Leibniz: A Very Short Introduction

Description

This Very Short Introduction considers who Leibniz was and introduces his overarching intellectual vision. It follows his pursuit of the systematic reform and advancement of all the sciences, to be undertaken as a collaborative enterprise supported by an enlightened ruler, and his ultimate goal of the improvement of the human condition.

• Introduces the German polymath and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and discusses his philosophy, and how his intellectual visions were shaped by his own experiences in life
• Discusses Leibniz's great master project, the systematic reform and advancement of all the sciences, to be undertaken as a collaborative enterprise supported by an enlightened ruler, with the goal of the improvement of the human condition and the celebration thereby of the glory of God in His creation
• Uncovers what it was, for Leibniz, to be a substance, and how this conception informed his doctrine of simple substances (or monads), and his theory of corporeal substances and bodies
• Examines Leibniz's philosophy as the product of a multi-layered conversation with centuries of past thought and hundreds of individuals of his own era, whose insights were reshaped and remodelled into a strikingly original outlook
• Part of the Very Short Introductions series - over seven million copies sold worldwide

About the Author(s)

Maria Rosa Antognazza, Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, King's College London

Maria Rosa Antognazza is Professor of Philosophy at Kings College London. She has held research and visiting fellowships in Italy, Germany, Israel, Great Britain, and the USA, including a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (1997-2000) and a two-year research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2003-5). She is the author of Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Leibniz on the Trinity and the Incarnation: Reason and Revelation in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2007). She is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Leibniz (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), has published numerous contributions on seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophy, and has edited texts by Leibniz, J. H. Alsted, and H. Grotius.

Table of Contents

1:Who was Leibniz?
2:Characteristica universalis, logical calculus, and mathematics
3:Encyclopaedia, Scientia Generalis, and the Academies of Sciences
4:Possible worlds, the principle of non-contradiction, and the principle of sufficient reason
5:Complete-concept theory, theory of truth, and theory of knowledge
6:The best of all possible worlds and Leibniz's theodicy
7:What is ultimately real - unity and activity
8:Monads
9:Monads, corporeal substances, and bodies
Conclusion
References
Further Reading
Index