Savile, Anthony - Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Leibniz and the Monadology

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born into an academic family in Leipzig in 1646, just before the end of the Thirty Years War. His father was Professor of Moral Philosophy there and his mother the daughter of a local Professor of Law. Descartes had died in 1650 before Leibniz was 4, and he was younger by 12 years than Spinoza and by 14 than Locke. By the time he was 20, he had precociously completed his own legal studies and written a doctoral thesis on the subject of hard cases at law (De casibus perplexis in jure).