The Monadology - Forgotten Books Author:Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz The Monadology (Monadologie, 1714) is one of Gottfried Leibniz's works that best define his philosophy, monadism. Written toward the end of his life in order to support a metaphysics of simple substances, the Monadology is thus about formal atoms which are not physical but metaphysical. (Quote from wikipedia.org) — About the Author... more »
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 - 1716)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (also Leibnitz or von Leibniz (July 1 (June 21 Old Style) 1646 - November 14, 1716) was a German polymath who wrote primarily in Latin and French.
He was educated in law and philosophy, and served as factotum to both the Elector of Mainz and the House of Hanover. Leibniz played a major role in the European politics and diplomacy of his day. He occupies an equally grand place in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He discovered calculus independently of Newton, and his notation is the one in general use since. He also discovered the binary system, foundation of virtually all modern computer architectures. In philosophy, he is most remembered for optimism, i.e. his conclusion that our universe is, in a restricted sense, the best possible one God could have made. He was, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, one of the three great 17th century rationalists, but his philosophy also looks back to the Scholastic tradition and anticipates modern logic and analysis. Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in biology, medicine, geology, probability theory, psychology, linguistics, and information science. He also wrote on politics, law, ethics, theology, history, and philology, even occasional verse. His contributions to this vast array of subjects are scattered in journals an« less