Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who invented the calculus independently of Newton and quarrelled with him about it for the rest of his life, built a calculating machine that multiplied, and set out the binary arithmetic every computer now runs on. He spent forty years as librarian and councillor to the House of Hanover, and much of that time trying to reunite the Lutheran and Catholic churches. The Theodicy is the one book he published, and the word is his.
Works (1)
- Theodicy — The only book Leibniz published in his lifetime, written against Pierre Bayle’s argument that the evil in the world cannot be reconciled with a God at once good and almighty. Its answer is that this is the best of all possible worlds — not that it holds no evil, but that no other whole would be better, the evil in it counted. Voltaire wrote Candide against it. This is the one work in the section that is not in the public domain everywhere: the only complete English translation is E. M. Huggard’s of 1951, which Project Gutenberg publishes as public domain in the United States and which may still be in copyright elsewhere. (9 notes)