"He made memorable creative contributions across the entire spectrum of intellectual life, from mathematics and logic through the various sciences to history, law, diplomacy, politics, philology, metaphysics, and theology. No one thinker except Aristotle has rivaled him in the range and variety of his abilities and achievements.”
If Leibniz was so varied why don’t we hear of him more often? Why is he not one of the great philosophers that get their picture on google on his birthday? When is his birthday?
All I think of when I hear Leibniz is Newton’s extraordinary vengeance. How he pursued his rival past the grave when trying to destroy his achievements.
“He acquired a love of history from his father, and he spent most of his childhood eagerly devouring the large library of choice that his father had collected, including Herodotus, Xenophon, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Seneca, Pliny, Polybius, and many others.”
How could he read those? How come every great philosopher or whatever is a magical genius from birth? Dang, those are still hard to understand even for adults so how could him as a child read all those just for fun? Its hard to believe.
“At that time the University was firmly congealed in the sterile Aristotelian tradition and did nothing to encourage science.”
Benjamin Franklin used to steal bodies for science so beneath his house they found a virtual cornucopia of bones.
“Leibniz spent the next year in Nuremberg, which was then a center of the secret mystical order of the Rosicrucians, and he made himself so familiar with the ideas and writings of the alchemists - much as Newton was doing at Cambridge - that he was elected secretary of the local Rosicrucian society.”
This also reminds me of Benjamin Franklin. Its rumored that he was a part of a secret sex society.
“The most important of these goals was survival, for at that time the swollen arrogance of Louis XIV was like a boil on the face of Europe, and his armies were threatening the Low Countries and the small German states around the Rhine.”
Gotta pop a boil. It seems Germany is a popular country.
“Western Europe was drunk with the wine of reason, and Leibniz enthusiastically joined the party when he moved to Paris at the age of 26.”
I believe we think 26 is young but at that time maybe you would only live to 60.
I wonder if he ever had a girlfriend...
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