This course offers an overview over Leibniz’s development in three areas central to his philosophy – logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. In particular, its aim is to make clear how Leibniz’s ideas in these areas interact with each other. One of Leibniz’s earliest philosophical projects is the development of a “universal characteristic” comprising the development of a formal language and the investigation into simple components of human thought. Leibniz’s logic, thus, has both a technical side – anticipating modern formal logic – and a methodological side concerning the nature of human thought in general. Both the technical and the methodological of logic show their influence in Leibniz’s metaphysical writings. In the course, we will read some text from his early Paris years, as well as the Discourse on Metaphysics and the New System of the Communication of Substances. Finally, both logical and metaphysical considerations play a role in Leibniz’s philosophy of science. In the course, we will trace the interaction between logic, metaphysics and philosophy of science in Leibniz’s early theory of matter and the continuum, in the writings on dynamics from his middle years, as well as in his later biological views.
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