Dr Philip Beeley
Research Fellow and Tutor
01865 615021
My research and publications are focused on the history of science and epistolarly cultures in early modern Europe. I am especially interested in the role played by correspondence networks in the emergence of modern scientific thought and in the ways in which mathematical ideas were disseminated and discussed both in scholarly communities and across different social milieus. A further area of my research is on early modern cryptographyand its importance in shaping political and military events in late seventeenth-century Europe.
I am currently President of the British Society for the History of Mathematics
G. W. Leibniz, Interrelations between Mathematics and Philosophy, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015)
(http://www.springer.com/gb/book/9789401796637)
Up to now there have been scarcely any publications on Leibniz dedicated to investigating the interrelations between philosophy and mathematics in his thought. In part this is due to the previously restricted textual basis of editions such as those produced by Gerhardt. Through recent volumes of the scientific letters and mathematical papers series of the Academy Edition scholars have obtained a much richer textual basis on which to conduct their studies - material which allows readers to see interconnections between his philosophical and mathematical ideas which have not previously been manifested. The present book draws extensively from this recently published material. The contributors are among the best in their fields. Their commissioned papers cover thematically salient aspects of the various ways in which philosophy and mathematics informed each other in Leibniz's thought.
