Philosopher

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Rationalist philosopher and mathematician — early modern Europe

Court of Hanover (House of Brunswick-Lüneburg) · Germany · d. 1 July 1646 — 14 November 1716

German rationalist who held that the world is composed of simple substances he called monads, and whose reasoning rested on the principle of sufficient reason and the identity of indiscernibles. He developed the calculus independently of Newton and was the first president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Most of his philosophical writing was unpublished at his death.