Today November 14 2016 is 300th death anniversary of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a father of Calculus
Matthew Stewart, ‘The courtier and the heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the fate of God in the modern world’, 2006:
"...The alarming fact about Leibniz is not that he did not
always tell the truth, but that he was, in a certain sense, constitutionally—or
perhaps metaphysically—incapable of telling the truth. In his handling of his
first contact with Spinoza, to cite the most pressing example, what we observe
is not straightforward duplicity, but a much more complex phenomenon that
deserves the name “multiplicity”—that is, showing a variety of related but
mutually incompatible faces, none of which seems to enjoy the privilege of
being entirely “true” or entirely “false.” From Leibniz’s multidirectional
correspondence on the subject of Spinoza, we may conclude neither that he was an
anti-Spinozist intending to lure the sage of The Hague into a trap, nor that he
was a crypto-Spinozist who concealed his true identity from his orthodox
colleagues. Rather, he was—always to some degree, depending on the listener,
the context, and the particular purposes in play—a subtle and indeterminate
mixture of both. As Lewis White Beck has said, he was “all things to all men”
but the price paid for such omnidexterity was that he was no one thing to
everybody..."
Captain Metaphysics and the Wizard of Elea:
Michael Brooks, ‘Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of
Science’, 2011:
“...Newton is known for humbly declaring that he had
achieved his great breakthroughs by ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’.
Though this may be true in part, it is largely humbug. Newton was hardly
humble, and it would be just as true to say that he achieved greatness by
stamping on the shoulders of giants. When others, such as Robert Hooke and
Gottfried Liebniz, made breakthroughs in fields he was also researching, Newton
fought ferociously to deny them credit for their work. Though his reputation
has been polished for centuries – he is the ‘scientist’s scientist’ – Newton
was not someone you would want to put in charge of science today; in later life
he suffered episodes of madness and became obsessed with the Old Testament Book
of Daniel, writing a commentary on it that he considered his greatest work.
Hardly the model of scientific level-headedness...”
Matthew Stewart, ‘The courtier and the heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the fate of God in the modern world’, 2006:
Jason Socrates Bardi, ‘The Calculus Wars: Newton, Leibniz,
and the Greatest Mathematical Clash of All Time’, 2006:
“...Leibniz and Newton both had a claim of ownership on
calculus, and today they are generally regarded as twin independent inventors,
both credited with giving mathematics its greatest push forward since the time
of the Greeks.
While the glory of the invention may be great enough for
today’s scholars to share, it was not enough for Leibniz and Newton, and by the
end of the seventeenth century accusations of impropriety were being raised by
the backers of both men. The first two decades of the eighteenth century would
see the eruption of the calculus wars...”
A very spooky philosophy Halloween:
courtesy: Existential Comics
Captain Metaphysics and the Wizard of Elea:
courtesy: Existential Comics
Newton and Leibniz:
