[This letter is part of the Little Letter Republic, a project whose purpose is to build community intellectual community.]

Dear Henrik,

You likely are wondering about the education of Gottfried Leibniz.

But let’s start with a 17th century pedagogical theory called Ramism developed 100 years prior, a virus spreading throughout Protestant Central Europe. We might call it a form of reductionism and an aggressive simplification of the curriculum, curriculum requirements, of the categories in philosophy and metaphysics, and the promotion of new tabular methods for pedagogy that trade off exactitude and nuance for ease of use. It was wildly successful, influential, loathed, and hated, and achieved a semi victory, that lasts to this day.

Here’s what the Ramists believed.

There are two types of philosophers, those who make easy to recall dichotomies and those who don’t i.e. dastardly Aristotelians. Among those who make dichotomies there are the Ramists and the Semi-ramists. The Ramists require all things be organized into pedagogically satisfying charts and the Semi-ramists only require most things. There are two types of Ramists, the ones who emphasize the doctrines of Ramus and the ones who spend all their time attacking Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and Quintillian for being too obtuse and poorly structured. For the Ramists there are two doctrines: 1) All knowledge is a form of dichotomous categorization. 2) Philosophy should be immediately evident and empirical. There are two types of philosophy: physics and logic. Physics should be based on math and simple observation. Logic should also be based on math and simple observation. Anything too complicated is likely not true, because true things are useful, and complicated things are not useful, and thus not true!

Leibniz was influenced by it greatly. Many later Ramists were interested in the mad quest to reduce ideas into primitive notions which could be combinatorially combined along with rules to create all possible ideas, like some mad Principia Mathematica or Peano Arithmetic for philosophy. Some post-Ramists were encyclopaedists looking to reconcile the sciences and philosophies of the day. What could be more useful than theological and political harmony in days torn by confessional, political, and philosophical divisions!

Leibniz went to an Orthodox Lutheran school in the very Orthodox Lutheran town of Leipzig in which the reading list was tightly curated for Lutheran Orthodoxy. At this school, he learned excellent Latin which was the language in which all of his writings, essays, and conversations had to take place. And as far as it went, it was solid. The secret sauce, though, was his father’s death when he was 8 years old. His father was a pastor and professor of theology and his library contained many books from the various confessions Reformed, Lutheran, and Catholic. The library was locked. A noble in town interceded on behalf of the young Gottfried to unlock this library and allow him free reign, despite the objections of the schoolmasters. Enter the autodidact.

Leibniz, however, was not solely a follower of this Ramist school of thought. He was extremely broad-minded – despite his parochial environment. Reading widely, he thought the various traditions could be reconciled. Everything from Aristotle and Aquinas to Philip Melanchthon and John Calvin. He read Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, the Jesuits and the Jansenists. If only we had the right alphabet of ideas, the right structure of thought, the right metaphysical axioms, then rational argument could undo the Gordian Knot of politics, religion, theology, and natural philosophy – all that had been thrown into great uncertainty in the 17th century.

Who knew that the inventor of the integral originally received his degrees in law? I didn’t!

Because he was completing his curriculum and dissertation so quickly, he finished his dissertation for his bachelor’s degree and was almost immediately ready to be finished with his master’s degree. However, the older students in the program worked hard to block special permission for Leibniz to be allowed to graduate early. Annoyed by his institution’s inability to adapt to his needs, he transferred to the University of Jena, where he almost immediately submitted his master’s degree thesis for jurisprudence.

One method of his study was to take a topic or disputed question and read across several traditions upon that question, taking notes. There are groups that he met at the University of Jena in which six students would read together. Each would read different authors on the same topic, and they would meet together to share the diversity of views, thus enabling a comparative approach to natural philosophy and legal studies.

Leibniz’s masters degree dissertation De Casis Perplexis in Iure offers a great example of how the simplified branching style of Ramus can be combined with erudition and novel thinking, especially through the use of comparison across texts. In terms of method, this would require creating notebooks by topic which collect references to deployed on that topic later. As scholars and writers struggle to organize their notes and reading into sensible systems for recall, the world after Ramus worked hard to develop these systems for keeping track. We take it for granted… yet how many of us have a truly good system?

—

Leibniz: An Intellectual Autobiography by Maria Rosa Antognazza
HOPWAG: Peter Adamson
De Casis Perplexis in Iure by Leibniz