G. W. Leibniz. Essais scientifiques et philosophiques. Les articles publiés dans les journaux savants

The editors of this work compiled all the articles Leibniz published in his lifetime, which are more than 160, in order to present them as a reprint in these three volumes. Leibniz' scientific and philosophical activity and the image of his works in the public were essentially determined by the articles which were printed in contemporary periodicals. Indeed, Leibniz only published - apart from scholarly texts of the political and historical kind - his early work Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (1666) and the Essais de Théodicée (1710) in a separate edition. Therefore a collection of the complete corpus of Leibniz' articles proves to be extremely important for historical and interpretative questions. Only by a detailed analysis of these texts the depiction of Leibniz' self-image, which he presented to his contemporaries and thus to all of the European culture for almost half a century, will be possible. On several occasions Leibniz called an anthology of his articles the most suitable means to remedy the lack of that systematic description of his thought which several people were insistently demanding.