Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T11:06:55.642Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

5 - Leibniz's world of monads

Charlie Huenemann
Affiliation:
Utah State University
Get access

Summary

Leibniz's life

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in 1646 into a troubled and imperfect world. The Thirty Years' War, raging since 1618, had cut Germany's population in half. Leibniz's father was a professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, and although he barely came to know his son (he died when Leibniz was only 6), he had just enough time to recognize and take pride in Leibniz's precocious intelligence. Leibniz and his sister were raised by their loving mother, and Leibniz devoted much of his childhood to reading his way through his father's library, mastering Latin and Greek along the way. He enrolled in the University of Leipzig when he was 15. Only two years later he produced a thesis in metaphysics; three years after that he published a short work in mathematics; and soon thereafter he was awarded a doctoral degree in jurisprudence. It would be in these three fields – metaphysics, mathematics and justice – that Leibniz would invest his intellectual efforts for the rest of his life. The world described by his philosophy would have at its core a profound metaphysics, an elegant mathematical harmony, and an uncompromised guarantee of divine justice. In short, the world he envisioned had everything war-ravaged Germany lacked.

At the age of 20, Leibniz was offered a professorship at the University of Altdorf, but he declined, deciding instead to try to make a greater contribution to the unstable political world around him.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×