2000 pages of Leibniz, much of it previously untranslated or unpublished, will be published next month.
They’ll appear in a new three-volume edition of Leibniz’s Philosophical Papers (1677–1686), edited by Lloyd Strickland and published by Oxford University Press.
According to Dr. Strickland, the volumes include “314 texts drawn from manuscripts in Latin, French, and German. Of these, 203 appear in English for the first time; 7 are previously unpublished, and 1 is published here in full for the first time.” They are the “first stage in a larger project to recover Leibniz’s philosophical writings directly from manuscript sources and present them in a scholarly English edition.”
There are further details about the project at Leibniz Papers.
Lloyd Strickland’s work has been of immeasurable value in exposing English-language readers to the tremendous range and richness of Leibniz’s work. I’ve been reading his online translations of Leibniz texts on sundry subjects for a long time, and I’ve found they’re always perfectly accurate and elegant. The Leibniz we got in grad school was just an infintesimal sliver of the actual thinker; Lloyd is delivering the real thing! I’m very happy to know that these volumes are coming out soon.
I wonder if this won’t perversely, be worse for Leibniz studies. A professor of mine once, half in jest but only half, suggested that the only thing that could explain the relative popularity of Spinoza over Leibniz despite the former’s obvious inferiority (her claim not mine but not one I reject to be honest) is that it was so much easier to work on Spinoza. With Spinoza the whole corpus is pretty much one book you can read in part of a summer break. With Leibniz the corpus is not only huge, but it’s expanding and a complete and utter mess. That means it’s not only a nightmare to master, but if you’re a grad student or early career type you have to worry about your whole careful thesis getting blown up by some random bit in an odd letter he wrote or note he scribbled in the margin that just came to light.
Also, not that it’s neither here nor there but I’m going to take this opportunity to say that everyone should take a minute to find the part where Leibniz pops up in Carlos Eire’s recent “They Flew.” If nothing else it should comfort you that even Leibniz got stuck with what he regarded as busywork from his bosses.
But grad student work in history of philosophy is largely aimed at refuting prior scholarship: adding to “the literature.” If anything, more Leibniz gives grad students more work. Hooray!
Every Leibniz scholar I know is excited about the news, so I doubt it’s bad for Leibniz studies.
PS: Why do you not-reject the claim that Spinoza is obviously inferior to Leibniz?
There is a very great deal more to come. In addition to his Philosophical Writings (Series VI), there are seven other series of volumes. See: https://www.leibnizedition.de/en/ Leibniz did not regard his work in philosophy and in mathematics as always disjoint.
Siegmund Probst, “The edition of Leibniz’s mathematical writings: past, present and future,” _Historia Mathematica_ Volume 72, September 2025, Pages 39-45 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0315086025000424
Abstract: The edition of Leibniz’s mathematical writings is a monumental task: 10,000 manuscript pages will fill 30 volumes (out of 130 planned for his complete works). At his death (1716), only 1 book and ∼100 journal articles were published. 19th century editions by Gerhardt (1849-1863) greatly increased availability. In the 20th century, Eberhard Knobloch spearheaded the Academy Edition (Series VII), publishing 4 volumes (1990-2008) with 90% unpublished texts. Volumes 1-7 cover Leibniz’s Paris years (1672-1676). Future plans: 22 more volumes in 30 years, requiring 2 to 8 editors. Collaborations (ERC Philiumm) already yield online pre-editions and translations, boosting worldwide Leibniz research.
Do we know who the most prolific philosopher was? I didn’t know Leibniz produced so much work. Could the title be his? (130 volumes is… a lot)
the complete works of Voltaire were edited in 205 volumes (1968-2022). A lot of it are emails: the correspondence took up 51 volumes (45 voll. of letters and 6 voll. editorial material)
Perhaps this release will solve “The Leibniz Conspiracy” conjectured by Kurt Goedel: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3876710
This looks great historically but, quite honestly, it’s hard to see how this is going to shed more light on the truth of things, as it were, as the monad theory has been robustly refuted, no?
Yes, as it turns out, monads are false! Who knew? Don’t bother reading about them.
So many new Leibniz texts in English, this is great. And Strickland’s scholarship is always top notch.