By Maria Rosa Antognazza
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Of the entire thinkers of the century of genius that inaugurated glossy philosophy, none lived an highbrow existence extra wealthy and sundry than Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). educated as a jurist and hired as a counsellor, librarian, and historian, he made well-known contributions to common sense, arithmetic, physics, and metaphysics, but seen his personal aspirations as eventually moral and theological, and married those theoretical issues with politics, international relations, and an both wide variety of sensible reforms: juridical, fiscal, administrative, technological, clinical, and ecclesiastical. Maria Rosa Antognazza's pioneering biography not just surveys the entire breadth and intensity of those theoretical pursuits and sensible actions, it additionally weaves them jointly for the 1st time right into a unified portrait of this designated philosopher and the realm from which he got here. on the centre of the large variety of Leibniz's it appears miscellaneous endeavours, Antognazza finds a unmarried grasp undertaking lending cohesion to his terribly multifaceted life's paintings. in the course of the vicissitudes of his lengthy lifestyles, Leibniz tenaciously pursued the dream of a scientific reform and development of all of the sciences, to be undertaken as a collaborative firm supported through an enlightened ruler; those theoretical objectives have been in flip eventually grounded in a pragmatic target: the development of the human and thereby the occasion of the honour of God in His construction. in addition to tracing the threads of continuity that sure those theoretical and useful actions to this all-embracing plan, this illuminating research additionally lines those threads again into the highbrow traditions of the Holy Roman Empire during which Leibniz lived and during the broader highbrow networks that associated him to buyers in international locations as far away as Russia and to correspondents as a long way afield as China.
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Extra resources for Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography
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W. Leibniz. Eine Chronik. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, , p. ix (the final phrase is taken from the slipcover). The purpose of these protracted negotiations was to bring to an end an even more protracted war: a war which raged for thirty years, the most destructive conflict of an era plagued by virtually incessant warfare. The product of these negotiations was the Peace of Westphalia, perhaps the most important treaty signed in the early modern period. But the difficulties which had prolonged first the war and then the peace negotiations lay several layers deep; the deeper strata lay well below the Westphalian diplomats’ immediate concerns or responsibilities; and the solutions to the more superficial problems which they hammered out in M¨unster and Osnabr¨uck in any case brought further problems in their wake.
The emperor’s power, by contrast, now rested primarily not on the imperial office or its resources but on the Habsburg dynasty’s hereditary lands in the southeast corner of the Empire, now enhanced by permanent accession to the Bohemian crown and, towards the end of the century, by the reconquest of the huge kingdom of Hungary as well, outside the boundaries of the Empire itself. From onward, in short, the Empire was definitively set on a Sonderweg, a more or less federal course of political development very different from the increasingly centralised and absolutist monarchies typified par excellence by contemporary France under the ‘Sun King’, Louis XIV (–).
Confessional reconciliation depended to some degree on theological reconciliation; and theological discussions were complicated in this period by the fact that they took place in a period of philosophical revolution. During the generation in which central Europe had been thrown into military and political turmoil, western Europe had begun a period of equally disorientating intellectual Youthful Vocations (–) upheaval. The limited problem of the competing world systems of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe had broadened into a clash of basic approaches to natural philosophy, pitting Galileo, Bacon, Gassendi, and Descartes against the revered authority of Aristotle.
