(Portrait of Gottfried Leibniz by Christoph Bernhard Francke (1660–1729), [Public Domain] via Creative
Commons)
Education and Advancement
In 1646, one of the great
Western minds was born in the city of Leipzig, within the Electorate of Saxony,
in the Holy Roman Empire. The boy’s name was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and his
path as an intellectual and an academic was seemingly set in stone from an
early age. Leibniz’s father, Friedrich, was not only a professor of moral
philosophy at the University of Leipzig, but was also the chairman of the
university’s philosophy faculty. As a child, Gottfried Leibniz was undoubtedly
influenced by the his father’s collection of books, as well as Friedrich
Leibniz’s personal knowledge accumulated from years of academia.
In 1661, Gottfried Leibniz was
accepted into the University of Leipzig, where he studies philosophy and law. He
obtained his degree, and applied to be a doctoral candidate at Leipzig, yet the
university declined his application. Most historians and observers cite
Leibniz’s youth as a reason his application was refused. Nevertheless, he quickly
shed any resentment or bitterness caused by the rejection and gained a
doctorate elsewhere, at the University of Altdorf.
Once Leibniz obtained his doctorate, a friend named Johann Christian von Boyneburg helped the young scholar secure his first lofty job in 1667—a position with the Elector of Mainz. In the elector’s employment, Leibniz enjoyed around four years as a diplomat in Paris, France. There, he congregated with other intellectuals, such as the mathematician Christian Haygens. During his stay in Paris, Leibniz’s patrons, the Elector and Johann Boyneburg, both died in Mainz. The Duke of Brunswick immediately offered to employ Leibniz, a job he would eventually accept. Yet, for now, the scholar continued to procrastinate in Paris, managing to stay in the French Capital for a few more years.
In 1676, Gottfried Leibniz
traveled to the domain of his new employers in Hanover, taking with him all the
knowledge and inspiration he had gained in Paris. He would spend the remainder
of his life employed in Hanover—these would be his most brilliant and prolific
years.
The Lonely Genius
Gottfried Leibniz was a polymath, a man with a
broad range of interests and numerous fields of study. One of the areas of
interest that piqued Leibniz’s curiosity was mathematics. While he was serving
as a diplomat in Paris, Leibniz began making breakthroughs in differential and
integral calculus. Yet, unfortunately for Leibniz, another man was
independently reaching the same mathematical conclusions in England—this other
man’s name was Isaac Newton.
(Portrait of Isaac Newton by Sir Godfrey Kneller (1689), [Public
Domain] via Creative Commons)
As it happened, Isaac Newton
and Gottfried Leibniz were pen pals, and Newton sent Leibniz some of his
findings concerning calculus. Consequently, when Leibniz realized that he and
his English rival were both nearing the same monumental mathematical
breakthrough, Leibniz quickly published his own findings on calculus.
When Newton heard the news,
he speedily accused Gottfried Leibniz of plagiarism, an accusation that much of
the academic community believed for the rest of Leibniz’s life. By the time
Leibniz moved to Hanover in 1676, the man was largely an unappreciated outcast
in the eyes of the scholarly world. For the rest of his life, Gottfried Leibniz
would continue to refute Newton’s claims of plagiarism, which would only
isolate Leibniz further and further from the scholarly world. Now, however,
most historians and mathematicians have refuted the charge of plagiarism,
finding that he and Newton both discovered differential and integral calculus
at the same time, but independently of each other. Nevertheless, during
Leibniz’s heyday in Hanover, much of his work was disregarded and overlooked.
(Portrait of King George I of Britain, housed in the Yale University
Art Gallery, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)
Gottfried Leibniz, however,
did much more than simply research family history while he was in Hanover. After
all, he was a polymath skilled in philosophy, diplomacy, law, engineering,
mathematics, physics, logic and other academic subjects. He designed his own windmills
and invented pumps to remove water from flooded silver mines in the Harz
Mountains. He studied silk and linen textile production. He even wrote about
water desalinization methods and was a pioneer in library cataloguing.
He did not limit himself to only
one field of study. He wrote prolifically on different subjects and is known to
have exchanged academic letters with at least six hundred people, such as Isaac
Newton (before the plagiarism incident), Antoine Arnauld and Samuel Clarke. Many
of the subjects that Gottfried Leibniz wrote about included the investigation
of substance, space and time, reality (relation, composition and harmony), and
some theology. Some of Leibniz’s most notable writings on metaphysics were his Discourse on Metaphysics (published in
1686), New Essays Concerning Human
Understanding (1704), Theodicy and
Monadology (both published in 1710).
(Portrait of Gottfried Leibniz by Johann Friedrich Wentzel (1670–1729), [Public Domain] via Creative
Commons)
Gottfried Leibniz died in
Hanover on November 14, 1716, after several months of being bedridden because
of intense gout. He had never married, had no known children and very few of
his relatives remained alive. Leibniz’s living relatives were so thin in number
that the wealth that he had accumulated over years of service to the nobility
of Hanover was left to his sister’s stepson. Tragically, according to legend,
Gottfried Leibniz’s funeral was only attended by his personal secretary, and
his grave was either unmarked or misplaced.
Written by C. Keith Hansley.
- The Longman Standard History of Modern Philosophy by Daniel Kolak and Garrett Thomson. New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2006.
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz
- http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/gottfried-w-leibniz-536.php
- http://www.iep.utm.edu/leib-met/
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