Gottfried Leibniz: Biography Of This Philosopher And Mathematician
Gottfried Leibniz (1646 – 1716) was a philosopher, physicist and mathematician who significantly influenced the development of modern science. Furthermore, he is recognized as one of the representatives of the rationalist tradition of modernity, since he significantly used his knowledge in mathematics and physics to explain both natural and human phenomena.
We’ll see now a biography of Gottfried Leibniz as well as his main contributions in the mathematical, logical and philosophical areas.
Gottfried Leibniz: biography of this philosopher and mathematician
Gottfried Leibniz born on July 1, 1646 in Leipzig, Germany The son of Friedrich Leibnütz and Catherina Schmuck, Leibniz grew up in a devout Lutheran family towards the end of the Thirty Years’ War, which had left the country in ruins.
During his childhood he was educated at the Nicolai school, always accompanied by self-taught learning in his father’s personal library, which in turn had been inherited from a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Leipzig. In fact, by the age of 12 Leibniz He had taught himself Latin, and at the same time he studied Greek
In the year 1661 he began to study law at the University of Leipzig, where he became especially interested in the men who had led the first scientific and philosophical revolutions in modern Europe. The latter were Galileo, Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon and René Descartes, and he even recovered the thought of the scholastics and Aristotle.
After completing his studies in law, Leibniz spent several years in Paris, where He trained in mathematics and physics There he met the main French philosophers of the time and studied in greater detail those who already interested him previously. He eventually trained with Christiaan Huygens, who turned out to be instrumental in Leibniz’s later development of theories on differential and integral calculus.
After making several trips to different places in Europe, and having met the most representative philosophers of the time, Leibniz establishes an Academy of Sciences in Berlin, where he had constant activity. He spent his last years trying to compile the greatest expressions of his philosophy. And without the latter being successful, he died in Hanover in November 1716.
Some contributions of Leibniz to philosophy and science
Just like other philosophers and scientists of the time, Leibniz specialized in various areas. This allowed him to formulate different theories and lay the foundations for the modern development of science. To give some examples we will see below three of Leibniz’s main contributions, both in mathematics and logic and in philosophy
1. Mathematics: infinitesimal calculus
Along with Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz is recognized as one of the creators of calculus. In Leibniz’s notebooks the first use of integral calculus is reported in the year 1675. He had used it to find the area under the function y = x. He also introduced notations such as the integral sign (“S” elongated from the Latin “sum”), and the d (from the Latin word “difference”) which is used for differential calculations. This gave rise to Leibniz’s Rule which is precisely the product rule of differential calculus.
Likewise, he contributed to the definition of the mathematical entities that we call “infinitesimals” and to defining their algebraic properties, although with many paradoxes at the time. The latter was reviewed and reformulated starting in the 19th century, with the development of modern calculus.
2. Logic: bases for epistemology and modal logic
Faithful to his mathematical training, Gottfried Leibniz argued that the complexity of human reasoning could be translated into the language of calculations and that, once understood, could be the solution to resolve differences of opinion and arguments.
For this reason, he is recognized as the most significant logician of his time, at least since Aristotle. Among other things he described the properties and method of linguistic devices such as conjunction, disjunction, negation, set, inclusion, identity and the empty set. All of them useful to understand and carry out valid reasoning and differentiate them from invalid ones. This constitutes one of the main bases for the development of epistemic type logic and also modal logic
3. Philosophy: the principle of individuation
In his thesis “On the principle of individuation”, which he carried out in the 1660s, Leibniz defends the existence of an individual value that constitutes a whole in itself, but that is possible differential of the whole. This was The first approach to the German theory of monads
In analogy with physics, Leibniz maintained that monads are in the mental realm what atoms are in the physical realm. These are the ultimate elements of the universe and what gives substantial shape to the being, through properties such as the following: they are eternal, they do not decompose into other simpler particles, they are dividual, active and subject to their own laws, in addition to independent of each other and function as an individual representation of the universe itself.
