An imagined gathering
1700 · Hanover, Germany
Leibniz hosts Newton and Locke in Hanover and makes the case for his monads and his best of all possible worlds.
Leibniz has spent years at the Hanover court and has built a household that is part library, part laboratory, part archive. Newton and Locke, both in Germany on other business, have accepted his invitation, and he means to show them that his philosophy is not the fantasy they suspect.
Over capon, blancmange, and wafers, Leibniz explains his monads and the pre-established harmony that makes mind and body run together without touching. Newton finds it ingenious and unnecessary; Locke finds it unfalsifiable and says so. The old dispute over the calculus is not mentioned until the wine, and then only once. Leibniz, who has never minded being the most optimistic man in the room, takes the evening as a success.
Host: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Isaac Newton — Leibniz's rival over the calculus, and never comfortable in company.
John Locke — Empiricist philosopher, constitutionally suspicious of grand systems.
Dessert
a period dish
Drink
a period dish
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
The mathematics of change and accumulation, invented independently by Newton and Leibniz and the subject of a bitter priority dispute.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Leibniz's picture of mind and body as two clocks set by God to keep perfect time without ever touching.
Isaac Newton
Newton's claim that the same force pulling an apple down holds the Moon in its orbit and binds the planets to the Sun.
This gathering is an editorial recreation grounded in the biographies of those present; it did not necessarily take place as described.