One of the hallmarks of Leibniz’s vast undertakings is that he strove to unify his kaleidoscopic interests into a single whole that deeply integrated faith and science, philosophy and politics, and shaped both his public and private life. How are we to make sense of a man who contributed prominently to so many fields, including both religion and science? In our day, it is common to think especially of religion and science as either pulling in opposing directions in their respective understandings of the world, or as parallel but different domains. The diversity of Leibniz’s interests and undertakings is dizzying. Physically, Leibniz may have been nothing special - in fact, he was hunched, bowlegged, and nearsighted - but his far-reaching intellect brought him into contact with scholars of the first rank, as well as statesmen, courtiers, and dignitaries around Europe. A preeminent man of letters, he was also a cosmopolitan writer of letters, exchanging about fifteen thousand of them with more than a thousand correspondents in French, German, and Latin. He was a historian, a poet, a legal theorist, a diplomat, a cryptographer, and a philosopher who thought it possible to reconcile theology with metaphysics and science. Leibniz worked unflaggingly at whatever task he set himself to, writing copiously on such diverse subjects as politics, theology, mathematics, and physics, and contributing with singular erudition to many other topics, such as chemistry, medicine, astronomy, geology, paleontology, optics, and philology. It seems impossible that one individual could accomplish all that he did. Yet Leibniz is one of the most impressive figures in the history of modern science, mathematics, and philosophy. Even in his homeland of Germany, the name Leibniz is perhaps more widely known for a beloved butter cookie named after him than for the man himself. And second, he authored the provocative statement that this world is “the best of all possible worlds.” This claim was famously lampooned in Voltaire’s 1759 satire Candide, in which the title character, “stunned, stupefied, despairing, bleeding, trembling, said to himself: - If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?” Leibniz’s posthumous reputation, already marred by the accusation he had plagiarized Newton’s calculus, never recovered from Voltaire’s mockery.
First, he invented the calculus - independently, most scholars now agree, of its other inventor Newton.
The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is chiefly remembered today, when he is remembered at all, for two reasons.
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