On the Project of a Universal Character

Abstract

During the last thirty years or so the practice has grown up among logicians of attributing the project of a universal character to Leibniz alone among seventeenth century thinkers. This attribution is to be found, for instance, in L. S. Stebbing’s Modern Introduction to Logic,1in Cohen and Nagel’s Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method,2 in M. Black’s Nature of Mathematics,3 in J. H. Woodger’s Axiomatic Method in Biology,4 and in 0. Neurath’s introductory article in the International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science. 5 And it dates, I suspect, from the publication of C. I. Lewis’s Survey of Symbolic Logic in 1918. Lewis mentioned that Leibniz acknowledged a debt in this connexion to Raymond Lully, Athanasius Kircher, George Dalgarno and John Wilkins. But he considered their writings contained “little which is directly to the point”.6 In this Lewis was obviously right with regard to Leibniz’s conception of a calculus of reasoning, but wrong, as I shall try to show, with regard to the project of a universal character, which seems in fact to have been an intellectual commonplace in seventeenth century Western Europe. This somewhat neglected by-way of philosophical history is worth a brief review, I think, not only in order to fix more precisely the respect in which Leibniz was the only seventeenth century precursor of modern symbolic logicians, but also because it draws attention to an early widespread philosophical muddle about the construction of artificial languages.