The perfecting, or near-perfecting, of philosophy: G. W. Leibniz: Dissertation on combinatorial art; Translated with introduction and commentary by Massimo Mugnai, Han van Ruler, and Martin Wilson; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 307 pp, $65.00 HB.

Nevertheless, Leibniz's I Dissertation on Combinatorial Art i constitutes a noteworthy seventeenth-century model of the relationship between combinatorial thinking and what Leibniz considered the "the harmony of the world, the inner workings of things, and the series of forms" (133). (53-54).We find echoes of such atomism, for instance, in the mature Leibniz's famous monads, the mind-like substances characterized in I Monadology i ¶3 as "the true atoms of nature and, in brief, the elements of things" (Leibniz [3], 213). This volume presents a complete English translation of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's I Dissertation on Combinatorial Art i ( I Dissertatio de arte combinatoria i ), first published in 1666 when the philosopher was just twenty years old. [Extracted from the article]