Gottfried Leibniz

Notes

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), German polymath who invented calculus independently of Newton and set out the Principle of Sufficient Reason: that nothing happens without a reason why it is so and not otherwise. He gave the Argument from Contingency its modern form, asking why there is something rather than nothing and answering that the chain of contingent things must rest on a necessary being. He is also the source of the claim that this is the best of all possible worlds, which Voltaire mocked in Candide.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz

Also see

Linked from

Argument from Abstract Objects

The argument runs from Augustine (On Free Choice of the Will, Book II) through Leibniz (Monadology, §§43–46) to Alvin Plantinga's "Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments":

Argument from Contingency

This is the third of Thomas Aquinas's Five Ways (Summa Theologica, I, q.2, a.3), the argument from possibility and necessity, in the form later given to it by Leibniz. Premise 1 is Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient Reason. The modern apolo…

Argument from the Principle of Sufficient Reason

Leibniz's version (On the Ultimate Origination of Things, 1697; Monadology, 1714, §§31–39):