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Articles

Leibniz on Unicorns

Dean Ericksen finds something strange in his cabinet of philosophical curiosities.

Saul Kripke may have argued that unicorns could not possibly exist, but if you’re personally unconvinced, you’d be in good company. When he wasn’t busy independently inventing infinitesimal calculus and devising his famous theodicy, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) found time to write about unicorns in what would become Protogaea (1749).

Leibniz’s ‘unicorn’, 1749

Leibniz intended for Protogaea to serve as a preface to a larger project, a history of the House of Brunswick. But Protogaea was an ambitious undertaking in its own right.

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