Leibniz: Philosophy in an Hour. Paul Strathern

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       Leibniz’s Life and Works

      His life began, seriously enough, on July 1, 1646, in Leipzig. Three years later came the end of the Thirty Years War, which had swept through Europe and left Germany in a state of devastation. This catastrophe was to cast its shadows over the European political scene for decades to come, in much the same way that the shades of World War II have only recently begun to fade in Eastern Europe.

      Leibniz’s father, Friedrich Leibnütz, was professor of moral philosophy at Leipzig University. His mother, Catherina, nee Schmuck, was Friedrich’s third wife. Their son was christened Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnütz (he was to change the spelling of his family name at the age of twenty). When Leibniz was just five years old his father died, leaving him and a sister to be brought up by their mother. According to all reports Catherina was a great believer in peace and harmony, who never spoke ill of anyone. Normally one would look upon this as a bit of the usual mythology. But in this case it must have been true. Leibniz was deeply affected by his mother and retained these very characteristics of hers to the end of his days. Despite everything (and this everything was to be quite something), Leibniz’s life was deeply harmonious. His long-term secretary Eckhart records that he never heard him speak ill of anyone. Leibniz’s philosophy too is permeated with a deep sense of harmony, and his lifelong political endeavours were invariably motivated by an attempt to bring harmony to the European scene.

      Leibniz did go to school but said that most of his education was conducted at home, reading through his father’s library. He always claimed that he was self-taught, and it shows, even at this supreme level of genius. As a boy he read obsessively, following his train of thought as the fancy took him – until the entire floor of the library and all the tables and chairs were covered with opened books. The boy is all too recognizable in the man. In adult life Leibniz was capable of hatching half a dozen brilliant crackpot schemes in a week. These could range from a submarine to an entirely new form of clock, from a revolutionary lantern to a coach as fast as a modern car (when the roads were still only rutted tracks), from a horizontal windmill to a machine for measuring good and evil – none of which would ever be finished. Eat your heart out, Leonardo.

      By the age of fourteen Leibniz was ready to take on the University of Leipzig. Here he studied law, quickly expanding his studies to include all possible interpretations of this subject, including the laws of physics, the laws of philosophy, the laws of mathematics, and almost the entire political concept and history of law. It was during this period that Leibniz first came across the writings of such celebrated lawyers as Galileo, Descartes, and Hobbes, who were revolutionizing scientific, philosophical, and political thought. Characteristically, Leibniz soon conceived the idea of harmonizing all this radical thought with the Scholasticism that it was in the process of replacing. In his spare time Leibniz became an avid student of alchemy (with the aim of reconciling it to chemistry), and he also wrote a paper that set out the theoretical basis for a computer (almost three hundred years before Turing’s seminal work on this subject).

      By the time Leibniz had finished all this he was almost twenty, but when he applied for a degree the university told him he was too young. Having been found deficient in the one СКАЧАТЬ