Books - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Product Description:
The year is 1714. Daniel Waterhouse has returned to England, where he joins forces with his friend Isaac Newton to hunt down a criminal gang attempting to blow up Natural Philosophers with "Infernal Devices," or time bombs. Unbeknownst to Daniel, however, Newton has an ulterior motive: to wrest the Solomonic Gold from the control of his arch-enemy, the master counterfeiter Jack the Coiner, a.k.a Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds. As Daniel and Newton machinate and maneuver, an increasingly vicious struggle rises for control of the Bristish Crown: Who will take control when the queen dies? Tories and Whigs are set against each other as people jockey to replace Queen Anne with the Hanoverian dynasty of Princess Caroline, with whom the multi-talented Eliza has become closely associated.



Customer Review: Book delivered on time:
It was the book I needed for an upcoming trip and was delivered in good condition and well before I needed it. Thanks much.

Customer Review: Even better on the second reading - Dense but worth the effort!:
Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is one of the most ambitious series of historical fiction in recent years and he does an excellent job of bridging the distance between 17th century and today by focusing on putting the ideas and persons in the context of their time. Having read through the voluminous series when it came out, I was a little hesitant to re-read the three books (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World) but my curiousity won out. I'm glad it did. There is so much information packed into the series that the second reading really made me appreciate the ideas and historical personalities invovlved.

I also noticed something that had slipped by me the first time. Daniel Waterhouse, rather than just being a neutral participant in the storyline, really came out as a catalyst for all the events in the book. Even more, his transformation from a person scared into inaction by the fear of others' disapproval into a man capable of exerting his will to make the world a better place is absolutely central to the storyline and I'm sad to say that I missed it the first time. This slow transformation permeates all three books and I think it must something very personal to Mr. Stephenson.

The other arguement for a second reading is that the events are so complex and the historical descriptions of warfare, economics and natural philosophy are often so detailed that catching everything after only one reading is difficult. I think of this as a strength of the book rather than a weakness, although some people probably do not appreciate the density of background material in the books.

The Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon form an interwoven historical narrative and I think that they will stand as a great literary achievement. I do wish he'd intersperse more of his shorter novels Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book) and The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book) alongside his large works (Baroque Cycle, Cryptonomicon, Anathem) but I'll happily read anything Neal Stephenson writes since he has a gift for conveying complex ideas in an exciting and compelling way.

Customer Review: I read it on the Kindle2:
Enough people have commented on the substance of the book that I can't add anything new, so my 5-star rating will have to suffice. I do have a couple of observations, however, related to the Kindle2. I read all three novels of the trilogy on my brand-new one, and was delighted with it.

1. Stephenson loves words, and the trilogy is loaded with obscure (to me!) and archaic ones. Fortunately, the Kindle2 comes with a dictionary, and it's a simple matter to point and click, to look up a word in mid-read. It's certainly a lot easier than carrying around a thousand-page dictionary with a thousand page novel. The dictionary is quite good, and contained most of the words I fed it, along with their sources.

2. Where the Kindle2 suffers is in its poor display of graphics; I think this is part of a larger problem that also leads to poor rendition of pdf files. The maps provided in the trilogy are fuzzy and pretty much useless. That's annoying, given the geographical scope of the books. In particular, System of the World focuses on early 18th century London, and I found myself wanting a good map to orient myself. I finally settled on this one, and printed out a copy to keep with the Kindle2 as I read the book:

http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/dickens_london_map.html

Granted, it's of a London more than a century later than the period of the novel, but it did contain most of the buildings and streets mentioned, plus very brief descriptions and histories of key locations.

A better solution would be for the Kindle to have a comprehensive atlas to complement its dictionary. But that will require a major upgrade to the graphic display capabilities, and probably a faster processor. Maybe we can look forward to it in the Kindle4.


Customer Review: Excellent...a stew of Ideas with a melange of historical and philosphical spices:
Read this book, and all of Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and be amazed at this man's acumen, storytelling wizardry, and of course adroit sense of humor. Highly recommended for those who enjoy books that educate as well as tittilate.

Customer Review: Epic History Made Readable:
This three-volume, 9-book set is, believe it or not, a *prequel* to his previous massive effort, Cryptonomicon. In the Baroque Cycle we find the ancestors of no less than NINE characters of that modern day tale of cryptography. But the Baroque trilogy covers much more ground. The fictional characters are used to take the reader through the lives of very real historical characters. The topics that Stephenson deals with in detail are the history of banking, medicine, international finance, cryptography, espionage, mathematics and computing. Not a light read by any stretch of the imagination, it is still enjoyable.

On a personal note, I gained great insight into the turbulent period when William of Orange chased the Jacobites out of Ireland. I had always wondered why my ancestors departed Ireland for Penn's Colony in 1689 until Stephenson documented William's march across Ireland in that same year. My pacifist Quaker ancestors had seen enough.

Product Description:
“A colorful reinterpretation. . . . Stewart’s wit and profluent prose make this book a fascinating read.�—Publishers Weekly, starred review Philosophy in the late seventeenth century was a dangerous business. No careerist could afford to know the reclusive, controversial philosopher Baruch de Spinoza. Yet the wildly ambitious genius Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who denounced Spinoza in public, became privately obsessed with Spinoza's ideas, wrote him clandestine letters, and ultimately met him in secret.

"In refreshingly lucid terms" (Booklist) Matthew Stewart "rescues both men from a dusty academic shelf, bringing them to life as enlightened humans" (Library Journal) central to the religious, political, and personal battles that gave birth to the modern age. Both men put their faith in the guidance of reason, but one spent his life defending a God he may not have believed in, while the other believed in a God who did not need his defense. Ultimately, the two thinkers represent radically different approaches to the challenges of the modern era. They stand for a choice that we all must make. .



Customer Review: A metaphysical detective story:
The book's premise is a meeting that took place between Leibniz and Spinoza on November 18, 1676. The former is represented as perhaps the last vestige of scholasticism and its prescriptions for changing society; the latter is regarded as the harbinger of modernity, and it is hinted that Locke appropriated many of his central themes. Leibniz is ultimately represented as an anachronistic later Wittgenstein; there are no philosophical conflicts, only bad grammar (79). Spinoza, while technically an equal of Leibniz is depicted, by contrast, as expressing a "fiery political passion" (100)

One wonders to what extent Stewart's own experience as an ex-philosopher turned management consultant colors his depiction of the pair; in perhaps the most entertaining section of the book, Leibniz's disastrous foray into mining is represented as the folly of a 17th century management consultant. The heroic Spinoza, by contrast, is given a free pass for a theory of mind-body interaction and its influence on cognition (169) that much of 20th century cognitive Science has shown to be a dead end. See for example, my "search for Mind", third edition, Pp. 80-92. The Search for Mind: A New Foundation for Cognitive Science

Yet there is much bigger game at stake here; the relationship between the state and the individual, and the role, if any, for God. Spinoza is portrayed as introducing a metaphysics of the individual which has profound consequences for the role of the state (115). Indeed, the thrust is ultimately mystical; Spinoza's God, famously Einstein's inspiration, could be experienced directly by the individual (79). In only apparent paradox, the best thing that the State could do is promote freedom (102)and remain resolutely secular (101)

Or perhaps not quite. Spinoza's state could also have civil servant clerics who promoted the idea of a good, charitable Supreme Being(115). It is hard to assert that the contradictions in Spinoza's thought are ultimately resolvable. It is indeed true that he may have led a more logically consistent life than Leibniz, who underwent a deathbed conversion to atheism. Perhaps Stewart is applauding the philosophical consistency that he was unable to manage in the early stages of his own varied career; as a full-time writer, we can expect better than this from him.




Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 30u Bealtaine 2009

Customer Review: Modern Thinkers:
I enjoyed this book because it was an honest portrait of two men with the loftiest of ideas, and their difficulties in trying to apply those ideals to the messy and uncaring world they found around them. Stewart also does an excellent job of translating the philosophical systems of both Leibniz and Spinoza into understandable ideas, from the abstruse and at times un-intelligible language that both men were disposed to use.

Customer Review: Spinoza...a fly-on-the-wall perspective:
This wonderful book gives the reader a great insight into the times and the mind of Spinoza. Later, others such as Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Albert Einstein and Eckhart Tolle articulated very similar philosophical views, but it was Spinoza who had the courage to pay an enormous price by veering off into then such radical philosophy; philosophy that ushured new thinking into the zeitgeist and, in the process, motivated Locke, Jefferson, Adams Washington and others to, ultimately, introduce a new and better world order. The "Courtier and the Heretic" gives the reader a-fly-on-the-wall perspective on the creation of the truly modern age.

Customer Review: Worthy of a Go On The Big Screen of the Mind (from Ahadada Books):
To be frank, I loved this book primarily because of its re-embodiment of the philosophies of two of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment. Said philosophies are usually presented scrubbed of all blood, phlegm and jizz, bright and shiny as skeletons of chrome jiggling in the void. It's easy to trace which bone connects to which, as the theorems and corollaries of Spinoza's ethics and Leibniz's Monadology click into place with the same innate logic and regularity that guides the hand of the forensic investigator to recover the basic physical structure of a lost organism, but to stretch believable skin over the framework and to breathe life into the nostrils, and to set these great ideas loose on two legs complete with a head whirling from too much hubris or too much coughing from a terminal bout of T.B., this is what great art-- great story telling--can do. This is exactly what the author of this book does for his readers with the fine touch of a novelist. Leibniz, the brittle genius meets the awesome grinder of lenses who sits at the center of a whirlwind of invective totally unafraid. Ever after, Leibniz carries the memory of three days spent in Spinoza's presence like a lesion on the frontal lobe that sets everything he writes against a field of stars and deepest night. So what if we feel that Leibniz comes out the lesser of the two greatnesses? Other books may act as a palliative for that. This book makes fine theater of the mind, and these apparitions called forth by the necromantic powers of the author may move us in the same way that Helen called forth by the Faust of Marlowe moved his scholar friends. In these pages we are transported back in time to a glorious moment of intellectual history, and allowed to be the fly on the wall we always wished we could be. The ideas, so embodied, are given context and scope and once again glow.

Customer Review: Philosophy or Fiction?:
Before reading Matthew Stewart's THE COURTIER AND THE HERETIC, I suggest reading "A Note on Sources", in the rear of the book sandwiched between the Notes and Bibliography. Stewart explains the premise of the book which is a meeting between Leibniz (the Courtier) and Spinoza (the Heretic) that took place shortly before Spinoza's death and that meeting served to influence Leibniz's philosophy. Stewart acknowledges that the basis of his book is not a widely held belief among philosophers or historians.

The book does show that these two philosophers are diametric opposites in virtually all ways. There is no confusion on where Stewart stands philosophically, he describes Spinoza with great affection as society's outcast and excommunicated Jew, the secularist who by day grinds optical lenses and by night has deep thoughts and writes. Living in a garret in The Hague in Nederland he survives on raisins and milk. Stewart is openly contemptuous of Leibniz and his lifestyle even inventing a currency system to compare the monies Leibniz receives to that of Spinoza. Unlike Spinoza, Leibniz is a Renaissance man who is interested in everything and he spends a great deal of time becoming financially secure serving various European nobles. Just to scratch the surface; he serves as a political consultant, he tries to devise a unification scheme for the various branches of Christianity sprouting throughout Europe, he develops an unsuccessful means of pumping water from silver mines in the Harz Mountains of Germany, invents calculus and an adding machine, studies the Chinese and their culture, corresponds with and visits many of Europe's great minds and inventors while also having deep thoughts and being such a prolific writer that many of his works are still being cataloged.

Would Leibniz dwell on his Spinoza visit and allow it to influence his philosophy? Being the dervish that Leibniz was and with his prolificacy it's obvious that Leibniz was very capable of thinking for himself which makes Stewart's theory improbable, in my opinion. They did correspond and met for an undetermined amount of time (hours, days no one knows) and were aware each other, Leibniz was 30 and Spinoza 44 when they met. Leibniz would live another forty years while Spinoza would be dead in three months. Leibniz had much more time to both develop and expand his own philosophy while studying the works of Spinoza. Often it appears that events and writings are contorted to fit the books premise, Stewart "slices and dices" with many "maybes", "appears to be" and "inferences" also taking one or two words, in quotes, from source material to build his case.

Both men are giants of Western Civilization and a part of the foundation of modern philosophy. There are numerous books both by and about Spinoza and Leibniz that will educate. Stewart may have needed a "hook" to get published, but it's hard to know whether THE COURTIER AND THE HERETIC should be in the philosophy or fiction section.

Customer Review: On the Translation:
Please forgive me for commenting on an English translation that I have not read, but honestly I was put off from purchasing the English edition by the complaints of several reviewers, so I purchased a French edition instead. I am familiar with Deleuze and Leibniz, but not a specialist in either per se. I read French well enough, but not with the acumen of a French professor. However, Deleuze's French is deliberate and concise, startlingly brilliant and terse. Moreover, the substantive content of the text is not particularly difficult for anyone who has some mastery of the philosophical issues behind Leibniz' mathematics and the development of the calculus or a general mastery of Deleuze. After spending a few days with the French text, I find it highly unlikely that a Harvard French professor with the complicity of the University of Minnesota Press would botch such an important translation. Just for example, one reviewer complained about the word "corps." In Leibniz's philosophical writings on mathematics, natural philosophy, or the mathematical qua philosophical problem of the continuum, for example, he uses the word "body" and "bodies" any number of times in mathematical contexts ... for example "On Minima and Maxima: On Bodies and Minds" (1672-73), "On Body, Space, and the Continuum" (1676), "A Body is not a Substance" (1679), just to name a few. If you are interested in Deleuze's wonderful little book and can't read the French with as much profit or pleasure as an English translation, I suspect you needn't worry about the quality of the translation. With all due respect to the opinions of others... Stuart MacNiven, Rutgers University

Customer Review: Between Two Worlds:
While my French is not good enough to judge others, I find it very easy to believe that this translation is not good. I found this book the most difficult of Deleuze's works, and I think the translator did not understand his task. To recover I needed to undertake a rereading of Leibniz so I could see through the English text before me and re-establish the original terms and questions.

Still, if you do not read French well, this very important book should not escape you even in this edition. Leibniz was a giant at the watershed between faith and science who was able to span this divide and think with complexity and innovation about the soul and mathematics. Since then, few can handle either vocabulary with such perspective, and almost none, save Deleuze, have tried to understand the demands of both.

If one does not, as almost all do, take for granted the givens of the centered subject and the rational world, their mutual differences demand a theory as powerful as the complexities they evoke. This book attempts to place that theory in play again with vigor.

Customer Review: A Refined Work of Philosophy:
An earlier reviewer questioned what Deleuze was doing with Leibniz's calculus. While Leibniz's calculus is of course crucial for Deleuze, in this work Deleuze keeps returning to one equation that almost acts as a sort of musical refrain, and through it he uses Leibniz's invention to express a philosophical concept. This is an excellent example of the refinement and elegance of Deleuze's thought that pervades the book as a whole.

Here is the equation: d(y)/d(x). This is certainly not a differential equation that a mathematician would have hit upon. Instead it is Deleuze's expression of a philosophical concept via calculus. When plotted out the equation produces a clinamen, or swerve, with no constant, only variables. It is "a world that no longer has its center" as Deleuze phrases it on page 125 of the translation. It is a structure without a center, as Derrida would call it. But whereas Derrida's notion can only be stated as a paradox (because by definition there can be no such thing as a centerless structure), Deleuze succeeds in expressing it as a simple differential equation. In other words, there are nothing but differences (and, Deleuze would maintain, force). Returning to the equation, the function d(y) is dependent on d(x), which it is divided by. d(y) is dependent on a differential function d(x), that is, a continuously displaced variable. Absolutely useless to mathematicians, it is however a succint expression of Deleuze's thought, conveyed via Leibniz's calculus, that creates a distribution of remarkable points. Michel Serres' 700 page tome "Le système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques" is a wonderful companion to Deleuze's little book. It was published in English as "The System of Leibniz" by Clinamen Press.

Customer Review: one of Deleuze's very best:
Deleuze's sojourns into the history of philosophy, as everyone knows by now, paint a stark contrast to his "independent" works; the former being wonders of concision and clarity, each one like a diamond cutter, and the latter being drawn-out, often tedious, and in general more difficult to pentrate.
The Fold falls somewhere in between the two as he wrote it so late in his life when most assumed he was done with history. We should be thankful that he wasn't. In order to get through this book, I'll just offer my opinion for those who it may affect: when I first picked it up, I read the first two chapters and almnost threw it across the room. I didn't pick the book up again because--presumptuous me--I thought the whole book was going to be like that. WRONG! As I said, Deleuze mixes it up here, and while you may not get every chapter, there will be those, like the short, almost curt, "What is an Event?" that will, um, blow your mind.
As for this being a discourse on Leibniz. Hard to say when we've read so little Leibniz, but Deleuze is willing to stick with his "compossible" world throughout all of the book until the end, which is pretty amazing---you know, since for Deleuze's world one of the first requirements is the reality of incompossibles. But it will give you a passion for Leibniz regardless, as the last reviewer made clear.
Finally, I think Deleuze here tries to answer some of the most difficult questions that faced him after years of expanding and 'deterritorializing' D&R and LofS. If you read the latter, for instance, did you have a sort of empty feeling when he got to the "Dynamic Genesis" and afterwards, as if his tying the incorporeals to the corporeals from the point of view of bodies wasn't as solid as from the point of view of sense? Deleuze will repay you here with interest, giving one of the most fascinating and detailed accounts of a body and its connection to monads I've ever read. It may not solve all of the problems for his materialism, but then again, it might. That's a judgment call and regardless of how you judge, this book will have riches for you.
10 stars.

Customer Review: A Key of sorts:
Deleuze's book is, at least for no other reason, a worthwhile read for its sheer imagination. Secondly, it is worth reading as it shows just what is so wonderfully interesting about Leibniz. If you know Leibniz, read this book, even just a single section, and then you will understand why there do exist, in small obscure places, Leibnitians. If you are looking for a splendidly imaginative perspective, read up.

Product Description:
Now regarded as the bane of many college students’ existence, calculus was one of the most important mathematical innovations of the seventeenth century. But a dispute over its discovery sewed the seeds of discontent between two of the greatest scientific giants of all time — Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Today Newton and Leibniz are generally considered the twin independent inventors of calculus, and they are both credited with giving mathematics its greatest push forward since the time of the Greeks. Had they known each other under different circumstances, they might have been friends. But in their own lifetimes, the joint glory of calculus was not enough for either and each declared war against the other, openly and in secret.

This long and bitter dispute has been swept under the carpet by historians — perhaps because it reveals Newton and Leibniz in their worst light — but The Calculus Wars tells the full story in narrative form for the first time. This vibrant and gripping scientific potboiler ultimately exposes how these twin mathematical giants were brilliant, proud, at times mad and, in the end, completely human.



Customer Review: not good....:
This book is poorly written. In fact, considering that its subject is most likely to be chosen by discriminating readers, it is so bad that I am surprised it made it into print. Among many other faults noted by other reviewers, most jarring to me is the way the author continually yanks the reader from the 17th century into the present by making reference to something that he'd recently seen or done. That may be the fault of the author, or of his editor, or both; regardless, it gives the book a wildly alternating tone and perspective. Both the author and the editor should feel embarrassed at having produced this shoddy work.

Customer Review: Please avoid this pomposity, at all costs!:
If you've read the reviews that preceded this, you probably have an idea of how disastrously this book has been edited. I will add only that which hasn't been mentioned in other reviews, which is my two cents.

I must say that I only finished this book to give the author the benefit of doubt, after fuming over the many typos, disgustingly careless grammar, factual errors and irreverent first-person comments. I'm sorry to say it wasn't worth the effort.

Before sounding like a gripe, let me tell you what this book is good for. If you like reading your history as a smattering of tidbits within the confines a specific social context, in this case the lives of two prominent scientists at the turn of the 18th century, this is worth skimming over. At best, it is a slightly precocious commentary, and at worst it has the pretentions of being an analysis, with random, irrelevant and condescending first-person accounts thrown in. Worse still, in the epilogue, we are made to feel that Bardi is really modest as he claims to be embarassed by a friend's comments regarding his expertise on the subject.

There are questions that arise out of the subject matter, however, and relevant ones. The overarching one is whether the introvert inventor or the original but flambuoyant expositor gets the credit for an issue as thorny as the invention of Calculus? If this was the question Bardi set out to answer in his book, he should have realized that a chronological biographical sketch with some seemingly relevant characters thrown in would be insufficient.

There is no level of detail regarding the mathematics here. This is disdainful, and only shows how much regard even a science writer has for the subject, or was he perhaps muffled by his very competent publishers? I tend to lean away from the latter explanation because even the verbal treatment of the mathematics is shamefully cursory. A case in point is the description of the brachistochrone problem, infamous in the calculus of variations. How is one to understand the gravity (sic) of the problem if one doesn't quite follow what has led up to it? Merely mentioning that it was a Leibniz challenge is like conjuring a rabbit out of a hat.

It is one thing to avoid equations, lest the audience feel they are talked down to, but another thing altogether to use mathematical symbols for the purely decorative, as the equations in the illustratitive section have done. They have no explanations, no context whatsover, provide no insight to those who are unfamiliar with Calculus, and tautological to those who are. Instead of pulling out pages from text and rendering them unreadable in fine print even the briefest description of Newton's explanation of rainbows would have sufficed. Equations could have been in the body of the text, and where relevant, at the very least.

A discussion about Calculus necessiates a discussion about the tools and the formalism, and even if Bardi wished to avoid excessive technicality, he could have done what most good science journalists do, which is to collate and quote opinions from folks who are well-versed in the mathematical subtleties.

There are a few instances when Bardi stoops from his pedestal to do just this, and those are the few slivers of salvation this book offers. At one point (page 130), he quotes a balanced review of the Pricipia, and mentions how it lauds Newton's geometry but not his physics, since Newton is to have famously declared that 'I do not invent hypothesis' [for gravity]. At another (page 207), Bardi quotes Johann Bernuolli's defense of Liebniz when he mentions that Newton didn't quite demonstrate his method of fluxions in the Principia when he had ample chance to do so, but dogmatically stuck to the geometrical style of his predecessors.

The first case was interesting because it echoes something of Edwin Hubble's attitude regarding his data for receding galaxies. He apparently refused to interpret what his data implied, even if it favoured something like the Big Bang. From a philosophical standpoint such extreme empericism must have indeed looked bizzare and rattled Leibniz in his time, as it did contemporary astronomers.

The other instance, involving Bernuolli's commentary, is somewhat more illuminating of Newton's character. It is an irony that Newton avoided his method of fluxions (perhaps embittered by Hooke's criticism) in the Principia so it would be widely understood, and Leibniz introduced the formalism of Calculus so that it would be widely used to solve a broad class of problems. While Newton's approach was to introduce his concepts of motion and gravitation using existing geometrical tools, looking backward, Leibniz's was to introduce a generic technique of solving infinitesimal problems, complete with a set of tools and it associated new symbols, moving forward. As testimony to the latters vision, we still use his symbols today. In this sense, contrary to the review of the Principia from long ago, Newton was really original in his physical insight about gravitation while Leibniz had the vision to understand that the scope of Calculus was much wider, and not just restricted to gravitation.

The redemption factors are not able to salvage the book, alas. It remains balanced but shallow, and goes to show that however well a book may be researched, an interesting narrative is one where the assimilation is almost invisible, and in a way that inspires meaningful questions. To this end, even an exhaustive bibliography still remains a means, not an end.

Customer Review: Just okay, borrow from library:
The author presents a less technical account of the development of the calculus and the acrimony between Newton and Leibniz later in their lives. Other reviewers here have noted many of the deficiencies of this book editorially; I completed the entire book, and have the following additional criticisms. The "warring" part of the book is only about the last 20%. While the author has done his research, in his presentation I detect only a superficial scholarship that suggests a post-modern, blasé approach to describing the topic. (A reader might get a slightly more engaging account of Newton and Leibniz in Neal Stephenson's "Quicksilver", but there again you have to slog through hundreds and hundreds of pages of post-modern writing).

Beyond the vast amount of editorial mistakes, in one instance the author also seems to have confused the Balkan peninsula, the Iberian peninsula, diplomacy, politics and wars in these areas, etc. with his mention of "France would indeed eventually invade Egypt under Napoleon, who grasped the value of the peninsula..." Finally, there are serious instances where the author's personal opinion has no place in the text.

Overall, it is an okay effort, but more serious readers might best go elsewhere.

Customer Review: Heavy on Biography, Light on the Origins of Calculus:
Students of mathematics at the calculus level and beyond are usually made vaguely aware that, despite some minor historical contention, Isaac Newton is credited for the discovery of calculus. Fewer in number are those who learn the name Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz as Newton's rival claimant for that honor, and still fewer are those who are informed that Newton's methods of fluxions and fluents were almost immediately abandoned in favor of Liebniz's differentials and his superior mathematical notation (essentially that still in use today).

Author Jason Bardi aims to correct that knowledge shortfall in THE CALCULUS WARS: NEWTON, LIEBNIZ, AND THE GREATEST MATHEMATICAL CLASH OF ALL TIME. The use of the word "wars" and the hyperbolic phrasing "greatest clash of all time" set the expectations stage for an epic battle of intellectual giants as potentially juicy as 20-year-old Evariste Galois's fatally romantic duel with pistols. The historical facts are rather less sensational, however, consisting largely of letters and journal articles (most submitted anonymously at the time) hurling nationalistic accusations, often petty or unfounded, from one side of the English Channel to the other. As a result, Mr. Bardi struggles to deliver the implicit drama: there is no critical face-off between the principals, no momentous debate (even the British Royal Society largely shrugs it off thanks to Newton's presidency of that august body), no climactic moment when the truth is laid bare.

Perhaps more disconcerting, the vast majority of Bardi's book is not about calculus at all, not about the battle over its discovery, its historical underpinnings, or its subsequent development along the lines of Liebniz's work. We never see a comparative representation of the Newtonian and Liebnizian models, their notational differences, or their intellectual geneses from the mathematical work of their predecessors (Archimedes' famous method of exhaustion, for example, receives just one passing mention). Instead, the author falls back on the more conventional approach of chronological biography, trailing the two men's parallel lives from 1642 to 1728. It could certainly be argued that their respective biographies give important background to their personalities and professional status when the "calculus wars" finally broke out in 1699 (175 pages into Bardi's 250-page book). However, Bardi writes extensively on Liebniz's silver mining schemes, invention of a leather folding chair and a new type of windmill, promotion of binary numbers, theories of planetary motion and theology, political machinations, court genealogical work, and studies of China, to name a few. Similarly with Newton, it is his optics, theories of universal gravitation, stewardship of the British Mint, dabblings in alchemy, psychological mood swings, even his sexual orientation.

In the end, Bardi sides with Liebniz as the more aggrieved party, clearly innocent of the charges of plagiarism. Newton is clearly the loser in this "war," both for hoarding his great discovery to the detriment of fellow scientists and mathematicians and for treating his Continental contemporaries with such disdain. Sadly, the entire affair did nothing to polish the honor of either man.

Bardi's storytelling prose is fluid and well suited to his task, with one significant exception. In a tale of dueling mathematical, scientific, and intellectual giants, one inserts oneself at the greatest of risks. Perhaps a Stephen Hawking could merit an occasional authorial "I" in this story, but decidedly not a Jason Bardi (despite his ostentatiously displayed middle name, Socrates, that ironically only emphasizes the disparity). Author Bardi is given to repeated, utterly trivial, and mostly parenthetical insertions of his own opinions that are presumptuous, irrelevant, and distracting: "When I was in London, I noticed..." , "...an event I like to call..." , "I get this picture when I think about it..." , "...as I recall from my encounter..." , "For my part, I can't help but wish..." , "a docent told me..." , "I examined..." , "...I have read..." , "I examined... [again]" , culminating with the irrepressible "I'm not surprised, really" and the exquisite "For me, what's really interesting... " Every one of these first person insertions should have been removed by a more exacting editorial pencil.

I approached this book hoping to discover a comparative treatment of the origins and development of Newton's and Liebniz's twin lines of calculus development, to learn how two intellectual giants of the 18th Century each separately made a conceptual mathematical leap nearly on a par with Einstein's leap to relativity. The similarities and differences in their developmental threads would surely be part and parcel of the historical argument over rights of discovery and accusations of plagiarism. Regrettably, I found instead seemingly endless pages of biographical minutiae about everything else in these two great men's lives.


Customer Review: Proofreading Errors Are Too Distracting:
When I received the book, I began reading the section "Bibliographical Essay" and encountered ten proofreading errors in nine pages. I found this too distracting to continue, and I lost trust in whatever scholarship was used in the preparation of this book. There is no excuse for such carelessness. If I were the publisher, I would be embarrassed.

Product Description:
Of all the thinkers of the century of genius that inaugurated modern philosophy, none lived an intellectual life more rich and varied than Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). Trained as a jurist and employed as a counsellor, librarian, and historian, he made famous contributions to logic, mathematics, physics, and metaphysics, yet viewed his own aspirations as ultimately ethical and theological, and married these theoretical concerns with politics, diplomacy, and an equally broad range of practical reforms: juridical, economic, administrative, technological, medical, and ecclesiastical. Maria Rosa Antognazza's pioneering biography not only surveys the full breadth and depth of these theoretical interests and practical activities, it also weaves them together for the first time into a unified portrait of this unique thinker and the world from which he came. At the centre of the huge range of Leibniz's apparently miscellaneous endeavours, Antognazza reveals a single master project lending unity to his extraordinarily multifaceted life's work. Throughout the vicissitudes of his long life, Leibniz tenaciously pursued the dream of a systematic reform and advancement of all the sciences, to be undertaken as a collaborative enterprise supported by an enlightened ruler; these theoretical pursuits were in turn ultimately grounded in a practical goal: the improvement of the human condition and thereby the celebration of the glory of God in His creation. As well as tracing the threads of continuity that bound these theoretical and practical activities to this all-embracing plan, this illuminating study also traces these threads back into the intellectual traditions of the Holy Roman Empire in which Leibniz lived and throughout the broader intellectual networks that linked him to patrons in countries as distant as Russia and to correspondents as far afield as China.

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Daniel Garber presents an illuminating study of Leibniz's conception of the physical world. Leibniz's commentators usually begin with monads, mind-like simple substances, the ultimate building-blocks of the Monadology. But Leibniz's apparently idealist metaphysics is very puzzling: how can any sensible person think that the world is made up of tiny minds? In this book, Garber tries to make Leibniz's thought intelligible by focusing instead on his notion of body. Beginning with Leibniz's earliest writings, he shows how Leibniz starts as a Hobbesian with a robust sense of the physical world, and how, step by step, he advances to the monadological metaphysics of his later years. Much of the book's focus is on Leibniz's middle years, where the fundamental constituents of the world are corporeal substances, unities of matter and form understood on the model of animals. For Garber monads only enter fairly late in Leibniz's career, and when they enter, he argues, they do not displace bodies but complement them. In the end, though, Garber argues that Leibniz never works out the relation between the world of monads and the world of bodies to his own satisfaction: at the time of his death, his philosophy is still a work in progress.

Product Description:
Offering an invaluable introduction to Leibniz's philosophy, this volume collects many of his most important texts, beginning with the Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), which marks the beginning of maturity in his ideas, and ending with the Monadology (1714), which was written in response to requests for a systematic, organized account of his overall philosophy. Also included in this volume are critical reactions to Leibniz's work by his contemporaries (Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Bayle, and Simon Foucher), together with Leibniz's responses. All the texts are newly translated into English for this edition, and each is preceded by a summary explaining its background, structure, and content.



Customer Review: A bit away from Leibniz:
A very good textbook, but with poor emphasis on Leibniz's mathematical work. I did't put four stars since it is a book intended for philosophers, or more precisely, students of philosophy, but I believe that no course on Leibniz can be complete without placing emphasis on his mathematical views, and their influence on his philosophical views.

Customer Review: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: the mind, the monad.:
Leibniz is indeed one of the most important and influential of philosophers and also one of the least examined, perhaps even among students of philosophy. He is most known for his contributions to mathematics, theology, and physics while his philosophical views are most often perceived through Voltaire's popular, but rather superficial mocking of his arguments regarding "possible worlds." But Leibniz' "best of all possible worlds" view is more subtle and robust than Voltaire was willing to see. The argument is not that the world is perfect -- certainly not if taken from any single, topical point of view, but that "in producing the universe [God] chose the best possible design, in which there was the greatest variety, together with the greatest order." One may dispute Leibniz' general view and/or aspects of his justification of it, but as Leibniz developed the argument along the lines of possibility, contingency, and necessity, it is difficult to see how one would logically disprove it. It has had to be enough for detractors to declare that they disagree with, or dislike the argument.
The famous argument is a recurring thread and summation in this Oxford Philosophical Texts volume edited by Woolhouse and Francks. Here is certainly a book that belongs in the library of any student of philosophy. As is noted in the editor's introduction, a recent biographer has written of Leibniz -- "Even if he had only contributed to one field, such as law, history, politics, linguistics, theology, logic, technology, mathematics, science, or philosophy his achievement would have earned him a place in history. Yet he contributed to all these fields, not as a dilettante but as an innovator able to lead the specialists." But even in the reasoning of such a magnificent mind there are problems and weaknesses (which tells us a great deal about philosophy and the human mind!). I won't explore the main difficulties that I found. I share one of the concerns expressed by Antoine Arnauld in his correspondence with Leibniz, as well as a few others.
Leibniz draws first from classical schools of thought, the Pythagoreans, Platonists, and Peripatetics (while wise ancient philosophers will always need rehabilitation, they "were not so far from the truth, nor so ridiculous as the common run of our new philosophers suppose."). He mostly rejects the Scholastics as well as the popular influences of European thought, Hobbes and Spinoza. With modification, he rehabilitates Aristotle's "entelechies," which become his "monads" (from the Greek, 'monas', meaning unity, or that which is one). A monad is the universe "from a point of view". Matter is understood as phenomena, not substance. Substance (for example number or mind) is irreducible, matter is a composite. Leibniz' view is amenable to Pythagoras and in many ways to both quantum theory (in the "quarks and gluons" model, the "solidity" of matter is merely a phenomena of the gluon force, and voids in space-time are not exactly voids) and to so-called string theories. One might say it is amenable to grand unification theory as well. Leibniz also hinted bluntly of Einstein's Relativity, repeatedly stating that there is no such thing as a physical state of absolute rest, motion, or time, as they are all "relativities." Newton, for all his genius, got that wrong (as regards time, that is).
I could go on and on, there are many pregnant themes in this collection of essays, articles, and correspondence (for example, "the present is big with the future"). Trying to keep this brief, I will simply suggest you read Leibniz (but do not skip the excellent introduction in this volume). Histories place him in Newton's shadow, which is unfortunate; as a philosopher, he certainly does not belong there. As regards the comparisons, Leibniz' mathematics was more elegant, his physics more far-sighted, his theology better by almost any standard. It seems he had a nicer personality too. His influence on such divergent thinkers as Kant, Russell, and Plantinga indicates his continuing importance.

Product Description:
Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays contains complete translations of the two essays that constitute the best introduction to Leibniz's complete thought: 'Discourse on Metaphysics', a short course in his metaphysics, written in 1686 at the time his mature thought was just crystalising and 'Monadology' of 1714, a summary of Leibniz's mature metaphysics, written late in his long career. These are supplemented with two essays of special interest to the student of modern philosophy, 'On the Ultimate Origination of Things' of 1697, which deals clearly with Leibniz's celebrated doctrine of contingency and creation, and the Preface to his New Essays of 1703-1705, which presents a brief and coherent overview of his epistemological position, particularly as it relates to the empiricism of Locke.

Product Description:
A remarkable thinker, Gottfried Leibniz made fundamental contributions not only to philosophy, but also to the development of modern mathematics and science. At the center of Leibniz's philosophy stands his metaphysics, an ambitious attempt to discover the nature of reality through the use of unaided reason. This volume provides a systematic and comprehensive account of the full range of Leibniz's thought, exploring the metaphysics in detail and showing its subtle and complex relationship to his views on logic, language, physics, and theology.

Amazon.com Review:
Observing that Leibniz "could manage simultaneously all the sciences," Bernard de Fontenelle half-seriously proposed that the student of his work should "make several savants from only one Leibniz." Fortunately, the 13 essays contained in The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz ought to make it unnecessary to dissect the great 17th-century polymath. The contributors, all distinguished scholars of Leibniz's work (strangely, though not objectionably per se, also all English speakers), have created a guide suitable for specialists and nonspecialists alike, well worth the attention of anyone interested in Leibniz's philosophy.

Roger Ariew's biographical essay and Stuart Brown's essay on the 17th-century intellectual backdrop help to situate Leibniz in his milieu. At the center of the Companion, however, are the essays that deal with Leibniz's metaphysics. His early metaphysical work is discussed by Christina Mercer and R.C. Sleigh Jr., who reveal, surprisingly, that it was ultimately motivated by his ambitious project to reconcile Roman Catholics and Protestants. Donald Rutherford examines Leibniz's later metaphysical work, dominated by the theory of monads, which "posits that the only fully real beings are unextended, soul-like substances." David Blumenfeld explains Leibniz's ontological and cosmological arguments for the existence of God; he also discusses Leibniz's famous dictum--ridiculed by Voltaire in Candide--that this is the best of all possible worlds. Other essays deal with Leibniz's work in logic, the philosophy of language, epistemology, physics, and moral philosophy. The Companion concludes with Catherine Wilson's insightful discussion of the reception of Leibniz's philosophy, although she unfortunately ends her historical survey with Kant. --Glenn Branch



Customer Review: Good introduction to great Rationalist:
Leibniz has often been called the last great 'universal genius.' An extraordinary polymath who mastered virtually everything intellectual and made outstanding contributions to science, mathematics, philosophy, law, and other areas and who co-invented the calculus with Newton (along with better notation) Leibniz stands as one of the great masters of Western thought.

This volume focuses on the philosophical contributions of Leibniz, including his rationalism, metaphysics, epistemology, theory of mind and ethics. It is a useful introduction to the thought of the man who was the last and the greatest of the Continental Rationalists.

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"... the most detailed statement of Heidegger's reflections on logic available in English." -- Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal

"Heim's excellent translation is eminently readable." -- Canadian Philosophical Review

"All in all, an extraordinary book."  -- David Farrell Krell

Customer Review: The great philosophy.:
The book entitled "Psychoneuroimmunopathology and Daseinsanalysis" is to be published and to be available in Amazon.com. The studies in the book was referred his philosophy. I felt he is the greatest philosophist.

Customer Review: An Excellent introduction to Heidgger's thinking about Technology:
This is an essential series of lectures to understand the importance of science and specifically of Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason in Heidegger's later thought. It provides the basis for any inquiry into technology which, in Heidegger's thought, is the latest development of scientific metaphysics. It is also the basis for recent studies of law like Roger Berkowitz's The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition.

Customer Review: Heidegger reads Leibniz:
The first half or so of this book is what makes it worthwhile. There we find Heidegger's best sustained discussion of Leibniz. To be sure, there are other discussions of Leibniz scattered throughout Heidegger's work (most notably in "The Principle of Reason") but here we find him attempting to elucidate Leibniz's metaphysics, not discuss aspects of Leibniz's work in connection with a broader theme. Heidegger's style of reading makes for excellent introductions to the thinkers he discusses. It's ironic that a writer who has a reputation for obtuseness and impenetrability can produce vividly clear discussions of other thinkers. It should be noted that Heidegger's "Die Frage nach dem Ding" (the English translation, long and sadly out of print, went by the name "What is a Thing?") is one of the best introductory books on Kant in any language. But Heidegger's approach: cut straight to the "question of Being" and show how the rest of a philosopher's work fits in with his basic metaphysical position, makes for a clear and striking interpretation, even if Leibniz scholars might find it a little over-aggressive in some details.