Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

1646-1716 · German · Metaphysics, Epistemology, Logic, Philosophy of Religion

This is the best of all possible worlds — for God, being supremely wise and good, could have chosen no other.

Born in Leipzig in 1646, just as the Thirty Years' War wound to a close, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent his career not in a university but in the service of German princes — diplomat, jurist, librarian, historian to the House of Brunswick at Hanover. He co-invented the calculus independently of Newton. Almost none of his philosophy appeared in print; the system must be reconstructed from the Monadology, the Discourse on Metaphysics, and letters still being edited.

Topics Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz addresses

• monads
• pre-established harmony
• the principle of sufficient reason
• the identity of indiscernibles
• the best of all possible worlds
• the complete individual concept
• the predicate-in-subject theory of truth
• necessary and contingent truths
• contingency and infinite analysis
• theodicy
• the problem of evil
• metaphysical, physical, and moral evil
• well-founded phenomena
• the windowless monad and expression
• petites perceptions
• apperception
• space and time as relational
• the principle of continuity
• the principle of the best
• force and dynamics
• innate ideas and the critique of Locke
• the reality of bodies and corporeal substance
• the vinculum substantiale
• human and divine freedom

Converse with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.