Theodicy by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Fre

Theodicy by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Fre

In order to be truly free, must you act arbitrarily? If an event did not happen, could it have happened? Since there is evil, and God could have made the world without evil, did God fail to pick the best course? Grappling with such simple--yet still intriguing--puzzles, Leibniz was able to present attractively his new theories of the real and the phenomenal, freewill and determinism, and the relation between minds and bodies.

Theodicy was Leibniz's only book-length work to be published in his lifetime, and for many years the work by which he was known to the world. Fully at home with the latest scientific advances, Leibniz ultimately rejected the new atomistic philosophies of Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes, and drew upon the old cosmology of Aristotelian scholasticism. There could be no conflict, he argued, between faith and reason, freedom and necessity, natural and divine law. Ingeniously defending his postulate of pre-established harmony, Leibniz made important advances in the precise analysis of concepts.

GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ was born on July 1, 1646, in Leipzig, Germany. Leibniz, who had already shown symptoms of a prodigious brain, enrolled at the University of Leipzig at the age of fifteen to study law, mathematics, and philosophy. Because Leipzig refused to offer him a doctorate due to his youth, Leibniz moved to Altdorf, near Nuremberg, where he got his doctorate in 1666, just before his twenty-first birthday. Leibniz went into the public service shortly after, first with the Elector of Mainz and then with the ducal house of Braunschweig-Lueneburg. Leibniz's diplomatic missions took him to Paris, London, Amsterdam, and then Hanover, where he settled.

Leibniz met the prominent thinkers of the day, including philosophers Nicolas de Malebranche and Baruch de Spinoza, as well as mathematician Christiaan Huygens, as a result of his travels. Leibniz was a real polymath who wrote extensively on legal, cultural, and political issues, compiled an official history of the Braunschweig family, and contributed essential works to mathematics, theology, and philosophy. Leibniz articulated his metaphysical framework, including his view of physical reality, the motion and resistance of bodies, and the place of the divine within the dynamic universe, in his two important philosophical works, the Discourse on Metaphysics and the Monadology. Leibniz was made a member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris, president of the Berlin Academy, privy councillor to royalty, and a baronet of the empire for his diplomatic and scientific achievements.

Despite this, Leibniz's final years were marred by illness and growing disdain from those who saw him as a religious heretic. On November 14, 1716, he died in Hannover. A code of international law, Systema theologicum (1687), and Essais de theodicee (1710), his most important work in theology, are among Leibniz's other writings.