Essays on Theodicy

cility itself; all this soon made him swallow the boredom inseparable from the study of Scholastic Philosophy The traditional system of theology and philosophy taught in medieval European universities, based on Aristotelian logic and the writings of early Church Fathers., which he learned well, and which gave him great advantages whenever he dealt with subjects requiring method, or when it was necessary to strip an opponent's arguments of their deceptive appearance. Mathematics gave him more trouble, because he had to deal with a master who perhaps knew them well enough, but who taught them poorly; and his lessons were so obscure that at first Mr. Leibniz hardly understood them, and the other students did not understand them at all. By dint of meditating and reasoning, Mr. Leibniz cleared up the ideas of Professor Kuhnius Joachim Kuhn (1647–1697), a professor of Greek and philosophy whom the author previously noted was a "limited mind" compared to Leibniz.—which until then had been impenetrable—not only for himself, but also for his fellow students.

In 1663, he goes to study at Jena.

As soon as Mr. Leibniz knew enough Mathematics to benefit from the lessons of a skilled man—that is to say, after about a year, and at the beginning of 1663—he went to Jena, a small town under the jurisdiction of the Duke of Weimar, situated on the Saale original: "Sala" in the Landgraviate of Thuringia, and famous for its University, where the reputation of the professors attracted the most flourishing youth of Germany.

The three whose lessons he took were Erhard Weigelius, Johann Andreas Bosius, and Johann Christoph Falkner.