Vol. 31 No. 12 · 25 June 2009
pages 23-25 | 4284 words
Dispersed and Distracted
Jonathan Rée
- BuyLeibniz: An Intellectual Biography by Maria Rosa Antognazza
Cambridge, 623 pp, £25.00, November 2008, ISBN 978 0 521 80619 0
When Queen Anne died in August 1714, the news was received with excitement in the medieval town of Hanover in Lower Saxony. Under the terms of the Act of Settlement of 1701, Anne’s death meant that Georg Ludwig, the stolid local duke, was about to become the next occupant of the English throne. A month later he was on his way to London with his German-speaking retinue, ready for his coronation in October and a new life as the first King George of Great Britain and Ireland.
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Letters
Vol. 31 No. 14 · 23 July 2009
From Constance Blackwell
Jonathan Rée’s review of Maria Rosa Antognazza’s biography of Leibniz (LRB, 25 June) mentions that her book replaces Gottschalk Eduard Guhrauer’s biography of 1842, but another was written a hundred years earlier: Jacob Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae (1742-44). This massive work in five volumes, written by a Lutheran, found its way not only into the libraries of the king of France and the pope, but served as a quarry for Diderot’s entries on philosophy in the Encyclopédie and for Hegel’s Lectures in the History of Philosophy. Leibniz scholars neglect Brucker’s text today, but if they were to read it, it is likely they would not like what they found.
Brucker did praise Leibniz’s prodigious ingenium, but he did not find Leibniz perfect. Brucker was the first to judge philosophers by their ability to build their philosophy into a system, and he found Leibniz’s construction of a system lacking. Hegel echoed this view. Brucker also complains that Leibniz’s theory of motion was too abstract and his concept of monads fuzzy.
The strength of Antognazza’s biography is that it shifts philosophy’s centre of gravity away from the traditions of Descartes and Locke towards central Germany and Prague, a tradition we know too little about. Whether Leibniz’s thought was quite as self-organised as the biography implies is something that only years of research will be able to settle.
Constance Blackwell
London N1
