ABSTRACT
One of the greatest philosophers and mathematicians of the Western world, despite the fact that he was neither a professional philosopher like Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) nor a professional mathematician like Isaac Newton (1642-1727). For forty years, Leibniz was employed by the dukes of Hanover for a variety of tasks-legal, technological, historical, diplomatic, and theological-and as a librarian. His writings and activities cannot be easily separated along disciplinary lines because, just to mention a few examples, his metaphysics of space, time, and matter was related to the problem of transubstantiation and the reunion of the churches, a lifelong concern of Leibniz with profound implications for his views on logic and the problems of freedom and necessity. His theological plans for church reunion had clear political connotations, as did many of his technological projects and historical endeavors, and even his mathematics had connections with his natural philosophy, metaphysics, and theology. His binary system of arithmetic, for example, suggested an analogy with biblical Creation. The most challenging task for the Leibniz scholar is to master several historical disciplines, requiring high technical competence, without losing sight of their connections and of the complexity of the whole.
