De Arte Combinatoria

[3] The booklet was reissued without Leibniz' consent in 1690, which prompted him to publish a brief explanatory notice in the Acta Eruditorum.

All truths may be expressed as appropriate combinations of concepts, which can in turn be decomposed into simple ideas, rendering the analysis much easier.

Since all sentences are composed of a subject and a predicate, one might For this, Leibniz was inspired in the Ars Magna of Ramon Llull, although he criticized this author because of the arbitrariness of his categories indexing.

The first examples of use of his ars combinatoria are taken from law, the musical registry of an organ, and the Aristotelian theory of generation of elements from the four primary qualities.

For him, this is a first step towards the Characteristica Universalis, the perfect language which would provide a direct representation of ideas along with a calculus for the philosophical reasoning.

As a preface, the work begins with a proof of the existence of God, cast in geometrical form, and based on the argument from motion.