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Universal Characteristic
The Latin term ''characteristica universalis'', commonly interpreted as ''universal characteristic'', or ''universal character'' in English, is a universal and formal language imagined by Gottfried Leibniz able to express mathematical, scientific, and metaphysical concepts. Leibniz thus hoped to create a language usable within the framework of a universal logical calculation or '' calculus ratiocinator''. The ''characteristica universalis'' is a recurring concept in the writings of Leibniz. When writing in French, he sometimes employed the phrase ''spécieuse générale'' to the same effect. The concept is sometimes paired with his notion of a ''calculus ratiocinator'' and with his plans for an encyclopaedia as a compendium of all human knowledge. A universal pictographic language: the key to all the sciences International communication Many Leibniz scholars writing in English seem to agree that he intended his ''characteristica universalis'' or "universal character" to be a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars (including its own descendants, the Romance languages) supplanted it in common academic and political usage, and it eventually became a dead language in the modern linguistic definition. Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), six or seven noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, and vocative), five declensions, four verb conjuga ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics with the major subdisciplines of number theory, algebra, geometry, and analysis, respectively. There is no general consensus among mathematicians about a common definition for their academic discipline. Most mathematical activity involves the discovery of properties of abstract objects and the use of pure reason to prove them. These objects consist of either abstractions from nature orin modern mathematicsentities that are stipulated to have certain properties, called axioms. A ''proof'' consists of a succession of applications of deductive rules to already established results. These results include previously proved theorems, axioms, andin case of abstraction from naturesome basic properties that are considered true starting points of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sophia Of Hanover
Sophia of Hanover (born Princess Sophia of the Palatinate; 14 October 1630 – 8 June 1714) was the Electress of Hanover by marriage to Elector Ernest Augustus and later the heiress presumptive to the thrones of England and Scotland (later Great Britain) and Ireland under the Act of Settlement 1701, as a granddaughter of James VI and I. Princess Sophia died less than two months before she would have become Queen of Great Britain. Consequently, her son (and grandson of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia) George I, succeeded her first cousin once removed, Queen Anne, to the British throne, and the succession to the throne has since been defined as, and composed entirely of, her legitimate and Protestant descendants. Sophia was born in 1630 to Frederick V of the Palatinate, a member of the House of Wittelsbach, and Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of King James VI and I. She grew up in the Dutch Republic, where her family had sought refuge after the sequestration of their Electorate d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
De Arte Combinatoria
The ''Dissertatio de arte combinatoria'' ("Dissertation on the Art of Combinations" or "On the Combinatorial Art") is an early work by Gottfried Leibniz published in 1666 in Leipzig. It is an extended version of his first doctoral dissertation, written before the author had seriously undertaken the study of mathematics.Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. ''Hauptschriften zur Grundlegung der Philosophie. Zur allgemeinen Charakteristik.'' ''Philosophische Werke'' Band 1. p. 32. Translated in German by Artur Buchenau. Published, reviewed and added an introduction and notes by Ernst Cassirer. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1966, p. 32. The booklet was reissued without Leibniz' consent in 1690, which prompted him to publish a brief explanatory notice in the ''Acta Eruditorum''. During the following years he repeatedly expressed regrets about its being circulated as he considered it immature.Leibniz complained to various correspondents, e.g., to Morell (1 October 1697) or to Meier (23 January 1699); see ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pictograms
A pictogram, also called a pictogramme, pictograph, or simply picto, and in computer usage an icon, is a graphic symbol that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Pictographs are often used in writing and graphic systems in which the characters are to a considerable extent pictorial in appearance. A pictogram may also be used in subjects such as leisure, tourism, and geography. Pictography is a form of writing which uses representational, pictorial drawings, similarly to cuneiform and, to some extent, hieroglyphic writing, which also uses drawings as phonetic letters or determinative rhymes. Some pictograms, such as Hazards pictograms, are elements of formal languages. "Pictograph" has a different definition in the field of prehistoric art (which includes recent art by traditional societies), where it means art painted on rock surfaces. This is in comparison to petroglyphs, where the images are carved or incised. Such images may or may no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logogram
In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced ''hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, as are many Egyptian hieroglyphs, hieroglyphic and cuneiform script, cuneiform characters. The use of logograms in writing is called ''logography'', and a writing system that is based on logograms is called a ''logography'' or ''logographic system''. All known logographies have some phonetic component, generally based on the rebus principle. Alphabets and syllabaries are distinct from logographies in that they use individual written characters to represent sounds directly. Such characters are called ''Phonogram (linguistics), phonograms'' in linguistics. Unlike logograms, phonograms do not have any inherent meaning. Writing language in this way is called ''phonemic writing'' or ''orthographic writing''. Etymology Doulgas Harper's Online Etymo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pictographs
A pictogram, also called a pictogramme, pictograph, or simply picto, and in computer usage an icon, is a graphic symbol that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Pictographs are often used in writing and graphic systems in which the characters are to a considerable extent pictorial in appearance. A pictogram may also be used in subjects such as leisure, tourism, and geography. Pictography is a form of writing which uses representational, pictorial drawings, similarly to cuneiform and, to some extent, hieroglyphic writing, which also uses drawings as phonetic letters or determinative rhymes. Some pictograms, such as Hazards pictograms, are elements of formal languages. "Pictograph" has a different definition in the field of prehistoric art (which includes recent art by traditional societies), where it means art painted on rock surfaces. This is in comparison to petroglyphs, where the images are carved or incised. Such images may or may no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nicholas Rescher
Nicholas Rescher (; ; born 15 July 1928) is a German-American philosopher, polymath, and author, who has been a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh since 1961. He is chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science and was formerly chairman of the philosophy department. Rescher has served as president for the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Leibniz Society of North America, American Metaphysical Society, American Philosophical Association, and Charles S. Peirce Society. He is the founder of ''American Philosophical Quarterly'', '' History of Philosophy Quarterly'', and ''Public Affairs Quarterly''. Early life and education Nicholas Rescher was born in Hagen in the Westphalia region of Germany. In his autobiography he traces his descent to Nehemias Rescher (1735-1801), a founder of the Hochberg-Remseck Jewish community in Swabian Germany. He relocated to the United States when he was 10 and obtained a degree in mathematics at Queens College, New Y ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Athanasius Kircher
Athanasius Kircher (2 May 1602 – 27 November 1680) was a German Jesuit scholar and polymath A polymath ( el, πολυμαθής, , "having learned much"; la, homo universalis, "universal human") is an individual whose knowledge spans a substantial number of subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific pro ... who published around 40 major works, most notably in the fields of comparative religion, geology, and medicine. Kircher has been compared to fellow Jesuit Roger Joseph Boscovich and to Leonardo da Vinci for his enormous range of interests, and has been honoured with the title "Master of a Hundred Arts".Woods, p. 108. He taught for more than 40 years at the Roman College, where he set up a wunderkammer. A resurgence of interest in Kircher has occurred within the scholarly community in recent decades. Kircher claimed to have deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs, hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Egyptian language, but most of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ernst Cassirer
Ernst Alfred Cassirer ( , ; July 28, 1874 – April 13, 1945) was a German philosopher. Trained within the Neo-Kantian Marburg School, he initially followed his mentor Hermann Cohen in attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science. After Cohen's death in 1918, Cassirer developed a theory of symbolism and used it to expand phenomenology of knowledge into a more general philosophy of culture. Cassirer was one of the leading 20th-century advocates of philosophical idealism. His most famous work is the ''Philosophy of Symbolic Forms'' (1923–1929). Though his work received a mixed reception shortly after his death, more recent scholarship has remarked upon Cassirer's role as a strident defender of the moral idealism of the Enlightenment era and the cause of liberal democracy at a time when the rise of fascism had made such advocacy unfashionable. Within the international Jewish community, Cassirer's work has additionally been seen as part of a long tradition of thought on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
