Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Although Leibniz's writing forms an enormous corpus, no single work stands as a canonical expression of his whole philosophy. In addition, the wide range of Leibniz's work—letters, published papers, and fragments on a variety of philosophical, religious, mathematical, and scientific questions over a fifty-year period—heightens the challenge of preparing an edition of his writings in English translation from the French...

Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays contains complete translations of the two essays that constitute the best introduction to Leibniz's complete thought: Discourse on Metaphysics, a short course in his metaphysics, written in 1686 at the time his mature thought was just crystalising, and Monadology of 1714, a summary of Leibniz's mature metaphysics, written late in his long career. These...