| De Arte Combinatoria |
Article Index for De Arte |
Website Links For Arte |
Information AboutDe Arte Combinatoria |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT DE ARTE COMBINATORIA | |
| philosophy books | |
| combinatorics | |
| philosophy of language literature | |
| 1666 books | |
| gottfried leibniz | |
|
The main idea behind the text is that of an Alphabet Of Human Thought , which is attributed to Descartes . All concepts are nothing but combinations of a relatively small number of simple concepts, just as words are combinations of letters. All truths may be expressed as appropriate combinations of concepts, which can in turn be decomposed into simple ideas, rendering the analysis much easier. Therefore, this alphabet would provide a logic of invention, opposed to that of demonstration which was known so far. Since all sentences are composed of a subject and a predicate, one might
For this, Leibniz was inspired in the '' Ars Magna '' of Ramon Llull , although he criticized this author because of the arbitrariness of his categories and his indexing. Leibniz discusses in this work some combinatorial concepts. He had read Clavius' comments to the Tractatus De Sphaera of Sacrobosco , and some other contemporary works. He introduced the term ''variationes ordinis'' for the permutations, ''combinationes'' for the combinations of two elements, ''con3nationes'' for those of three elements, etc. His general term for combinations was ''complexions''. He found the formula : which he thought was original. The first examples of use of his ''ars combinatoria'' are taken from law, the musical registry of an Organ , and the Aristotelian theory of generation of elements from the four primary qualities. But philosophical applications are of greater importance. He cites the idea of Hobbes that all reasoning is just a computation. The most careful example is taken from geometry, from where we shall give some definitions. He introduces the Class I concepts, which are primitive. ;Class I: 1 point, 2 space, 3 included, 9 parts, 10 total, [... 14 number, 15 various [...] Class II contains simple combinations. ;Class II.1: Quantity is 14 των 9 Where των means "of the". Thus, "Quantity" is the number of the parts. Class III contains the ''con3nationes'': ;Class III.1: Interval is 2.3.10 Thus, "Interval" is the space included in total. Of course, concepts deriving from former classes may also be defined. ;Class IV.1: Line is 1/3 των 2 Where 1/3 means the first concept of class III. Thus, a "line" is the interval of (between) points. Leibniz compares his system to the Chinese and Egyptian languages, although he did not really understand them at this point. For him, this is a first step towards the Characteristica Universalis , the perfect language which would provide a direct representation of ideas along with a calculus for the philosophical reasoning. As a corollary, the work ends with a proof of the existence of God, according to the Euclidean formalism, based on the Ontological Argument . REFERENCES
|
|
|