The Importance of Leibniz for Wundt

Abstract

Late in his life, Wundt published a book on Leibniz, 200 years after Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz died in 1716. In this book, he states a long-lasting interest in Leibniz. He grasped the opportunity to summarize this interest as a part of the memorial in 1916. A closer reading of this book, however, is not just a celebration speech of Leibniz. It is a highly personal confession of the importance of Leibniz’s intellectual activities as a forerunner to some fundamentals for Wundt’s experimental and folk psychology. Yet, by drawing the line back to Leibniz, Wundt also indirectly sketches and includes those intermediate scholars that contributed with continuing the historical line between them. In this paper, Wundt’s reading of Leibniz is examined. One of the striking aspects of his reading is that he is not so interested in Leibniz’s philosophy, as he is of his mathematical thinking. Leibniz’s discovery of differential calculus, the aspect of dynamics in physics and his critic of the mechanistic understanding of causality are probably some of the most important changes that paved the way for modernity and the modern thinking. Wundt makes an indirect connection between those discoveries and the forthcoming psychology. However, Leibniz did not apply the term “psychology”, but Wundt did not hesitate to regard aspects of Leibniz’s authorship as contributions to psychology. The use of the term related to Leibniz is justified by the fact that the one who systematized Leibniz’s philosophy was his student Christian Wolff. This was also the same person to be the first one in the history to include and apply the term psychology as a core aspect of philosophy. The reaction Kant had on this is well known. Thus, this paper will concentrate on the link between Wundt and Leibniz to shed some light on the upcoming use of the term psychology on its way to achieve the status as an experimental science at the end of the nineteenth century.