Leibniz's life

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in 1646 into a troubled and imperfect world. The Thirty Years' War, raging since 1618, had cut Germany's population in half. Leibniz's father was a professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, and although he barely came to know his son (he died when Leibniz was only 6), he had just enough time to recognize and take pride in Leibniz's precocious intelligence. Leibniz and his sister were raised by their loving mother, and Leibniz devoted much of his childhood to reading his way through his father's library, mastering Latin and Greek along the way. He enrolled in the University of Leipzig when he was 15. Only two years later he produced a thesis in metaphysics; three years after that he published a short work in mathematics; and soon thereafter he was awarded a doctoral degree in jurisprudence. It would be in these three fields – metaphysics, mathematics and justice – that Leibniz would invest his intellectual efforts for the rest of his life. The world described by his philosophy would have at its core a profound metaphysics, an elegant mathematical harmony, and an uncompromised guarantee of divine justice. In short, the world he envisioned had everything war-ravaged Germany lacked.

At the age of 20, Leibniz was offered a professorship at the University of Altdorf, but he declined, deciding instead to try to make a greater contribution to the unstable political world around him.