Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

1. German philosopher, mathematician, historian and jurist, contemporary of Newton (1642-1727), who left behind no philosophical outstanding works, but who is still considered to be among the giant thinkers of the 17th-century. Leibniz believed in "pre-established harmony" between matter and maid, and developed a philosophy of Rationalism by which he attempted to reconcile the existence of matter with the existence of God. Bertrand Russel wrote that Leibniz's intellect "was highly abstract and logical; his greatest claim to fame is as an inventor of the infinitesimal calculus."

2. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in Leipzig as the son of a professor of moral philosophy. He received his Master’s degree from the University of Leipzig at the age of 18 and his doctorate in law at Altdorf in 1667. Leibniz preferred a courtly to an academic career and in 1669 he entered the service of the elector of Mainz.

3. In 1675 Leibniz made his most important scientific discovery, the differential and integral calculus, which became the basis for modern mathematics. The discovery resulted in a controversy with Isaac Newton over whether he or Newton was the inventor. Nowadays it is generally agreed that they both discovered the basic foundations of the calculus independently, Newton first, but Leibniz's publication preceded that of Newton. Leibniz's system of notation is superior to that of Newton, and is still in use today. Newton's absolute space also was something Leibniz could not accept: "I hold space to be something merely relative, for space denotes, in terms of possibility, an order to things which exist at the same time, considered as existing together."

4. He died in Hanover in 1716 embittered by ill health, plagued with gout, under secret surveillance, neglected, and almost all his works unpublished. His death was not much noted by the academies of which he was a member. Neither Leibniz's two philosophical books, the New Essays on Human Understanding (c. 1705) and Theodicy (1710), gave to wide audience a complete account of his thinking. They only showed the tip of the iceberg. His work in symbolic logic was not resurrected until the twentieth century.