Noted German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz was one of the most important philosophers of the Enlightenment era. A contemporary of Isaac Newton, Leibniz is today best remembered for independently developing a system of differential and integral calculus. As a philosopher he ranks as one of three great proponents of rationalism, along with Rene Descartes and Baruch Spinoza. Unpublished until the middle of the 19th century, Leibniz’s “Discourse on Metaphysics” is a philosophical work in...
