ABSTRACT
No thinker was ever more taken with the power of logic and no other scholar was more universally erudite than Go fried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). Equally at home in philosophy, history, theology, linguistics, biology, geology, mathematics, logic, law and diplomacy, he had set his heart on discovering a universal method for a aining reliable knowledge and understanding the nature of the cosmos. Thomas Hobbes’ (1588-1679) fl ash of insight that all thinking is calculating made a deep impression on
the young Leibniz, who went on to explore the possibility of a lingua characteristica universalis, a universal language informed by symbolic logic, which would make logical errors every bit as obvious as arithmetical errors.
