VERANSTALTUNG IN DER REIHE: 350 JAHRE – LEIBNIZ KOMMT NACH HANNOVER

Dr. Audrey Borowski

Described by Voltaire as “perhaps a man of the most universal learning in Europe”, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is often portrayed as a rationalist and philosopher who was wholly detached from the worldly concerns of his contemporaries. As my talk shows, this could not be further from the truth. Leibniz, especially as a young man, was a veritable powerhouse of ideas for concrete problems and improvement. Leibniz was an audacious young man encouraged by the ambient sense of epistemological opening and fluidity. The staggering range of his activities included publishing articles, promoting scientific and philosophical societies as well as a universal language, seeking to acquire the secret of phosphorus, inventing a calculating machine, and advocating for engineering projects and newfound medical measures. Famously he devised a plan for a universal philosophical language and encyclopaedia that would provide an archive of all knowledge through a combinatorial art, centuries before large language models, and even imagined enlightened princes promoting metaphysically inspired technocracies redesigned along rational and scientific lines. Ultimately, however, many of his schemes did not succeed or remained unimplemented. As he would find out quickly enough, willing as Leibniz was ready to place his knowledge in the service of power, power did not in turn feel obliged to implement his schemes or cater to his vision of learning.

Dr Audrey Borowski is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Isaac Newton Trust Fellow at the University of Cambridge working on the philosophy of artificial intelligence. She was previously a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy as well as the University of Bonn. She completed her doctorate (D.Phil) in the History of Ideas at the University of Oxford. Her first monograph Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant was published by Princeton University Press in 2024.

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