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LEIBNIZ, GOTTFRIED WILHELM (b. Leipzig,
Germany, 1 July 1646; d. Hannover, Germany,
14 November 1716), mathematics, philosophy, metaphysics.
Leibniz was the son of Friedrich Leibniz, who was
professor of moral philosophy and held various
administrative posts at the University of Leipzig.
His mother, Katherina Schmuck, was also from an
academic family. Although the Leibniz family was of
Slavonic origin, it had been established in the Leipzig
area for more than two hundred years, and three
generations had been in the service of the local
princes.
Leibniz attended the Nicolai school, where his
precocity led his teachers to attempt to confine him
to materials thought suitable to his age. A sympathetic
relative recognized his gifts and aptitude for self-instruction,
and on the death of Friedrich Leibniz,
in 1652, recommended that the boy be given unhampered
access to the library that his father had assembled.
By the time he was fourteen, Leibniz had thus
become acquainted with a wide range of classical,
scholastic, and even patristic writers, and had, in fact,
begun that omnivorous reading that was to be his
habit throughout his life. (Indeed, Leibniz' ability to
read almost anything led Fontenelle to remark of him
that he bestowed the honor of reading on a great mass
of bad books.)
At the age of fifteen Leibniz entered the University
of Leipzig, where he received most of his formal
education, although that institution was at that time
firmly entrenched in the Aristotelian tradition and did
little to encourage science. In 1663 he was for a brief
time a student at the University of Jena, where Erhard
Weigel first taught him to understand Euclidean
geometry. Leibniz continued his studies at Altdorf,
from which he received the doctorate in 1666, with a
dissertation entitled Disputatio de casibus perplexis. He
was invited to remain at that university, but chose
instead, during the second half of 1667, to undertake a
visit to Holland.
Leibniz reached Mainz, where, through the offices
of the statesman J. C. von Boyneburg, he met the
elector Johann Philipp von Schönborn, who asked him
into his service. Leibniz worked on general legal problems,
developed his program for legal reform of the
Holy Roman Empire, wrote (anonymously) a number
of position papers for the elector, and began a vast
correspondence that by 1671 had already brought him
into contact with the secretaries of the Royal Society
of London and the Paris Academy of Sciences, as
well as with Athanasius Kircher in Italy and Otto von
Guericke in Magdeburg. He also began work on his
calculating machine, a device designed to multiply and
divide by the mechanical repetition of adding or
subtracting. In 1671 Pierre de Carcavi, royal librarian
in Paris, asked Leibniz to send him this machine so
that it could be shown to Colbert. The machine was,
however, only in the design stage at that time (although
a model of it was built in 1672 and demonstrated to the
Academy three years later).
In the winter of 1671-1672, Leibniz and Boyneburg
set forth a plan to forestall French attacks on the
Rhineland. By its terms, Louis XIV was to conquer
Egypt, create a colonial empire in North Africa, and
build a canal across the isthmus of Suez—thereby
gratifying his imperial ambitions at no cost to the
Netherlands and the German states along the Rhine.
Leibniz was asked to accompany a diplomatic mission
to Paris to discuss this matter with the king. He never
met Louis, but he did immerse himself in the intellectual
and scientific life of Paris, forming a lifelong
friendship with Christiaan Huygens. He also met
Antoine Arnauld and Carcavi. The official mission
came to nothing, however, and in December 1672
Leibňiz' patron and collaborator Boyneburg died.
In January 1673 Leibniz went to London with a
mission to encourage peace negotiations between
England and the Netherlands; while there he became
acquainted with Oldenburg, Pell, Hooke, and Boyle,
and was elected to the Royal Society. The mission
was completed, but the elector Johann Philipp had
died, and his successor showed little interest in
continuing Leibniz' salary, especially since Leibniz
wanted to return to Paris. Leibniz arrived in the
French capital in March 1673, hoping to make a
sufficient reputation to obtain for himself a paid post
in the Academy of Sciences. Disappointed in this
ambition, he visited London briefly, where he saw
Oldenburg and Collins, and in October 1676 left
Paris for Hannover, where he was to enter the service
of Johann Friedrich, duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg.
En route, Leibniz stopped in Holland, where he had
scientific discussions with Jan Hudde and Leeuwenhoek,
and, at The Hague between 18 and 21 November,
conducted a momentous series of conversations with
Spinoza.