He talked about decomposing ideas into simple components on which a “logic of invention” could operate. And, for good measure, he put in an argument that purported to prove the existence of God.Īs Leibniz himself said in later years, this thesis-written at age 20-was in many ways naive. But I think it began to define Leibniz’s lifelong way of thinking about all sorts of things. And so, for example, Leibniz’s law graduation thesis about “perplexing legal cases” was all about how such cases could potentially be resolved by reducing them to logic and combinatorics. He used some basic combinatorial mathematics to count possibilities. And for his philosophy graduation thesis, Leibniz tried to pursue this idea. There had been vague ideas for a long time-for example in the semi-mystical Ars Magna of Ramon Llull from the 1300s-that one might be able to set up some kind of universal system in which all knowledge could be derived from combinations of signs drawn from a suitable (as Descartes called it) “alphabet of human thought”. He went to the local university at age 15, studying philosophy and law-and graduated in both of them at age 20.Įven as a teenager, Leibniz seems to have been interested in systematization and formalization of knowledge. Leibniz’s father died when Leibniz was 6-and after a 2-year deliberation on its suitability for one so young, Leibniz was allowed into his father’s library, and began to read his way through its diverse collection of books. His father was a professor of philosophy his mother’s family was in the book trade. Gottfried Leibniz was born in Leipzig in what’s now Germany in 1646 (four years after Galileo died, and four years after Newton was born). I have always found Leibniz a somewhat confusing figure. He did many seemingly disparate and unrelated things-in philosophy, mathematics, theology, law, physics, history, and more. And he described what he was doing in what seem to us now as strange 17th century terms.īut as I’ve learned more, and gotten a better feeling for Leibniz as a person, I’ve realized that underneath much of what he did was a core intellectual direction that is curiously close to the modern computational one that I, for example, have followed. But what was everything else about? What was the larger story of his work and thinking?

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