I wrote a guest post for the wonderful philosophy-of-palaeontology blog, Extinct. To read the whole thing, go here.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz never finished the principal task assigned to him by his boss, Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover. When the latter became King of England in 1704 --the beginning of the ‘Hanoverian usurpation’ that still enjoys some sort of power in the United Kingdom and some of its former possessions--, Leibniz, the delinquent court genealogist, was not invited to join him, as he had hoped. Instead he was made to stay behind, in the expectation that he would finally complete his long overdue history of the medieval origins of Georg Ludwig's own Guelf family, and of their distant union with the Italian Este dynasty: a forgotten alliance that, once reestablished, might yield up validation for new territorial claims.
Leibniz’s principal excuse for taking so long was, he felt, that in order to write a history properly one must begin at the beginning. And he understood this in the most rigorous sense possible: not the beginning of the Guelfs, nor even of humanity, but that of the continents, oceans, and mountains, and the several curiosities discovered within them. Any true history, Leibniz thought, is big history. And thus by the early 1690s, after several years of largely unsuccessful mine-engineering projects in the Harz Mountains, the philosopher set about writing what would come to be called the Protogaea, a text that may rightly be seen as the first instalment in the planned history of his employer’s ancestors.
This work begins as a sort of advertisement for both the scientific interest and the economic potential of the Elector’s lands:
“[T]hose who would trace our region back to its beginnings must also say something about the original appearance of the Earth, and about the nature of the soil and what it contains. For we occupy the highest region of lower Germany, one that is especially rich in metals. Moreover, our homeland is the source of remarkable speculations, and the rays of a public light emanating from here will also advance the exploration of other regions.”
The spirit of this passage is an instance of what I have elsewhere described as Leibniz’s ‘rationalist empiricism’ —the contradiction in terms is only apparent—, whereby precise observations of singular and local things eventually contribute to a universal picture of the rational order of nature, an order we may know exists on a priori grounds, but which only gets fleshed out through the the accumulation of empirical data. Thus curiosity is a tributary of reason, and the particular provides clues to the structure of the universal. As Leibniz says elsewhere in the Protogaea: “[W]hen everyone contributes curiosity locally, it will be easier to recognize universal origins.”
To continue reading, click here.
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