Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

  Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz (1646-1716), a German philosopher, mathematician, and political adviser, was important as a metaphysician, a logician, and distinguished also for his independent invention of differential and integral calculus.
  Leibniz sought to reconcile his era’s "modern" thinkers, such as Galileo, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and René Descartes with the Aristotle of the Scholastics. His baccalaureate thesis, On the Principle of the Individual, emphasized the existential value of the individual, who is not to be explained either by matter or by form alone but rather by his whole being (entitate tota). This notion was the first germ of what became Leibniz’s future "monad."
  In 1666, Leibniz wrote 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. His research led him to situate the soul in a point — new progress toward the monad — and to develop the principle of sufficient reason (nothing occurs without a reason). His meditations on the difficult theory of the point were related to problems encountered in optics, space, and movement. He asserted, as did Johannes Kepler’s theory, that movement depends on the action of a spirit (God).
  Leibniz, beginning with the principle that light follows the path of least resistance, believed that he could demonstrate the ordering of nature toward a final goal or cause. He continued to perfect his metaphysical system through research into his belief in a universal cause of all being, attempting to arrive at a starting point that would reduce reasoning to an "algebra of thought." His noted Reflections on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas defined his theory of knowledge: there is an analogy, a strict relation, between God’s ideas and man’s, an identity between God’s logic and man’s.

“There is an analogy, a strict relation, between God’s ideas and man’s,
an identity between God’s logic and man’s.”

  Leibniz’s views included a generalization concerning propositions that in every true affirmative proposition, whether necessary or contingent, the predicate is contained in the notion of the subject. This notion seemed to imply determinism and thus to undermine human freedom — as did Leibniz’s conception of monads, the soul-like individual substances that make up the universe, as in a sense "containing" all of their pasts and futures. Leibniz’s solution was to argue that, even though each monad already contains all of its future actions, God can create those actions as "free."
  In 1695 Leibniz explained a portion of his dynamic theory of motion in the New System, which treated the relationship of substances and the preestablished harmony between the soul and the body: God does not need to bring about man’s action by means of his thoughts, or to wind some sort of watch in order to reconcile the two; rather, the Supreme Watchmaker has so exactly matched body and soul that they correspond—they give meaning to each other—from the beginning. In On the Ultimate Origin of Things, he developed a cosmological argument for the existence of God, attempting to prove that the ultimate origin of things can be none other than God.
  Leibniz’s Theodicy, published in 1710, set down his ideas on divine justice, particularly on the problem of evil, arguing that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds that God could have created. However, two of Leibniz’s works, Principles of Nature and Grace and his Monadology are his crowning achievements, strengthening the philosophical foundation of Idealism, and the monad as the ultimate ideal substance.

The Works of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Discourse on Metaphysics

Principles of Nature and Grace

Monadology

Theodicy

"Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz"
A scholarly article on Leibniz’s life and work by Brandon C. Look.

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