In 1666, at the age of 20, he published his habilitation thesis and first book, "De Arte Combinatoria" ( "On the Art of Combinations"), in which he aimed to reduce all reasoning and discovery to a combination of basic elements (such as numbers, letters, sounds and colours). At 14, he entered the University of Leipzig, mastering the standard university courses in classics, law, Logic, and Scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy under Jakob Thomasius (1622 - 1684), although his education in mathematics was probably not up to the French and British standards. However, his father, who had been a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Leipzig, left his personal library to his son, who was granted free access to it from age seven onwards, in addition to attending the regular Nicolai School in Leipzig.īy twelve, he had taught himself Latin, which he used freely all his life, and had begun studying Greek. His father, Friedrich Leibniz, died when Gottfried was just six years old, so he mainly learned his religious and moral values from his mother, Catherina Schmuck (the daughter of a lawyer and Friedrich's third wife). Leibniz (pronounced LIBE-nitz) was born on 1 July 1646 in Leipzig in Saxony, eastern Germany. He also made major contributions to physics, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in other sciences biology, medicine, geology, probability theory, psychology, linguistics and information science, as well as writing on politics, law, ethics, theology, history and philology. He is equally important in the history of mathematics, as the inventor of calculus (independently of Sir Isaac Newton), and as the discoverer of the binary system (the foundation of virtually all modern computer architectures). His contributions to Logic were perhaps the most important between Aristotle and the developments in modern formal Logic of the mid-19th Century, and to some extent he anticipated modern Symbolic Logic. He remained a devout Christian throughout his life and his formulation of the Problem of Evil in a world created by a good God was an influential one. He devised his rather eccentric metaphysical theory of monads operating in a pre-established divine harmony in order to overcome what he saw as some of the drawbacks of the theories of Descartes and Spinoza. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (also Leibnitz or von Leibniz) (1646 - 1716) was a German philosopher, mathematician, scientist and polymath of the Age of Reason.Īs a philosopher, he was, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, a major figure in the Continental Rationalism movement (the main 17th Century opposition to the British Empiricist school of thought of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume). (Painting by Bernhard Christoph Francke, c. By Individual Philosopher > Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
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