Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a German mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat who invented calculus in addition to many other branches of mathematics and statistics. He has been called the ‘last universal genius’ due to his knowledge and skills in different fields and because such people became less common during the Industrial Revolution and spread of specialized labor after his lifetime.
As a philosopher, Leibniz was a leading representative of 17th-century rationalism and idealism. Leibniz’s philosophical thinking appears fragmented because his philosophical writings consist mainly of a multitude of short pieces: journal articles, manuscripts published long after his death, and letters to correspondents.
We propose to our readers today
The Monadology (
La Monadologie, 1714), one of Leibniz’s best known works of his later philosophy, in the English translation by George Martin Duncan (1890). It is a short text which presents, in some 90 paragraphs, a metaphysics of simple substances, or monads.