A New Three Volume Edition of Leibniz’s Philosophical Papers (1677–1686)

For a philosopher whose ideas have rippled across logic, metaphysics, mathematics, and beyond, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz remains surprisingly under-translated. Descartes has his Cambridge edition; Spinoza has his Hackett and Princeton volumes; Kant has the Cambridge series. Leibniz, by contrast, has long been served by overlapping “best of” anthologies, many now outdated and based on unreliable transcriptions. That gap is finally beginning to close. A new three-volume edition of Leibniz’s Philosophical Papers (1677–1686), published on April 30 by Oxford University Press, offers the most comprehensive English-language presentation to date of Leibniz’s writings. Drawing directly from manuscripts in Latin, French, and German, it makes available 2000 pages of material, much of it never before appearing in English, and some never previously published in any language.