Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Writings and Edition

Writings and Edition

Leibniz mainly wrote in three languages: scholastic Latin, French and German. During his lifetime, he published many pamphlets and scholarly articles, but only two "philosophical" books, the Combinatorial Art and the Théodicée. (He published numerous pamphlets, often anonymous, on behalf of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, most notably the "De jure suprematum" a major consideration of the nature of sovereignty.) One substantial book appeared posthumously, his Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain, which Leibniz had withheld from publication after the death of John Locke. Only in 1895, when Bodemann completed his catalogues of Leibniz's manuscripts and correspondence, did the enormous extent of Leibniz's Nachlass become clear: about 15,000 letters to more than 1000 recipients plus more than 40,000 other items. Moreover, quite a few of these letters are of essay length. Much of his vast correspondence, especially the letters dated after 1685, remains unpublished, and much of what is published has been so only in recent decades. The amount, variety, and disorder of Leibniz's writings are a predictable result of a situation he described in a letter as follows:

I cannot tell you how extraordinarily distracted and spread out I am. I am trying to find various things in the archives; I look at old papers and hunt up unpublished documents. From these I hope to shed some light on the history of the Brunswick. I receive and answer a huge number of letters. At the same time, I have so many mathematical results, philosophical thoughts, and other literary innovations that should not be allowed to vanish that I often do not know where to begin.

The extant parts of the critical edition of Leibniz's writings are organized as follows:

• Series 1. Political, Historical, and General Correspondence. 21 vols., 1666–1701.
• Series 2. Philosophical Correspondence. 1 vol., 1663–85.
• Series 3. Mathematical, Scientific, and Technical Correspondence. 6 vols., 1672–96.
• Series 4. Political Writings. 6 vols., 1667–98.
• Series 5. Historical and Linguistic Writings. Inactive.
• Series 6. Philosophical Writings. 7 vols., 1663–90, and Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain.
• Series 7. Mathematical Writings. 3 vols., 1672–76.
• Series 8. Scientific, Medical, and Technical Writings. In preparation.

The systematic cataloguing of all of Leibniz's Nachlass began in 1901. It was hampered by two world wars, the Nazi dictatorship (with the Holocaust, which affected a Jewish employee of the project, and other personal consequences), and decades of German division (two states with the cold war's "iron curtain" in between, separating scholars and also scattering portions of his literary estates). The ambitious project has had to deal with seven languages contained in some 200,000 pages of written and printed paper. In 1985 it was reorganized and included in a joint program of German federal and state (Länder) academies. Since then the branches in Potsdam, Münster, Hanover and Berlin have jointly published 25 volumes of the critical edition, with an average of 870 pages, and prepared index and concordance works.