On Leibniz's Calculus:Prelude to Kant's"Copernican Revolution"
The infinitesimals in Leibniz's approach to calculus were not a so-called"success"merely because of the simplicity and practicality of the nota-tion.Starting from the extension,the pioneering method of situs analysis and the theory of mereology not only reconciled the geometrical and algebraic meth-ods on the basis of solving the"problem of incommensurability",which was a difficult problem of the time,but also defined the basis of its concept of infini-tesimals on the basis of the systematic structure of the elements of a new spatial geometry.Moreover,Leibniz's calculus approach reduces the"meta-math-ematics"of deterministic mathematical reasoning,which can be completely independent of the rational concepts and symbolic forms of empirical objects,to a rational critique of philosophical epistemology.Thus the deductive arithmetic with its formal logic and the calculus with its symbolic representations ulti-mately pointed to a"Copernican revolution"in the Sense of Kant's epistemology,which profoundly influenced the subsequent history of thought.
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