Warning: this film features rapidly flashing images that can be distressing to photosensitive viewers.
The German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) believed that the Universe fundamentally consists of radically simple mind-like building blocks – separate, indivisible, indestructible – from which emerges the unified world of matter and substance. Borrowing a term from ancient Greek philosophy, he called these entities ‘monads’, and attributed their existence to a ‘God, who perceives all monads with utter clarity’. He laid out this theory of metaphysics in his seminal work, the Monadology (1714). This short video essay for Epoché Magazine pairs excerpts from the notoriously dense text with enigmatic archival imagery and original music, making for a whirlwind introduction to Leibniz’s celebrated and controversial conception of the Universe.
Video by Epoché Magazine
Editor and composer: John C Brady
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History of science
Ideas ‘of pure genius’ – how astronomers have measured the Universe across history
29 minutes
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Values and beliefs
Why a single tree, uprooted in a typhoon, means so much to one man in Hanoi
7 minutes
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Meaning and the good life
Why Orwell urged his readers to celebrate the spring, cynics be damned
11 minutes
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Making
On the Norwegian coast, a tree is transformed into a boat the old-fashioned way
6 minutes
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Animals and humans
One man’s quest to save an orphaned squirrel, as narrated by David Attenborough
14 minutes
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Computing and artificial intelligence
A future in which ‘artificial scientists’ make discoveries may not be far away
9 minutes
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History
Hags, seductresses, feminist icons – how gender dynamics manifest in witches
13 minutes
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Earth science and climate
Images carved into film form a haunting elegy for a disappearing slice of Earth
3 minutes
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Meaning and the good life
Leading 1950s thinkers on the search for happiness in trying times
29 minutes