Abstract

The polymathic Leibniz was surely one of the greatest and most enigmatic figures produced by the "century of genius." He is the only philosopher whom the renowned historian of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Adolf von Harnack, would admit as a colleague to that august body, and Leibniz is universally admired by metaphysicians, theologians, advocates of cosmopolitanism and religious tolerance, students of international law, and, not the least, by philosophers of logic and language. Although efforts to canonize Leibniz as the pure type of "harmonic synthesizer" have been under way for quite a long time, philosophers and historians are no longer so anxious as they once were to work out a synthetic unification of these and many other perspectives of Leibniz as was Mahnke, for instance, who characterized Leibniz’ philosophy as a synthesis of universal mathematics and individual metaphysics.