German philosopher, mathematician, historian and jurist, contemporary of Newton (1642-1727), who left behind no philosophical magnum opus, but who is still considered to be among the giant thinkers of the 17th-century. Leibniz believed in "pre-established harmony" between matter and maid, and developed a philosophy of Rationalism by which he attempted to reconcile the existence of matter with the existence of God. Bertrand Russel wrote that Leibniz's intellect "was highly abstract and logical; his greatest claim to fame is as an inventor of the infinitesimal calculus."

…if we were able to understand sufficiently well the order of the universe, we should find that it surpasses all the desires of the wisest of us, and that it is impossible to render it better than it is, not only for all in general, but also for each one of us in particular… (from The Monadology, 1714)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in Leipzig as the son of a professor of moral philosophy. He received his masters degree from the University of Leipzig at the age of 18 and his doctorate in law at Altdorf in 1667. Leibniz preferred a courtly to and academich career and in 1669 he entered into the service of the elector of Mainz. Some years later he traveled to Paris to try to persuade Louis XIV to expel the Turks from Egypt in order to distract his attention from marching on Holland. The ploy did not work.

In 1675 Leibniz made his most important scientific discovery, the differential and integral calculus which became the basis for modern mathematic. The discovery resulted in a controversy with Isaac Newton over whether he or Newton was the inventor. Nowadays it is generally agreed that they both discovered the basic foundations the calculus independently, Newton first but Leibniz's publication prededed that of Newton. Leibniz's system of notation is superior to that of Newton, and is still in use today. Newton's absolute space also was something Leibniz could not accept: "I hold space to be something merely relative, as time is; . . . For space denotes, in terms of possibility, an order to things which exist at the same time, considered as existing together."

"Just what would Newton have lost if he had acknowledged Leibniz's originality? Absolutely nothing! He would have gained a lot. And yet, how hard it is to acknowledge something of this sort: someone who tires it feels as though he were confessing his own incapacity. Only people who hold you in esteem and at the same time love you can make it easy for you to behave like this." (Ludwig Wittgenstein in Culture and Value, 1979)

After spending time in London and Paris in diplomatic appointments Leibniz became in 1676 librarian to the Duke of Brunswick at Hanover, a position which he retained until his death. In Hanover he had to adjust to the fact that he was not any more living in centers of fashionable scientific and philosophical thought. One of his duties was to prepare a history of the house of Brunswick. In the late 1680s he traveled to Austria and Italy to collect source material for his work. The history was not published until 1843. In 1700 Leibniz planned the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin and was its first president. Unpopular with George Luis of Hanover, Leibniz was not permitted to go to England, when the Elector moved his court to London as George I.

Leibniz never married. He died in Hanover in 1716 embittered by ill health, plagued with gout, under secret surveillance, neglected, and almost all his works unpublished. His death was not much noted by the academies of which he was a member. Neither Leibniz's two philosophical books, the New Essays on Human Understanding (c. 1705) and Theodicy (1710), gave to wide audience a complete account of his thinking. They only showed the tip of the iceberg. His work in symbolic logic was not resurrected until the twentieth century. Leibniz's philosophical works, DIE PHILOSOPHISCHEN SCHRIFTEN, were published in 1857-90 (7 vols., ed. by C.I. Gerhardt). WERKE (1864-84, 11 vols.), edited by Onno Klopp, included Leibniz's historial and political works. Mathematical works were published in MATEMATISCHE SCHRIFTEN (1849-63, 7 vols.).

Leibniz was a convinced advocate of a Eurasian policy and published a collection of documents on China (Novissima Sinica, 1679). He saw that China was better than Europe in the elegance of life, but Europe was ahead in abstract mathematical sciences and metaphysics. When Father Joachim Bouvet, who had been in China, wrote Leibniz a letter in which he described the I Ching, an ancient book of wisdom and oracles, he recognized in the enigmatic hexagrams representations of his binary digits. To demonstrate this he wrote Explication de l'arithmétique binaire (1705). "The I Ching was important for its divinatory contents, but for Leibniz it becomes further evidence in proving the universal value of his formal calculus (and in a letter to Father Bouvet he suggests that its inventor was Hermes Trismegistus; as a matter of fact, Fu-hsi, the legendary inventor of the hexagrams, like Hermes was considered the father of all inventions)." (Umberto Eco in Serendipities, 1999)

Along with many Germans of his age, Leibniz wrote mostly in Latin and French. During his lifetime he was a very public figure, described by George I of England as a "walking encyclopedia." He wrote bad, formalistic poems, which were not openly slaughtered by critics. Most personally Leibniz expressed himself in letters. At that time in the small intellectual world, Catholics and Protestants changed ideas through incessant correspondence in mutual respect, which prepared way to the Enlightenment. Leibniz himself tried to formulate a sound philosophical and theological basis for church reunions projects which arose occasionally. He had a lifelong interest in alchemy, and his system, complex and forbidding, has been seen to resemble in some ways mystical or Kabbalistic accounts of reality.

In his Monadologie (1714) Leibniz maintained that the divine order of the universe is reflected in each of its parts, each part being called a monad, a term that means 'unit' or 'unity' - or a counterpart of atom. Monads are incorporeal automata and adre called by Leibniz "entelechies": "There is a world of created beings - living things, animals, entelechies and souls - in the least part of matter. Each portion of matter may be conceived as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish. But every branch of each plant, every member of each animal, and every drop of their liquid parts is itself likewise a similar garden or pond." Leibniz concluded that there must be an infinite number of substances, monads. They are not material particles and the only way in which two monads can differ is in having different properties. The whole range of monads can be divided into stages from inanimate world to rational minds. This idea he had formulated in other words in a letter to Burcher De Volder: "Considering matters accurately, it must be said that there is nothing in things except simple substances, and, in them, nothing but perception and appetite. Moreover, matter and motion are not so much substances or things as they are the phenomena of percipient beings, the reality of which is located in the harmony of each percipient with itself (with respect to different times) and with other percipients."

Rational monads are capable of self-consciousness, but because their position in the universe is fixed (i.e. there is no choice of action), there is no such thing as free will. Evil exist, but only to accentuate goodness, one cannot be without the other. Each monad perceives all the other monads more or less clearly, but only God perceives all monads with utter clarity. God have pre-established a harmony between the monads, and the world that these monads compose is the best possible. God is all-powerful and morally perfect, hence, of necessity, whatever possible world created by God is the best possible world. Whatever states of affairs obtain in it, they do so of necessity. It has often been said, that Leibniz's optimism was later ridiculed by Voltaire in Candide (1759), but the real target was possibly Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759), a philosopher and scientist, whose writings attracted wide attention at that time. In Candide, after guiding his protagonist through a number of disasters, Voltaire showed justifiable the question that if God cannot make a better world that the one we know, is his powers or goodness limited? However, Leibniz intended a metaphysical concept that applied to a world of absolutely fixed, predeterminated order. From Candide's last remark, "We must cultivate our garden", one may conclude that Voltaire considered work far more profitable than metaphysical speculations. - "Whatever is, is right" - see Voltaire

Or, as poet Alexander Pope wrote:

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All change, direction which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good.

And, spite of pride, in erring reason spite,

One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

For further reading: Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, by Bertrand Russell (1900); Logic and Reality in Leibniz's Metaphysics by G.H.R. Parkinson (1965); The Philosophy of Leibniz by N. Rescher (1967); Leibniz: A Collection of Critical Essays by H. Frankfurt (1972); Leibniz's Philosophy of Logic and Language by H. Ishiguro (1972); Leibniz, ed. by R.S. Woodhouse (1981); Leibnitz by S. Brown (1984); Leibniz by G.M. Ross (1984); The Philosophy of Leibnitz by B. Mates (1986); Leibniz: Language, Signs and Thought by Marcelo Dascal (1987); G.W. Leibniz's Monadology: An Edition for Students by G.W. Leibniz, Nicholas Rescher (1991); The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque by Gilles Deleuze (1992); A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz: With an Appendix of Leading Passages by Bertrand Arthur Russell, John G. Slater (1993); The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, ed. by Nicholas Jolley (1994, paperback); Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature by Donald Rutherford (1995); Leibniz's Universal Jurisprudence by Patrick Riley (1996); Leibniz's 'New System' and Associated Contemporary Texts, ed. by Richard Francks (1997); Liebniz: Representation, Continuity, and the Spatio-Temporal by Dionysios Anapolitanos (1998); The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written by Martin Seymour-Smith (1998); The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing by Martin Davis (2000) - Leibniz's law: If one thing is identical with another the anything that is true of the one must also be true of the other.

English translations:

* De Summa Rerum: Metaphysical Paper, 1675-1676

* The Monadology and other Philosophical writings, 1898

* Leibniz' Discourse on Metaphysics, 1902

* The Philosophical Works of Leibniz, 1908

* New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, 1916

* Philosophical Writings, 1934

* Selections, 1951

* Theodicy, 1952

* Discourse on Metaphysics, 1953

* Philosophical Papers and Letters, 1956

* The Age of Reason (chap. 7), 1956

* The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, 1956

* Logical Papers, 1966

* New Essays on Human Understanding, 1981