| Abstract: | "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a polymath of the first order, an inspiration for the German Enlightenment in philosophy, mathematics, and other fields. Yet his reputation had already been in decline at the time of his death due to the influence of Voltaire's Candide, so much so that his independent discovery of differential calculus was widely doubted. Kant rejected most of his philosophical ideas, and although Spinoza, Leibniz' chief contemporary and adversary, was considered a heretic during his lifetime, his views were later considered to be foundational to our conception of liberal, secular modernity, while Leibniz' philosophy was generally forgotten until the 20th century Leibniz in Motion argues that his great innovation was to explain the elusive and indefinable qualities of thought, whether about art, philosophy, or mathematics, as the product of confused perceptions that walled off value judgments from conceptual understanding rather than integrating the two. Similarly, Leibniz challenged the prevailing dichotomy between the beautiful and the practical, opening up the possibility of a usable aesthetic, and insisted that, just as thought participates in aesthetic experience, so too does aesthetic experience participate in thinking--intellectual realms seep into one another and serve as a model for transdisciplinary thought. As opposed to interdisciplinarity, which is rule-bound, it is more spontaneous, unpredictable, fluid, and permeable, aesthetic as well as conceptual. Leibniz' brilliant, innovative style, which diverges from disciplinary norms, underscores this characterization. For Richard Halpern, Leibniz offers a valuable experimental and creative corrective to the intellectual narrowness of the humanities today"-- |
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