Bonn 2010 – scientific programme

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 6: History and Philosophy of Physics

AGPhil 6.2: Talk

Thursday, March 18, 2010, 14:45–15:15, JUR G

On the interpretation of Leibniz’s unpublished manuscripts on natural sciences — •Hartmut Hecht¹ and Dieter Suisky² — ¹BBAW, G. W. Leibniz Arbeitsstelle Berlin, hecht@bbaw.de — ²Institut für Physik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

From the very beginning of Leibniz’s career, the public and scientific reception of his writings were hampered by the fact that essential parts of his work were either only reluctantly or not at all published. This delay had not only a considerable influence on the interpretation of Leibniz’s theory by his contemporaries, but also by his followers. The impact of the discovered and reread manuscripts results in a considerable change of the role Leibniz played in the history of science.

The new edition of manuscripts on physics is not only a contribution to a contemporary interpretation of Leibniz’s writings in this discipline, but stimulates also a reinterpretation of his mathematical and philosophical papers. For the first time, the project of a complete edition of Leibniz’s papers on natural sciences had been inaugurated. From the results, it can be concluded that the traditionally established interpretation of Leibniz as a representative of one of the great rational systems of the 17th century is to be considerably re-interpreted and modified. Since his stay in Paris in 1672, Leibniz did not only carefully study the results of the empirical sciences, but gave also an interpretation in terms of a specific theory of science. These studies result in a program of physics based on the idea of living forces which was not only alternative to Newton’s approach in the Principia from 1687, but had been even almost simultaneously published in 1686.