Early modern · 1646–1716
Who influenced Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz?
Influences and legacy
Monads, best of all possible worlds, and binary arithmetic — optimism as a system.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was influenced by René Descartes, Anne Conway and Baruch Spinoza, and went on to influence Christian Wolff, Émilie du Châtelet, Immanuel Kant and Gottlob Frege. That is 7 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Christoph Bernhard Francke, Public domain See the whole map
Who was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz?
Leibniz was a German mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat, often called the last universal genius. Independently of Newton he developed the differential and integral calculus, and his notation is the one still in use. He also devised the modern binary number system and built the Leibniz wheel for mechanical calculators.
With Descartes and Spinoza he is one of the three great early modern rationalists. He is best known for his optimism, the view that ours is, in a qualified sense, the best world God could have created, which Voltaire mocked in Candide. His work anticipated modern logic, and analytic philosophy still uses his idea of possible worlds.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz?
3 direct influences on this map, earliest first.
- René Descartes 1596–1650
- Anne Conway 1631–1679
- Baruch Spinoza 1632–1677
Who did Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz influence?
4 thinkers on this map draw directly on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
- Christian Wolff 1679–1754
- Émilie du Châtelet 1706–1749
- Immanuel Kant 1724–1804
- Gottlob Frege 1848–1925
The line of teachers behind Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
The longest documented line of influence ending at Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz runs 17 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
Two steps away from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Indirect influences
- Through René Descartes: Augustine of Hippo, Anselm of Canterbury, Al-Ghazali, Thomas Aquinas, Michel de Montaigne
- Through Baruch Spinoza: Maimonides, Giordano Bruno, Thomas Hobbes
The second generation
- Through Immanuel Kant: Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Georg W. F. Hegel, Johann Friedrich Herbart, Bernard Bolzano, Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Sanders Peirce, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Ernst Cassirer, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, John Rawls
- Through Gottlob Frege: Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, Michael Dummett
- Through Christian Wolff: Moses Mendelssohn
Contemporaries of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, with no direct line between them.
- Pierre Bayle 1647–1706
- Nicolas Malebranche 1638–1715
- John Locke 1632–1704
- Giambattista Vico 1668–1744
- Blaise Pascal 1623–1662
- Margaret Cavendish 1623–1673
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 3
- Direct followers
- 4 — #25 of 279 on this map
- Thinkers upstream
- 73
- Thinkers downstream
- 107
- Wikipedia languages
- 157 — #7 of 36 among early modern philosophers
- Card rarity
- Legendary
Questions about Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Who influenced Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz?
- René Descartes, Anne Conway and Baruch Spinoza.
- Who did Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz influence?
- Christian Wolff, Émilie du Châtelet, Immanuel Kant and Gottlob Frege.
- When did Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz live?
- 1646–1716. The map files Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz under the early modern period.
- How rare is the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 157 languages, which makes it a Legendary card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More early modern philosophers
- René Descartes 1596–1650
- Immanuel Kant 1724–1804
- Voltaire 1694–1778
- Adam Smith 1723–1790
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712–1778
- Niccolò Machiavelli 1469–1527
- John Locke 1632–1704
- Blaise Pascal 1623–1662