Abstract

When asked about the consequences that Leibniz, beyond his reception from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, still has for our time in the twenty-first century, one could look for quick answers and say, for example: as the inventor of binary arithmetic, the mathematician Leibniz is one of the intellectual fathers of computer science and thus of the computer age in which we live. That is certainly not wrong, but it is still not enough. We have also already seen that scientific discoveries that cannot be clearly assigned to a name as a theory, as in the humanities or social sciences, can lead to the same result in different ways. The priority dispute between Leibniz and Newton on the question of the authorship of the infinitesimal calculus is an outstanding example of this. The development of computer technology would probably have been possible even without Leibniz. In contrast to classics such as Marx or Nietzsche, who had a direct influence on social movements and cultural developments through their thoughts beyond philosophy and science, classical thinkers such as Leibniz, who tended to influence developments within the boundaries of their sciences, appear much more indirect and mediated. It is therefore difficult to say what consequences Leibniz had for reality in the twenty-first century.