ABSTRACT
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was born in Leipzig into a scholarly and noble family just before the end of the Thirty Years War (1618-48) that had torn apart the German states. His father was the Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Leipzig, and his mother was also from an academic family. Accordingly, Leibniz had a very broad education and throughout his life was active in a vast number of diverse intellectual areas. Much of his life was spent working in various official capacities in courts in Europe, including those in Paris, London and, for the greater part of his mature life, Hanover. Central to Leibniz’s philosophy was the project to reconcile religion,
ancient metaphysics and modern science. He was a major innovator in mathematics (inventing calculus at the same time as and independently of Newton) and logic (anticipating the type of “algebraic” formalisation of logic later developed in the nineteenth century), but importantly, he also sought to rework ancient Aristotelian and Platonic ideas such that they could be made compatible with the developing physical sciences. Here, his influence was central to the development of a conception of science in Continental Europe that differed from the more mechanistic tradition found in Britain. Many of his distinctive ideas about the nature of substances, and some of
the very peculiar consequences of these ideas, seem to be entailed by the logical conceptions he ultimately took from Aristotle and Plato. Kant’s later criticisms of Leibnizian metaphysics were, in turn, bound up with his criticisms of these logical conceptions.
