Repercussions

Abstract

This chapter considers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who devoted his philosophic and scientific career to harmonizing discordances and unifying disparities, calculating the otherwise incalculable and reconciling the seemingly unreconciliable. The universalizing thrust of Leibniz's thinking is of a piece both with his ecumenism and with his moral and political views. The Cartesian who rejects phenomena as false simply because they can be doubted lacks the courage to face conflicts that may arise within any aspect of human experience. Instead, Leibniz refused to be daunted by uncertainty. In this regard, he should be numbered among those seventeenth-century theoreticians of probability like Pierre de Fermat, Blaise Pascal, and Jakob Bernoulli, who strove to develop models of rational judgment and action in the face of grave uncertainty.