Anne Conway’s Place: A Map of Leibniz

The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, 1994

Leibniz claimed to be proud of the fact that, during his lifetime, he had no school, no disciples, and no popularizers. He despised, he said, the sectarian spirit which he associated with the Cartesians. Whether this attitude did not hide a kind of disappointment in the end is open to question. Leibniz was widely admired as a diplomat, a man of learning, and as a mathematician. But he was not, during his lifetime and long afterwards, considered a great philosopher, and after the deaths of Sophie Charlotte, the Queen of Prussia, in 1705, and her moth,er, the Ellectress Sophie, in 1714, no one showed an intense interest in his metaphysical theories. The dispute with Newton and the Royal Society, followed by the increasingly agitated argument with Newton's representative Samuel Clarke, threw a pall over Leibniz's last two years. Newton, never a gracious opponent, is said to have boasted that he killed Leibniz. This is hardly true; Leibniz had outlived most of his contemporaries and had been unwell for a long time, but his exit from the world was certainly agitated rather than peaceful. He was out of favor with his employer, the Elector of Hanover Brunswick, who became George I of England in I 7 I 4, for having failed to bring the royal family's history beyond the year 100s. Shortly after Leibniz's death, rumors and gossip about his religious insincerity were spread through France and Germany by the clergyman Christian Matthaeus Pfaff.

2012

2008

In 1714, Leibniz makes a striking pronouncement about the relation between the explicit claims of a philosopher and the underlying sources of those claims. He says that in order to understand the intellectual ‘discoveries’ of others, it is often necessary ‘to detect the source of their invention’. Historians of philosophy have missed much about Leibniz’s ‘discoveries’ because they have not identified the sources of his philosophical ‘inventions’.

2014

In February 1676, one of Leibniz's main concerns is with the problem of the seat of the soul and its relationship with the body, to which, in two very short papers, he provides two different solutions: the doctrine of the flos substantiae and the vortex theory. By analyzing the former, I suggest that, despite what other scholars claim, it is far from being an earlier exposition of the notion of monad. I argue that this doctrine is entertained by Leibniz only for a period, but is rejected later on and excluded from the final monadic system. This hypothesis seems to be supported by the shift to the notion of a vortex, which-despite having some evident pantheistic and monistic implications-offers a different solution to the problem of mind-body union, by identifying the soul as the only cement of matter. In this article, by following the progress of such a shift, we discover some fascinating nuances in the young Leibniz's development. Among the thirty-one pieces collected by the Editors of the Academy under the heading De Summa Rerum, two are explicitly devoted by Leibniz to the problem of the seat of the soul and the mind-body relationship: De Sede Animae (A, VI-3, 478-9) 1 and De Unione Animae et Corporis (A, VI-3, 480). Both written in February 1676, these texts are a cluster of ideas as brief as they are interesting, not only because they offer a quick review of Leibniz's interests and intellectual relationships at that time, but also because they represent a shift (one of many) in the development of the young Leibniz's reflections. The pages of these two works show that he meets Christian Knorr von Rosenroth and Claude Perrault, and that he reads Athanasius Kircher,

Rodríguez-Hurtado, R. (2016). From 1670 to 1680, the concept of perspective in Leibniz’s thought. In Wenchao Li & et all. (Eds), Für unser Glück oder das Glück anderer, vol. III (pp. 323-334). Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag., 2016

Cambridge University Press eBooks, 1996

Small •dots• enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis. .. . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions are reported within [brackets] in normal-sized type.-This work was posthumously published in a Latin translation, and the original (English) manuscript was lost; so the Latin is all we have to work with.-The division into chapters and sections is presumably Lady Conway's; the titles of chapters 2-9 are not.

Routledge eBooks, 2019

As Fontenelle (1812, 137) wrote in his eulogy of Leibniz of 1717: "It would be pointless to say that Mr Leibniz was a mathematician of the first rank, [since] it is through mathematics that he is most generally known." 2 For the influence of Leibniz's mathematics, see especially Krömer and Chin-Drian 2012. Amongst his contemporaries, Leibniz's insights clearly inspired the works of the Bernoullis (Jakob and his younger brother Johann) and also Jakob's nephew Daniel Bernoulli, himself a contemporary of one of the greatest mathematicians of the eighteenth century, Leonhard Euler. Basel born and bred, Euler would join the academies in Berlin and then Saint Petersburg to develop amongst other, the variational calculus which optimizes for functions, not for points. In France there are at least two significant figures, Émilie du Châtelet (1706-1749) and Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783), a mathematician, mechanician and physicist who repeatedly referred to Leibniz in his Encyclopédie [Encyclopedia], with entries amongst others on Action (I, 119-20), Binary Arithmetic (I, 680),

The Leibniz Review, 2020

Reviewed by Markku Roinila, University of Helsinki L eibniz's Legacy and Impact is a most welcome addition to our understanding of the influence of the universal genius. The volume reaches far beyond Leibniz's immediate impact and gives us valuable information on how his ideas influenced various fields of science. We even get to see what Leibniz's impact on future science might be 304 years after he passed on. It is standard practice for introductory textbooks and article collections on Leibniz to include a chapter about his legacy, often reflecting the interests of the commentator in question. As an example one might mention the relatively recent book by Richard Arthur, 1 in which Leibnizian posterity is discussed especially from the point of view of physics and mathematics. A different focus can be found in Nicholas Jolley's Leibniz, where the author approaches the topic from a metaphysical point of view. 2 An earlier account by Catherine Wilson is centered on Leibniz's immediate impact on Eighteenth-Century French and German discussions. 3 Finally, it is interesting that recent German introductions to Leibniz's philosophy, such as those by Michael-Thomas Liske 4 and Hans Poser, 5 include chapters on reception in which contemporary philosophy is emphasized (Poser's chapter is titled "Leibniz Today"). While these different accounts complement each in other in a fruitful way, there have been few general, book-length accounts of Leibniz's impact and legacy apart from some conference proceedings. This is unfortunate because Leibniz's central role in the scientific enterprises of his time is interesting not only to Leibniz scholars, but also to scholars of early modern philosophy and historians of science. Part of the reason may be that it is almost impossible to take into account all of the different aspects of the polymath, and consequently the book will inevitably be incomplete. Such is the case with this book as well. However, I think it can be said that this volume includes an extraordinary breadth within unity, for the topics range from mathematics to ecology and the timeline extends from Leibniz's youth to our time and beyond. The introduction by the editors is excellent, giving a more substantial take on results than is often the case in article collections and covering the challenges regarding the assessment of Leibniz's impact very well. It is clear that the biggest