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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: 4 ideas worth knowing

4 ideas from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

• Walk through a giant thinking machine, find no thought inside

  Leibniz asks you to imagine a machine that could think and feel, enlarged to the size of a mill so you could walk through its gears. Inside, he says, you'd see only parts pushing o…

  — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology

• Leibniz argued God had no choice but to create the best of all possible worlds

  In his 1710 Theodicy, Leibniz reasoned that a perfectly good, all-powerful God would necessarily have selected the best possible world to create out of infinite alternatives — mean…

  — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Théodicée

• Leibniz said the universe is built from infinite tiny substances that never interact

  In his 1714 Monadology, Gottfried Leibniz argued reality is made of "monads," simple substances with no parts and, in his words, "no windows through which anything could come in or…

  — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology

• If two things share literally every property, Leibniz said they must be one thing

  Leibniz argued that no two distinct objects can be exactly alike in every respect: if you could list every single property of X and every single property of Y and the lists matched…

  — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics

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