Leibniz and the Mechanization of Thought

Journal article

From his plans for a combinatorics of symbols, to the mechanization of thought, to designing mechanical automata that could compute for us, to binary notation, Gottfried Leibniz gave us a sense of how rationality was mechanically possible and how reason could be mechanically explained as ‘well-behaved’ thought-to-thought transitions using symbols. In what follows, I shall trace the developments of some of Leibniz’s ideas and present the elements of his vision of a future, which, so I argue, are entirely consonant with modern machine intelligence and which were remarkably ahead of their time.

Authors: Weckend, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Journal: Think: Philosophy for everyone
• Volume: 25
• Issue: 72
• Pages: 31-40
• Publication date: 2026-05-05
• DOI: 10.1017/s1477175625100924
• EISSN: 1755-1196
• ISSN: 1477-1756
• Language: English
• Keywords: Leibniz; art of combinations; binary system; mechanizing reason; universal language of though