillor to the Habsburgs. On the death of Queen Anne in 1714, Elector George Louis became King George I of Great Britain, under the terms of the 1701 Act of Settlement. Even though Leibniz had done much to bring about this happy event, it was not to be his hour of glory. Despite the intercession of the Princess of Wales, Caroline of Ansbach, George I forbade Leibniz to join him in London until he completed at least one volume of the history of the Brunswick family his father had commissioned nearly 30 years earlier. Moreover, for George I to include Leibniz in his London court would have been deemed insulting to Newton, who was seen as having won the calculus priority dispute and whose standing in British official circles could not have been higher. Finally, his dear friend and defender, the Dowager Electress Sophia, died in 1714.

Death

Leibniz died in Hanover in 1716: at the time, he was so out of favor that neither George I (who happened to be near Hanover at the time) nor any fellow courtier other than his personal secretary attended the funeral. Even though Leibniz was a life member of the Royal Society and the Berlin Academy of Sciences, neither organization saw fit to honor his passing. His grave went unmarked for more than 50 years. Leibniz was eulogized by Fontenelle, before the Academie des Sciences in Paris, which had admitted him as a foreign member in 1700. The eulogy was composed at the behest of the Duchess of Orleans, a niece of the Electress Sophia.

Personal life

Leibniz never married. He complained on occasion about money, but the fair sum he left to his sole heir, his sister's stepson, proved that the Brunswicks had, by and large, paid him well. In his diplomatic endeavors, he at times verged on the unscrupulous, as was all too often the case with professional diplomats of his day. On several occasions, Leibniz backdated and altered personal manuscripts, actions which put him in a bad light during the calculus controversy. On the other hand, he was charming, well-mannered, and not without humor and imagination. He had many friends and admirers all over Europe.

Philosopher

Leibniz's philosophical thinking appears fragmented, because his philosophical writings consist mainly of a multitude of short pieces: journal articles, manuscripts published long after his death, and many letters to many correspondents. He wrote only two philosophical treatises, of which only the Théodicée of 1710 was published in his lifetime.

Leibniz dated his beginning as a philosopher to his Discourse on Metaphysics, which he composed in 1686 as a commentary on a running dispute between Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld. This led to an extensive and valuable correspondence with Arnauld; it and the Discourse were not published until the 19th century. In 1695, Leibniz made his public entrée into European philosophy with a journal article titled "New System of the Nature and Communication of Substances". Between 1695 and 1705, he composed his New Essays on Human Understanding, a lengthy commentary on John Locke's 1690 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, but upon learning of Locke's 1704 death, lost the desire to publish it, so that the New Essays were not published until 1765. The Monadologie, composed in 1714 and published posthumously, consists of 90 aphorisms.

Leibniz met Spinoza in 1676, read some of his unpublished writings, and has since been suspected of appropriating some of Spinoza's ideas. While Leibniz admired Spinoza's powerful intellect, he was also forthrightly dismayed by Spinoza's conclusions, especially when these were inconsistent with Christian orthodoxy.

Unlike Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz had a thorough university education in philosophy. His lifelong scholastic and Aristotelian turn of mind betrayed the strong influence of one of his Leipzig professors, Jakob Thomasius, who also supervised his BA thesis in philosophy. Leibniz also eagerly read Francisco Suárez, a Spanish Jesuit respected even in Lutheran universities. Leibniz was deeply interested in the new methods and conclusions of Descartes, Huygens, Newton, and Boyle, but viewed their work through a lens heavily tinted by scholastic notions. Yet it remains the case that Leibniz's methods and concerns often anticipate the logic, and analytic and linguistic philosophy of the 20th century.

The Principles

Leibniz variously invoked one or another of seven fundamental philosophical Principles:

Identity/contradiction. If a proposition is true, then its negation is false and vice versa.

Identity of indiscernibles. Two things are identical if and only if they share the same and only the same properties. Frequently invoked in modern logic and philosophy. The "identity of indiscernibles" is often referred to as Leibniz's Law. It has attracted the most controversy and criticism, especially from corpuscular philosophy and quantum mechanics.

Sufficient reason. "There must be a sufficient reason [often known only to God] for anything to exist, for any event to occur, for any truth to obtain." Pre-established harmony. "[T]he appropriate nature of each substance brings it about that what happens to one corresponds to what happens to all the others, without, however, their acting upon one another directly." (Discourse on Metaphysics, XIV) A dropped glass shatters because it "knows" it has hit the ground, and not because the impact with the ground "compels" the glass to split.

Law of Continuity. Natura non saltum facit. A mathematical analog to this principle would proceed as follows: if a function describes a transformation of something to which continuity applies, then its domain and range are both dense sets.

Optimism. "God assuredly always chooses the best."

Plenitude. "Leibniz believed that the best of all possible worlds would actualize every genuine possibility, and argued in Théodicée that this best of all possible worlds will contain all possibilities, with our finite experience of eternity giving no reason to dispute nature's perfection."

Leibniz would on occasion give a speech for a specific principle, but more often took them for granted.

The monads

Leibniz's best known contribution to metaphysics is his theory of monads, as exposited in Monadologie. Monads are to the metaphysical realm what atoms are to the physical/phenomenal. They can also be compared to the corpuscles of the Mechanical Philosophy of René Descartes and others. Monads are the ultimate elements of the universe. The monads are "substantial forms of being" with the following properties: they are eternal, indecomposable, individual, subject to their own laws, un-interacting, and each reflecting the entire universe in a pre-established harmony (a historically important example of panpsychism). Monads are centers of force; substance is force, while space, matter, and motion are merely phenomenal.

The ontological essence of a monad is its irreducible simplicity. Unlike atoms, monads possess no material or spatial character. They also differ from atoms by their complete mutual independence, so that interactions among monads are only apparent. Instead, by virtue of the principle of pre-established harmony, each monad follows a preprogrammed set of "instructions" peculiar to itself, so that a monad "knows" what to do at each moment. (These "instructions" may be seen as analogs of the scientific laws governing subatomic particles.) By virtue of these intrinsic instructions, each monad is like a little mirror of the universe. Monads need not be "small"; e.g., each human being constitutes a monad, in which case free will is problematic. God, too, is a monad, and the existence of God can be inferred from the harmony prevailing among all other monads; God wills the pre-established harmony.

Monads are purported to having gotten rid of the problematic:

Interaction between mind and matter arising in the system of Descartes;

Lack of individuation inherent to the system of Spinoza, which represents individual creatures as merely accidental.

Theodicy and optimism

(Note that the word "optimism" here is used in the classic sense of optimal, not in the mood-related sense, as being positively hopeful.)

The Theodicy tries to justify the apparent imperfections of the world by claiming that it is optimal among all possible worlds. It must be the best possible and most balanced world, because it was created by an all powerful and all knowing God, who would not choose to create an imperfect world if a better world could be known to him or possible to exist. In effect, apparent flaws that can be identified in this world must exist in every possible world, because otherwise God would have chosen to create the world that excluded those flaws.

Leibniz asserted that the truths of theology (religion) and philosophy cannot contradict each other, since reason and faith are both "gifts of God" so that their conflict would imply God contending against himself. The Theodicy is Leibniz's attempt to reconcile his personal philosophical system with his interpretation of the tenets of Christianity. This project was motivated in part by Leibniz's belief, shared by many conservative philosophers and theologians during the Enlightenment, in the rational and enlightened nature of the Christian religion, at least as this was defined in tendentious comparisons between Christian and non Western or "primitive" religious practices and beliefs. It was also shaped by Leibniz's belief in the perfectibility of human nature (if humanity relied on correct philosophy and religion as a guide), and by his belief that metaphysical necessity must have a rational or logical foundation, even if this metaphysical causality seemed inexplicable in terms of physical necessity (the natural laws identified by science).

Because reason and faith must be entirely reconciled, any tenet of faith which could not be defended by reason must be rejected. Leibniz then approached one of the central criticisms of Christian theism: if God is all good, all wise and all powerful, how did evil come into the world? The answer (according to Leibniz) is that, while God is indeed unlimited in wisdom and power, his human creations, as creations, are limited both in their wisdom and in their will (power to act). This predisposes humans to false beliefs, wrong decisions and ineffective actions in the exercise of their free will. God does not arbitrarily inflict pain and suffering on humans; rather he permits both moral evil (sin) and physical evil (pain and suffering) as the necessary consequences of metaphysical evil (imperfection), as a means by which humans can identify and correct their erroneous decisions, and as a contrast to true good.

Further, although human actions flow from prior causes that ultimately arise in God, and therefore are known as a metaphysical certainty to God, an individual's free will is exercised within natural laws, where choices are merely contingently necessary, to be decided in the event by a "wonderful spontaneity" that provides individuals an escape from rigorous predestination.

The Theodicy was deemed illogical by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Russell points out that moral and physical evil must result from metaphysical evil (imperfection). But imperfection is merely finitude or limitation; if existence is good, as Leibniz maintains, then the mere existence of evil requires that evil also be good. In addition, Christian theology defines sin as not necessary but contingent, the result of free will. Russell maintains that Leibniz failed logically to show that metaphysical necessity (divine will) and human free will are not incompatible or contradictory.

The mathematician Paul du Bois-Reymond, in his "Leibnizian Thoughts in Modern Science", wrote that Leibniz thought of God as a mathematician:

As is well known, the theory of the maxima and minima of functions was indebted to him for the greatest progress through the discovery of the method of tangents. Well, he conceives God in the creation of the world like a mathematician who is solving a minimum problem, or rather, in our modern phraseology, a problem in the calculus of variations the question being to determine among an infinite number of possible worlds, that for which the sum of necessary evil is a minimum.

The statement that "we live in the best of all possible worlds" drew scorn, most notably from Voltaire, who lampooned it in his comic novella Candide by having the character Dr. Pangloss (a parody of Leibniz and Maupertuis) repeat it like a mantra. From this, the adjective "Panglossian" describes a person who believes that the world about us is the best possible one.

Symbolic thought

Leibniz believed that much of human reasoning could be reduced to calculations of a sort, and that such calculations could resolve many differences of opinion:

The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate [calculemus], without further ado, to see who is right.

Leibniz's calculus ratiocinator, which resembles symbolic logic, can be viewed as a way of making such calculations feasible. Leibniz wrote memoranda that can now be read as groping attempts to get symbolic logic—and thus his calculus—off the ground. But Gerhard and Couturat did not publish these writings until modern formal logic had emerged in Frege's Begriffsschrift and in writings by Charles Sanders Peirce and his students in the 1880s, and hence well after Boole and De Morgan began that logic in 1847.

Leibniz thought symbols were important for human understanding. He attached so much importance to the invention of good notations that he attributed all his discoveries in mathematics to this. His notation for the infinitesimal calculus is an example of his skill in this regard. C.S. Peirce, a 19th-century pioneer of semiotics, shared Leibniz's passion for symbols and notation, and his belief that these are essential to a well-running logic and mathematics.

But Leibniz took his speculations much further. Defining a character as any written sign, he then defined a "real" character as one that represents an idea directly and not simply as the word embodying the idea. Some real characters, such as the notation of logic, serve only to facilitate reasoning. Many characters well known in his day, including Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese characters, and the symbols of astronomy and chemistry, he deemed not real. Instead, he proposed the creation of a characteristica universalis or "universal characteristic", built on an alphabet of human thought in which each fundamental concept would be represented by a unique "real" character:

It is obvious that if we could find characters or signs suited for expressing all our thoughts as clearly and as exactly as arithmetic expresses numbers or geometry expresses lines, we could do in all matters insofar as they are subject to reasoning all that we can do in arithmetic and geometry. For all investigations which depend on reasoning would be carried out by transposing these characters and by a species of calculus.

Complex thoughts would be represented by combining characters for simpler thoughts. Leibniz saw that the uniqueness of prime factorization suggests a central role for prime numbers in the universal characteristic, a striking anticipation of Gödel numbering. Granted, there is no intuitive or mnemonic way to number any set of elementary concepts using the prime numbers. Leibniz's idea of reasoning through a universal language of symbols and calculations however remarkably foreshadows great 20th century developments in formal systems, such as Turing completeness, where computation was used to define equivalent universal languages (see Turing degree).

Because Leibniz was a mathematical novice when he first wrote about the characteristic, at first he did not conceive it as an algebra but rather as a universal language or script. Only in 1676 did he conceive of a kind of "algebra of thought", modeled on and including conventional algebra and its notation. The resulting characteristic included a logical calculus, some combinatorics, algebra, his analysis situs (geometry of situation), a universal concept language, and more.

What Leibniz actually intended by his characteristica universalis and calculus ratiocinator, and the extent to which modern formal logic does justice to the calculus, may never be established.

Formal logic

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:

#All our ideas are compounded from a very small number of simple ideas, which form the alphabet of human thought. #Complex ideas proceed from these simple ideas by a uniform and symmetrical combination, analogous to arithmetical multiplication.

With regard to the first point, the number of simple ideas is much greater than Leibniz thought. As for the second, 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 so far as to claim that Leibniz had developed logic in his unpublished writings to a level which was reached only 200 years later.

Mathematician

Although the mathematical notion of function was implicit in trigonometric and logarithmic tables, which existed in his day, Leibniz was the first, in 1692 and 1694, to employ it explicitly, to denote any of several geometric concepts derived from a curve, such as abscissa, ordinate, tangent, chord, and the perpendicular. In the 18th century, "function" lost these geometrical associations.

Leibniz was the first to see that the coefficients of a system of linear equations could be arranged into an array, now called a matrix, which can be manipulated to find the solution of the system, if any. This method was later called Gaussian elimination. Leibniz's discoveries of Boolean algebra and of symbolic logic, also relevant to mathematics, are discussed in the preceding section. A detailed treatment of Leibniz's writings on the calculus may be found in Bos (1974).

Calculus

Leibniz is credited, along with Sir Isaac Newton, with the inventing of infinitesimal calculus (that comprises differential and integral calculus). According to Leibniz's notebooks, a critical breakthrough occurred on November 11, 1675, when he employed integral calculus for the first time to find the area under the graph of a function y = ƒ(x). He introduced several notations used to this day, for instance the integral sign ∫ representing an elongated S, from the Latin word summa and the d used for differentials, from the Latin word differentia. This cleverly suggestive notation for the calculus is probably his most enduring mathematical legacy. Leibniz did not publish anything about his calculus until 1684. The product rule of differential calculus is still called "Leibniz's law". In addition, the theorem that tells how and when to differentiate under the integral sign is called the Leibniz integral rule.

Leibniz's approach to the calculus fell well short of later standards of rigor (the same can be said of Newton's). We now see a Leibniz proof as being in truth mostly a heuristic argument mainly grounded in geometric intuition. Leibniz also freely invoked mathematical entities he called infinitesimals, manipulating them in ways suggesting that they had paradoxical algebraic properties. George Berkeley, in a tract called The Analyst and elsewhere, ridiculed this and other aspects of the early calculus, pointing out that natural science grounded in the calculus required just as big of a leap of faith as theology grounded in Christian revelation.

From 1711 until his death, Leibniz's life was envenomed by a long dispute with John Keill, Newton, and others, over whether Leibniz had invented the calculus independently of Newton, or whether he had merely invented another notation for ideas that were fundamentally Newton's.

Modern, rigorous calculus emerged in the 19th century, thanks to the efforts of Augustin Louis Cauchy, Bernhard Riemann, Karl Weierstrass, and others, who based their work on the definition of a limit and on a precise understanding of real numbers. While Cauchy still used infinitesimals as a foundational concept for the calculus, following Weierstrass they were gradually eliminated from calculus, though continued to be studied outside of analysis. Infinitesimals survived in science and engineering, and even in rigorous mathematics, via the fundamental computational device known as the differential. Beginning in 1960, Abraham Robinson worked out a rigorous foundation for Leibniz's infinitesimals, using model theory. The resulting non-standard analysis can be seen as a belated vindication of Leibniz's mathematical reasoning.

Topology

Leibniz was the first to use the term analysis situs, later used in the 19th century to refer to what is now known as topology. There are two takes on this situation. On the one hand, Mates, citing a 1954 paper in German by Jacob Freudenthal, argues:

Although for Leibniz the situs of a sequence of points is completely determined by the distance between them and is altered if those distances are altered, his admirer Euler, in the famous 1736 paper solving the Königsberg Bridge Problem and its generalizations, used the term geometria situs in such a sense that the situs remains unchanged under topological deformations. He mistakenly credits Leibniz with originating this concept. ...it is sometimes not realized that Leibniz used the term in an entirely different sense and hence can hardly be considered the founder of that part of mathematics.

But Hideaki Hirano argues differently, quoting Mandelbrot:

To sample Leibniz' scientific works is a sobering experience. Next to calculus, and to other thoughts that have been carried out to completion, the number and variety of premonitory thrusts is overwhelming. We saw examples in 'packing,'... My Leibniz mania is further reinforced by finding that for one moment its hero attached importance to geometric scaling. In "Euclidis Prota"..., which is an attempt to tighten Euclid's axioms, he states,...: 'I have diverse definitions for the straight line. The straight line is a curve, any part of which is similar to the whole, and it alone has this property, not only among curves but among sets.' This claim can be proved today.

Thus the fractal geometry promoted by Mandelbrot drew on Leibniz's notions of self-similarity and the principle of continuity: natura non facit saltus. We also see that when Leibniz wrote, in a metaphysical vein, that "the straight line is a curve, any part of which is similar to the whole", he was anticipating topology by more than two centuries. As for "packing", Leibniz told to his friend and correspondent Des Bosses to imagine a circle, then to inscribe within it three congruent circles with maximum radius; the latter smaller circles could be filled with three even smaller circles by the same procedure. This process can be continued infinitely, from which arises a good idea of self-similarity. Leibniz's improvement of Euclid's axiom contains the same concept.

Scientist and engineer

Leibniz's writings are currently discussed, not only for their anticipations and possible discoveries not yet recognized, but as ways of advancing present knowledge. Much of his writing on physics is included in Gerhardt's Mathematical Writings.

Physics

Leibniz contributed a fair amount to the statics and dynamics emerging about him, often disagreeing with Descartes and Newton. He devised a new theory of motion (dynamics) based on kinetic energy and potential energy, which posited space as relative, whereas Newton felt strongly space was absolute. An important example of Leibniz's mature physical thinking is his Specimen Dynamicum of 1695.

Until the discovery of subatomic particles and the quantum mechanics governing them, many of Leibniz's speculative ideas about aspects of nature not reducible to statics and dynamics made little sense. For instance, he anticipated Albert Einstein by arguing, against Newton, that space, time and motion are relative, not absolute. Leibniz's rule is an important, if often overlooked, step in many proofs in diverse fields of physics. The principle of sufficient reason has been invoked in recent cosmology, and his identity of indiscernibles in quantum mechanics, a field some even credit him with having anticipated in some sense. Those who advocate digital philosophy, a recent direction in cosmology, claim Leibniz as a precursor.

The vis viva

Leibniz's vis viva (Latin for living force) is mv², twice the modern kinetic energy. He realized that the total energy would be conserved in certain mechanical systems, so he considered it an innate motive characteristic of matter. Here too his thinking gave rise to another regrettable nationalistic dispute. His vis viva was seen as rivaling the conservation of momentum championed by Newton in England and by Descartes in France; hence academics in those countries tended to neglect Leibniz's idea. In reality, both energy and momentum are conserved, so the two approaches are equally valid.

Other natural science

By proposing that the earth has a molten core, he anticipated modern geology. In embryology, he was a preformationist, but also proposed that organisms are the outcome of a combination of an infinite number of possible microstructures and of their powers. In the life sciences and paleontology, he revealed an amazing transformist intuition, fueled by his study of comparative anatomy and fossils. One of his principal works on this subject, Protogaea, unpublished in his lifetime, has recently been published in English for the first time. He worked out a primal organismic theory. In medicine, he exhorted the physicians of his time—with some results—to ground their theories in detailed comparative observations and verified experiments, and to distinguish firmly scientific and metaphysical points of view.

Social science

In psychology, he anticipated the distinction between conscious and unconscious states. In public health, he advocated establishing a medical administrative authority, with powers over epidemiology and veterinary medicine. He worked to set up a coherent medical training programme, oriented towards public health and preventive measures. In economic policy, he proposed tax reforms and a national insurance scheme, and discussed the balance of trade. He even proposed something akin to what much later emerged as game theory. In sociology he laid the ground for communication theory.

Technology

In 1906, Garland published a volume of Leibniz's writings bearing on his many practical inventions and engineering work. To date, few of these writings have been translated into English. Nevertheless, it is well understood that Leibniz was a serious inventor, engineer, and applied scientist, with great respect for practical life. Following the motto theoria cum praxis, he urged that theory be combined with practical application, and thus has been claimed as the father of applied science. He designed wind-driven propellers and water pumps, mining machines to extract ore, hydraulic presses, lamps, submarines, clocks, etc. With Denis Papin, he invented a steam engine. He even proposed a method for desalinating water. From 1680 to 1685, he struggled to overcome the chronic flooding that afflicted the ducal silver mines in the Harz Mountains, but did not succeed.

Computation

Leibniz may have been the first computer scientist and information theorist. Early in life, he documented the binary numeral system (base 2), then revisited that system throughout his career. He anticipated Lagrangian interpolation and algorithmic information theory. His calculus ratiocinator anticipated aspects of the universal Turing machine. In 1934, Norbert Wiener claimed to have found in Leibniz's writings a mention of the concept of feedback, central to Wiener's later cybernetic theory.

In 1671, Leibniz began to invent a machine that could execute all four arithmetical operations, gradually improving it over a number of years. This "Stepped Reckoner" attracted fair attention and was the basis of his election to the Royal Society in 1673. A number of such machines were made during his years in Hanover, by a craftsman working under Leibniz's supervision. It was not an unambiguous success because it did not fully mechanize the operation of carrying. Couturat reported finding an unpublished note by Leibniz, dated 1674, describing a machine capable of performing some algebraic operations.

Leibniz was groping towards hardware and software concepts worked out much later by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. In 1679, while mulling over his binary arithmetic, Leibniz imagined a machine in which binary numbers were represented by marbles, governed by a rudimentary sort of punched cards. Modern electronic digital computers replace Leibniz's marbles moving by gravity with shift registers, voltage gradients, and pulses of electrons, but otherwise they run roughly as Leibniz envisioned in 1679.

Librarian

While serving as librarian of the ducal libraries in Hanover and Wolfenbuettel, Leibniz effectively became one of the founders of library science. The latter library was enormous for its day, as it contained more than 100,000 volumes, and Leibniz helped design a new building for it, believed to be the first building explicitly designed to be a library. He also designed a book indexing system in ignorance of the only other such system then extant, that of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. He also called on publishers to distribute abstracts of all new titles they produced each year, in a standard form that would facilitate indexing. He hoped that this abstracting project would eventually include everything printed from his day back to Gutenberg. Neither proposal met with success at the time, but something like them became standard practice among English language publishers during the 20th century, under the aegis of the Library of Congress and the British Library.

He called for the creation of an empirical database as a way to further all sciences. His characteristica universalis, calculus ratiocinator, and a "community of minds"—intended, among other things, to bring political and religious unity to Europe—can be seen as distant unwitting anticipations of artificial languages (e.g., Esperanto and its rivals), symbolic logic, even the World Wide Web.

Advocate of scientific societies

Leibniz emphasized that research was a collaborative endeavor. Hence he warmly advocated the formation of national scientific societies along the lines of the British Royal Society and the French Academie Royale des Sciences. More specifically, in his correspondence and travels he urged the creation of such societies in Dresden, Saint Petersburg, Vienna, and Berlin. Only one such project came to fruition; in 1700, the Berlin Academy of Sciences was created. Leibniz drew up its first statutes, and served as its first President for the remainder of his life. That Academy evolved into the German Academy of Sciences, the publisher of the ongoing critical edition of his works.

Lawyer, moralist

With the possible exception of Marcus Aurelius, no philosopher has ever had as much experience with practical affairs of state as Leibniz. Leibniz's writings on law, ethics, and politics were long overlooked by English-speaking scholars, but this has changed of late.

While Leibniz was no apologist for absolute monarchy like Hobbes, or for tyranny in any form, neither did he echo the political and constitutional views of his contemporary John Locke, views invoked in support of democracy, in 18th-century America and later elsewhere. The following excerpt from a 1695 letter to Baron J. C. Boineburg's son Philipp is very revealing of Leibniz's political sentiments:

As for.. the great question of the power of sovereigns and the obedience their peoples owe them, I usually say that it would be good for princes to be persuaded that their people have the right to resist them, and for the people, on the other hand, to be persuaded to obey them passively. I am, however, quite of the opinion of Grotius, that one ought to obey as a rule, the evil of revolution being greater beyond comparison than the evils causing it. Yet I recognize that a prince can go to such excess, and place the well-being of the state in such danger, that the obligation to endure ceases. This is most rare, however, and the theologian who authorizes violence under this pretext should take care against excess; excess being infinitely more dangerous than deficiency.

In 1677, Leibniz called for a European confederation, governed by a council or senate, whose members would represent entire nations and would be free to vote their consciences; in doing so, he anticipated the European Union. He believed that Europe would adopt a uniform religion. He reiterated these proposals in 1715.

Ecumenism

Leibniz devoted considerable intellectual and diplomatic effort to what would now be called ecumenical endeavor, seeking to reconcile first the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches, later the Lutheran and Reformed churches. In this respect, he followed the example of his early patrons, Baron von Boineburg and the Duke John Frederick—both cradle Lutherans who converted to Catholicism as adults—who did what they could to encourage the reunion of the two faiths, and who warmly welcomed such endeavors by others. (The House of Brunswick remained Lutheran because the Duke's children did not follow their father.) These efforts included corresponding with the French bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, and involved Leibniz in a fair bit of theological controversy. He evidently thought that the thoroughgoing application of reason would suffice to heal the breach caused by the Reformation.

Philologist

Leibniz the philologist was an avid student of languages, eagerly latching on to any information about vocabulary and grammar that came his way. He refuted the belief, widely held by Christian scholars in his day, that Hebrew was the primeval language of the human race. He also refuted the argument, advanced by Swedish scholars in his day, that a form of proto-Swedish was the ancestor of the Germanic languages. He puzzled over the origins of the Slavic languages, was aware of the existence of Sanskrit, and was fascinated by classical Chinese.

He published the princeps editio (first modern edition) of the late medieval Chronicon Holtzatiae, a Latin chronicle of the County of Holstein.

Sinophile

Leibniz was perhaps the first major European intellect to take a close interest in Chinese civilization, which he knew by corresponding with, and reading other works by, European Christian missionaries posted in China. He concluded that Europeans could learn much from the Confucian ethical tradition. He mulled over the possibility that the Chinese characters were an unwitting form of his universal characteristic. He noted with fascination how the I Ching hexagrams correspond to the binary numbers from 0 to 111111, and concluded that this mapping was evidence of major Chinese accomplishments in the sort of philosophical mathematics he admired.

As polymath

While making his grand tour of European archives to research the Brunswick family history that he never completed, Leibniz stopped in Vienna between May 1688 and 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, 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.

Posthumous reputation

As a mathematician and philosopher

When Leibniz died, his reputation was in decline. He was remembered for only one book, the Théodicée, whose supposed central argument Voltaire lampooned in his Candide. Voltaire's depiction of Leibniz's ideas was so influential that many believed it to be an accurate description. Thus Voltaire and his Candide bear some of the blame for the lingering failure to appreciate and understand Leibniz's ideas. Leibniz had an ardent disciple, Christian Wolff, whose dogmatic and facile outlook did Leibniz's reputation much harm. He also influenced David Hume who read his Théodicée and used some of his ideas. In any event, philosophical fashion was moving away from the rationalism and system building of the 17th century, of which Leibniz had been such an ardent proponent. His work on law, diplomacy, and history was seen as of ephemeral interest. The vastness and richness of his correspondence went unrecognized.

Much of Europe came to doubt that Leibniz had discovered the calculus independently of Newton, and hence his whole work in mathematics and physics was neglected. Voltaire, an admirer of Newton, also wrote Candide at least in part to discredit Leibniz's claim to having discovered the calculus and Leibniz's charge that Newton's theory of universal gravitation was incorrect. The rise of relativity and subsequent work in the history of mathematics has put Leibniz's stance in a more favorable light.

Leibniz's long march to his present glory began with the 1765 publication of the Nouveaux Essais, which Kant read closely. In 1768, Dutens edited the first multi-volume edition of Leibniz's writings, followed in the 19th century by a number of editions, including those edited by Erdmann, Foucher de Careil, Gerhardt, Gerland, Klopp, and Mollat. Publication of Leibniz's correspondence with notables such as Antoine Arnauld, Samuel Clarke, Sophia of Hanover, and her daughter Sophia Charlotte of Hanover, began.

In 1900, Bertrand Russell published a critical study of Leibniz's metaphysics. Shortly thereafter, Louis Couturat published an important study of Leibniz, and edited a volume of Leibniz's heretofore unpublished writings, mainly on logic. They made Leibniz somewhat respectable among 20th-century analytical and linguistic philosophers in the English-speaking world (Leibniz had already been of great influence to many Germans such as Bernhard Riemann). For example, Leibniz's phrase salva veritate, meaning interchangeability without loss of or compromising the truth, recurs in Willard Quine's writings. Nevertheless, the secondary English-language literature on Leibniz did not really blossom until after World War II. This is especially true of English speaking countries; in Gregory Brown's bibliography fewer than 30 of the English language entries were published before 1946. American Leibniz studies owe much to Leroy Loemker (1904–85) through his translations and his interpretive essays in LeClerc (1973).

Nicholas Jolley has surmised that Leibniz's reputation as a philosopher is now perhaps higher than at any time since he was alive. Analytic and contemporary philosophy continue to invoke his notions of identity, individuation, and possible worlds, while the doctrinaire contempt for metaphysics, characteristic of analytic and linguistic philosophy, has faded. Work in the history of 17th- and 18th-century ideas has revealed more clearly the 17th-century "Intellectual Revolution" that preceded the better-known Industrial and commercial revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. The 17th- and 18th-century belief that natural science, especially physics, differs from philosophy mainly in degree and not in kind, is no longer dismissed out of hand. That modern science includes a "scholastic" as well as a "radical empiricist" element is more accepted now than in the early 20th century. Leibniz's thought is now seen as a major prolongation of the mighty endeavor begun by Plato and Aristotle: the universe and man's place in it are amenable to human reason.

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. It is the world's largest prize for scientific achievement.

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.

Leibniz biscuits

Leibniz-Keks, a popular brand of biscuits in Germany, are named after Gottfried Leibniz. These biscuits honour Leibniz because he was a resident of Hanover, where the company is based.

Writings and edition

Leibniz mainly wrote in three languages: scholastic Latin, French and German. During his lifetime, he published many pamphlets and scholarly articles, but only two "philosophical" books, the Combinatorial Art and the Théodicée. (He published numerous pamphlets, often anonymous, on behalf of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, most notably the "De jure suprematum" a major consideration of the nature of sovereignty.) One substantial book appeared posthumously, his Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain, which Leibniz had withheld from publication after the death of John Locke. Only in 1895, when Bodemann completed his catalogues of Leibniz's manuscripts and correspondence, did the enormous extent of Leibniz's Nachlass become clear: about 15,000 letters to more than 1000 recipients plus more than 40,000 other items. Moreover, quite a few of these letters are of essay length. Much of his vast correspondence, especially the letters dated after 1685, remains unpublished, and much of what is published has been so only in recent decades. The amount, variety, and disorder of Leibniz's writings are a predictable result of a situation he described in a letter as follows:

I cannot tell you how extraordinarily distracted and spread out I am. I am trying to find various things in the archives; I look at old papers and hunt up unpublished documents. From these I hope to shed some light on the history of the [House of] Brunswick. I receive and answer a huge number of letters. At the same time, I have so many mathematical results, philosophical thoughts, and other literary innovations that should not be allowed to vanish that I often do not know where to begin.

The extant parts of the critical edition of Leibniz's writings are organized as follows:

Series 1. Political, Historical, and General Correspondence. 21 vols., 1666–1701.

Series 2. Philosophical Correspondence. 1 vol., 1663–85.

Series 3. Mathematical, Scientific, and Technical Correspondence. 6 vols., 1672–96.

Series 4. Political Writings. 6 vols., 1667–98.

Series 5. Historical and Linguistic Writings. Inactive.

Series 6. Philosophical Writings. 7 vols., 1663–90, and Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain.

Series 7. Mathematical Writings. 3 vols., 1672–76.

Series 8. Scientific, Medical, and Technical Writings. In preparation.

The systematic cataloguing of all of Leibniz's Nachlass began in 1901. It was hampered by two world wars, the Nazi dictatorship (with the Holocaust, which affected a Jewish employee of the project, and other personal consequences), and decades of German division (two states with the cold war's "iron curtain" in between, separating scholars and also scattering portions of his literary estates). The ambitious project has had to deal with seven languages contained in some 200,000 pages of written and printed paper. In 1985 it was reorganized and included in a joint program of German federal and state (Länder) academies. Since then the branches in Potsdam, Münster, Hannover and Berlin have jointly published 25 volumes of the critical edition, with an average of 870 pages, and prepared index and concordance works.

Selected works

The year given is usually that in which the work was completed, not of its eventual publication.

1666. De Arte Combinatoria (On the Art of Combination); partially translated in Loemker §1 and Parkinson (1966).

1671. Hypothesis Physica Nova (New Physical Hypothesis); Loemker §8.I (partial).

1673 Confessio philosophi (A Philosopher's Creed); an English translation is available.

1684. Nova methodus pro maximis et minimis (New method for maximums and minimums); translated in Struik, D. J., 1969. A Source Book in Mathematics, 1200–1800. Harvard University Press: 271–81.

1686. Discours de métaphysique; Martin and Brown (1988), Ariew and Garber 35, Loemker §35, Wiener III.3, Woolhouse and Francks 1. An online translation by Jonathan Bennett is available.

1703. Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire (Explanation of Binary Arithmetic); Gerhardt, Mathematical Writings VII.223. An online translation by Lloyd Strickland is available.

1710. Théodicée; Farrer, A.M., and Huggard, E.M., trans., 1985 (1952). Wiener III.11 (part). An online translation is available at Project Gutenberg.

1714. Monadologie; translated by Nicholas Rescher, 1991. The Monadology: An Edition for Students. University of Pittsburg Press. Ariew and Garber 213, Loemker §67, Wiener III.13, Woolhouse and Francks 19. Online translations: Jonathan Bennett's translation; Latta's translation; French, Latin and Spanish edition, with facsimile of Leibniz's manuscript.

1765. Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain; completed in 1704. Remnant, Peter, and Bennett, Jonathan, trans., 1996. New Essays on Human Understanding. Cambridge University Press. Wiener III.6 (part). An online translation by Jonathan Bennett is available.

Collections

Five important collections of English translations are Wiener (1951), Loemker (1969), Ariew and Garber (1989), Woolhouse and Francks (1998), and Strickland (2006). The ongoing critical edition of all of Leibniz's writings is Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe.

See also

General Leibniz rule

German inventors and discoverers

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Scientific Community

Leibniz formula for π

Leibniz formula for determinants

Leibniz harmonic triangle

Leibniz integral rule for differentiation under the integral sign

Leibniz test

Leibniz's notation

Leibniz operator

Leibniz–Clarke correspondence

Newton v. Leibniz calculus controversy

Scientific Revolution

Stepped Reckoner – mechanical calculator

Notes

References

Primary literature

Alexander, H G (ed) The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956.

Ariew, R & D Garber, 1989. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays. Hackett.

Arthur, Richard, 2001. The Labyrinth of the Continuum: Writings on the Continuum Problem, 1672–1686. Yale University Press.

Cohen, Claudine and Wakefield, Andre, 2008. Protogaea. University of Chicago Press.

Cook, Daniel, and Rosemont, Henry Jr., 1994. Leibniz: Writings on China. Open Court.

Loemker, Leroy, 1969 (1956). Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters. Reidel.

Remnant, Peter, and Bennett, Jonathan, 1996 (1981). Leibniz: New Essays on Human Understanding. Cambridge University Press.

Riley, Patrick, 1988. Leibniz: Political Writings. Cambridge University Press.

Sleigh, Robert C., Look, Brandon, and Stam, James, 2005. Confessio Philosophi: Papers Concerning the Problem of Evil, 1671–1678. Yale University Press.

Strickland, Lloyd, 2006. The Shorter Leibniz Texts: A Collection of New Translations. Continuum.

Wiener, Philip, 1951. Leibniz: Selections. Scribner.

Woolhouse, R.S., and Francks, R., 1998. Leibniz: Philosophical Texts. Oxford University Press.

Secondary literature

Adams, Robert Merrihew. Lebniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist. New York: Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994.

Aiton, Eric J., 1985. Leibniz: A Biography. Hilger (UK).

Antognazza, M.R.(2008) Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Albeck-Gidron, Rachel, The Century of the Monads: Leibniz's Metaphysics and 20th-Century Modernity, Bar-Ilan University Press.

Bos, H. J. M. (1974) "Differentials, higher-order differentials and the derivative in the Leibnizian calculus," Arch. History Exact Sci. 14: 1—90.

Couturat, Louis, 1901. La Logique de Leibniz. Paris: Felix Alcan.

Davis, Martin, 2000. The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing. WW Norton.

Deleuze, Gilles, 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. University of Minnesota Press.

Du Bois-Reymond, Paul, 18nn. "Leibnizian Thoughts in Modern Science".

Finster, Reinhard & Gerd van den Heuvel. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. 4. Auflage. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2000 (Rowohlts Monographien, 50481), ISBN 3-499-50481-2.

Grattan-Guinness, Ivor, 1997. The Norton History of the Mathematical Sciences. W W Norton.

Hall, A. R., 1980. Philosophers at War: The Quarrel between Newton and Leibniz. Cambridge University Press.

Heidegger, Martin, 1983. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Indiana University Press.

Hirano, Hideaki, 1997. "Cultural Pluralism And Natural Law." Unpublished.

Hostler, J., 1975. Leibniz's Moral Philosophy. UK: Duckworth.

Jolley, Nicholas, ed., 1995. The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz. Cambridge University Press.

LeClerc, Ivor, ed., 1973. The Philosophy of Leibniz and the Modern World. Vanderbilt University Press.

Lovejoy, Arthur O., 1957 (1936) "Plenitude and Sufficient Reason in Leibniz and Spinoza" in his The Great Chain of Being. Harvard University Press: 144–82. Reprinted in Frankfurt, H. G., ed., 1972. Leibniz: A Collection of Critical Essays. Anchor Books.

Mandelbrot, Benoît, 1977. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. Freeman.

Mates, Benson, 1986. The Philosophy of Leibniz: Metaphysics and Language. Oxford University Press.

Mercer, Christia, 2001. Leibniz's metaphysics: Its Origins and Development. Cambridge University Press.

Morris, Simon Conway, 2003. Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Cambridge University Press.

Perkins, Franklin, 2004. Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light. Cambridge University Press.

Rensoli, Lourdes, 2002. El problema antropologico en la concepcion filosofica de G. W. Leibniz. Leibnitius Politechnicus. Universidad Politecnica de Valencia.

Riley, Patrick, 1996. Leibniz's Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise. Harvard University Press.

Rutherford, Donald, 1998. Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature. Cambridge University Press.

Struik, D. J., 1969. A Source Book in Mathematics, 1200–1800. Harvard University Press.

Ward, P. D., and Brownlee, D., 2000. Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe. Springer Verlag.

Wilson, Catherine, 1989. 'Leibniz's Metaphysics''. Princeton University Press.

Zalta, E. N., 2000. "A (Leibnizian) Theory of Concepts", Philosophiegeschichte und logische Analyse / Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy 3: 137–183.

External links

An extensive bibliography

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Leibniz" Douglas Burnham.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Articles on Leibniz.

George MacDonald Ross, Leibniz, Originally published: Oxford University Press (Past Masters) 1984; Electronic edition: Leeds Electronic Text Centre July 2000

translations by Jonathan Bennett, of the New Essays, the exchanges with Bayle, Arnauld and Clarke, and about 15 shorter works.

Leibnitiana Gregory Brown.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Texts and Translations, compiled by Donald Rutherford, UCSD

Leibniz-translations.com Scroll down for many Leibniz links.

Gottfried Leibniz Archives

Leibniz Prize.

Philosophical Works of Leibnitz translated by G.M. Duncan

Leibnitiana, links and resources compiled by Gregory Brown, University of Houston.

Leibnizian Resources, many links organized by Markku Roinila, University of Helsinki.

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