The Organon had several other books, which further detailed the process of constructing arguments, deducing logical consequences, and even contained the foundations of the modern scientific method.
[3] The most immediate predecessor to universal science is the system of formal logic, which is the study of the abstract notions of propositions and arguments, usually utilizing symbols to represent these structures.
This viewpoint inspired later logicians to seek out a set of minimal size containing all of the requisite knowledge from which everything else could be derived and is the fundamental idea behind universal science.
[5] Llull sought to unify philosophy, theology, and mysticism through a single universal model to understand reality.
The books included the principles, definitions, and questions, along with ways to combine these things, which Llull thought could serve as the basis from which reality could be studied.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a 17th century German philosopher, mathematician, and political adviser, metaphysician, and logician, distinguished for his achievements including the independent creation of the mathematical field of Calculus.
Leibniz entered the University of Leipzig in 1661,[8] which is where he first studied the teachings of many famous scientists and philosophers, such as Rene Descartes, Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes.
Unification played a major role in one of Leibniz's early works, Dissertatio de arte Combinatoria.
Written in 1666, De arte Combinatoria was a mathematical and philosophical text that served as the basis for Leibniz's future goal for a universal science.
Leibniz's ideas about unifying human knowledge culminated in his Characteristica universalis, which was a proposed language that would allow for logical statements and arguments to become symbolic calculations.
[11] Kurt Gödel was an Austrian mathematician and logician, who furthered the investigations in logic and the foundations of mathematics began by Hilbert and Russell in the early 20th century.