Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) Was one of the great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is known as the last “universal genius”. He made deep and important contributions to the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of religion, as well as mathematics, physics, geology, jurisprudence, and history. Even the eighteenth-century French atheist and materialist Denis Diderot, whose views were very often at odds with those of Leibniz, could not help being awed by his achievement, writing in his entry on Leibniz in theEncyclopedia, “Perhaps never has a man read as much, studied as much, meditated more, and written more than Leibniz… Stanford.edu