Final Report Blog Post, Leibniz (1646-1716)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

One Often Overlooked 

Jack Lasseter

By Christoph Bernhard Francke - Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, online, Public Domain, Link

    Leibniz (Born 4 years before Descartes death) is not ignored in the historical sense but his contributions in philosophy are not terribly unique, leading to an unfortunate minimization of an influential character. He is a noteworthy figure with several important, often technical, contributions to humanity. He is an interesting character to me in that I view his reasoning in philosophy as vaguely cognitively dissonant to his work as a scientist. However, my view is likely mostly just modern hindsight bias. 

    Philosophically, Leibniz is briefly introduced in Warburton's A Little History. Leibniz is characterized with the similar views to Alexander Pope, 

He assumed that there must be a logical explanation for everything. Since God is perfect in every respect – that is part of the standard definition of God – it followed from this that God must have had excellent reasons for making the universe in precisely the form that he did. Nothing could have been left to chance. God did not create an absolutely perfect world in every respect – that would have made the world into God, since God is the most perfect thing that there is or can be. But he must have made the best of all possible worlds, the one with the least amount of evil needed to achieve that result. There couldn’t have been a better way of putting the bits together than this: no design would have produced more goodness using less evil. (94)

 Which from my external readings is an accurate representation of his philosophy, if a criminally short amount of space for him. One of the few actual published philosophical works of his was Monadology. It is an Idealist piece, but also addresses the same questions as Aristotle's Substance Theory in explaining the "Why" behind the universe, in the same explanatory way we view atoms today. Play with the interactive drug molecule below, or just have a sip in real life - you're probably on it! It's caffeine - a natural defense mechanism of plants that is highly toxic (That's one of the reasons why your dog can't eat chocolate, its the caffeine from dark chocolates that overworks their heart. Theobromine, and other things found in chocolate is also dangerous to them, and that also comes in chocolate) - but if we poison ourselves just a tiny amount it happens to be fairly enjoyable, if addictive.

Leibniz subscribed to a "Recursive" (My word) explanation. A Monad is a unit, that can be explained by smaller Monad units:

Thus, for example, Leibniz writes in the Monadology §70, “Thus we see that each living body has a dominant entelechy, which in the animal is the soul; but the limbs of this living body are full of other living beings, plants, animals, each of which also has its entelechy, or its dominant soul”

This isn't completely different from todays view of Macroscopic creatures -> cells -> molecules -> atoms -> quarks -> .... although, it's somewhat debated if quarks are pointlike or not, and might be the fundamental unit.  "At the moment there is no experimental indication that the quarks are not elementary." But again, it might be another fight against precision keeping us from discovering another "Monad".

As far as dissecting his religious views Stanford's Plato offers a concise summary of his logic on the existence of God:

(1)	God is a being having all perfections. (Definition)
(2)	A perfection is a simple and absolute property. (Definition)
(3)	Existence is a perfection.
(4)	If existence is part of the essence of a thing, then it is a necessary being.
(5)	If it is possible for a necessary being to exist, then a necessary being does exist.
(6)	It is possible for a being to have all perfections.
(7)	Therefore, a necessary being (God) does exist.

This logic is what I, modernly, retrospectively find puzzling. It's likely just cultural biases I adopted that have disseminated from Voltaire and completely permeated our ways of life and thinking. It's rarely debated that existence is not perfect by modern scientists. Leibniz, for all the religious zeal of his time period, was an incredibly accomplished scientist.

Leibniz is easily one of the giants whose shoulders we stand on as a modern world. As a computer science major it's crazy to learn that he set the foundations of algebraic logic (Which is what computing, in the hardware sense, is) by explaining foundational concepts like conjunction (And), disjunction (Or), negation (Not), identity, set inclusion, and the empty set. Without his works, who knows what Robert Boole ends up doing with his life, and the modern world looks like the 1920's - Leibniz made a basic calculator in 1671. If this was twitter, the next sentence would be in all capital letters to express my amazement: He made a physical, manual calculator in 1671 that could divide, add multiply and subtract. In 1671. He didn't call it finished until 1694, the "Stepped Reckoner".

By User:Kolossos - recorded by me in de:Technische Sammlungen der Stadt Dresden (with photo permission), CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Even crazier and possibly less known was that he was a contemporary of Isaac Newton, and single-handedly (and independently) invented calculus during the same time as Newton (Arguably he was the first, Leibniz notes survive on the subject from 1675, but he didn't publish till 1684, Newton is debated at publishing at 1687 - but the controversy remained. Both were slow to publish for fear of ridicule).

Honestly, Leibniz probably provided more useful information than Newton but Newton is the one who is famous for it, likely for Newtons applications of his work in physics (Which, if you're interested, Leibniz is credited as being more in line with general relativity, he was just misunderstood across language barriers in his physics explanations and was interpreted as opposing Newton, but momentum and energy are both conserved so turns out Leibniz actually agreed with Newton). Leibniz created the integral notation (Large stylized S) and the derivative notation (d/dx), which are considered far more useful and convenient than Newtons notation. See how it works below (Tested on chrome, clicked attempt anyways, then allow flash in a chrome pop up on the top left of my screen).

Leibniz also setup: Gaussian elimination, Fractal geometry, proposed the molten core earth (modern geology), discussed large swaths of psychology foundations, and others. He touched upon an impressive number of subjects, which has earned him criticism at times but his work has generally aged like wine, except for the "Reality is perfect" bit. For someone who (on paper) believed that reality was perfect when he was born, he did an awful lot to improve it over the next hundreds of years. Hopefully I can do my little part to help the world too!

Book references: A Little History

I think I've earned 11 runs in quarantine, assuming I did good on the extra credit (6 normal, up to 5 from EC). Plus whatever this ends up being, I didn't count a few random question comments here and there and the two comments below on other peoples exams.

Comment on William James by Sydeny Schettler
Comment on Carl Jung by Jake Marvelli