Most of the modern philosophers had something to say about the distinction between analysis and synthesis, since they saw it as crucial to scientific method. However, they didn’t exactly agree, and they certainly didn’t use the terms in the way that Kant did later. In order to understand pre-Kantian thought, it’s essential to bracket off the post-Kantian meanings of the terms.

Leibniz preferred the term ‘combinatoric’ to ‘synthetic’, probably because one of his earliest publications was a highly original student dissertation on the mathematical theory of permutations and combinations. It remained one of his leading ideas that traditional logic could ultimately be replaced by a ‘universal characteristic’, in which all possible concepts were designated a number derived from the simpler concepts of which they were composed. It would then be possible to compute whether any proposition were analytically true or not. Indeed, since he held that all truth was analytic, all truth was theoretically computable.

Note also the relativity of Leibniz’s distinction between the analytic and the synthetic. You only need the synthetic method when you don’t know the answer to a question; so the more you know, the more your knowledge becomes analytic. For God, everything is analytic.

I have selected five passages which together give a clear picture of Leibniz’s views on analysis and synthesis. They are all private notes written in Latin (which was Leibniz’s preferred language when thinking for himself). The second passage is from Gerhardt’s Philosophischen Schriften, Vol. 7. The rest are from Louis Couturat, Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz (Paris, 1903).

Go to the Index to Notes on Analysis