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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in Leipzig in A precocious child, he began reading Latin by age seven and quickly taught himself Greek. By 15, he was studying philosophy and law at the University of Leipzig, where he became fascinated by logic, mathematics, and metaphysics. Despite his many political and administrative duties, he devoted much of his time to philosophy and mathematics, leading to groundbreaking contributions in both fields.

He independently developed calculus, a discovery that led to a bitter dispute with Isaac Newton over priority. Leibniz was not content to focus on one discipline. He envisioned a universal science, a grand intellectual system that would unify all knowledge.

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His vast body of work includes theories on metaphysics, logic, theology, and epistemology, and he engaged with many of the great thinkers of his time, including Spinoza, Malebranche, and Locke. Despite his intellectual achievements, Leibniz was largely ignored by his contemporaries while alive and died in relative obscurity in According to Leibniz, the universe is composed of monads: simple, indivisible substances that contain their own internal principles of action.

Monads are not physical atoms but rather metaphysical entities that do not interact causally with one another. Instead, they exist in a state of pre-established harmony, orchestrated by God. Each monad reflects the entire universe from its own unique perspective, much like individual mirrors reflecting the same scene from different angles.

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For Leibniz, truths of fact ultimately rest on the principle of sufficient reason, which states that everything must have an explanation, even if we do not always know it. Locke argued that the mind is a tabula rasa — a blank slate at birth, with all knowledge coming from experience. Leibniz strongly disagreed, defending the rationalist position that some knowledge must be innate and present in the mind prior to experience.

Where Locke described the mind at birth as a blank slate, Leibniz compared the mind to veined marble — a rock containing shapes that are uncovered by a sculptor.