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Gottfried Leibniz

Gottfried Leibniz. By: Kat Gonzalez. Biography. Gottfried Leibniz was born on July 1, 1646 in Leipzig, Saxony. Leibniz earned his master’s degree in philosophy on February 7, 1664.

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Gottfried Leibniz

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  1. Gottfried Leibniz By: Kat Gonzalez

  2. Biography • Gottfried Leibniz was born on July 1, 1646 in Leipzig, Saxony. • Leibniz earned his master’s degree in philosophy on February 7, 1664. • He published a dissertation Specimen QuaestionumPhilosophicarum ex Jure collectarum, arguing for both a theoretical and a pedagogical relationship between philosophy and law. After one year of legal studies, he was awarded his bachelor's degree in Law on 28 September 1665.

  3. In 1666, Leibniz published his first book, On the Art of Combinations, the first part of which was also his habilitation thesis in philosophy. • Leibniz earned his license to practice law and his Doctorate in Law in November of 1666.

  4. Beliefs • Identity/contradiction: If a proposition is true, then its negation is false and vice versa. • 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."

  5. 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.

  6. 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."

  7. Optimism: "God assuredly always chooses the best." • Continuity: 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.

  8. 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.

  9. The Théodicée tries to justify the imperfections of the world by saying 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.”

  10. 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

  11. Famous Quote • “We live in the best of all possible worlds"

  12. Metaphor • “Bodies, for example, fail to have inherent unity, but we do represent them as being single and unified objects much as we represent a rainbow as being one thing when it is in fact merely the result of the refraction of light through innumerable water droplets. But just as the rainbow results from the presence of genuine unities, so do the bodies of the natural world result from the presence of the genuine simple substances.”

  13. bib • Bell, E.t. "Gottfried Leibniz's Life and Work." Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Archives - Free Access to Documentation about Leibniz (1646/1716), the Celebrated German Polymath, Universal Genius - Gottfried Leibniz's Life and Work. Web. 22 Feb. 2011. <http://www.gottfriedleibniz.com/>. • "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web. 22 Feb. 2011. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/>. • "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz." The Metaphysics Research Lab. Web. 22 Feb. 2011. <http://mally.stanford.edu/leibniz.html>. • "Leibniz Biography." MacTutor History of Mathematics. Web. 22 Feb. 2011. <http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Leibniz.html>.

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