I think I may have finished – at least for now – my Leibniz paper. Or at least, time for some other people to see it. I’ll be giving a version of this at the AAG in February, and it will undoubtedly change through comments there, from friends and later from peer review. But it’s time to let it go. Here’s the abstract.

This article discusses the way that the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) made a number of significant contributions across the discipline we now call Geography. In outlining ‘another Leibniz’ to more traditional ways of reading his work, it discusses his work as a geologist, palaeontologist, biologist, historian, political theorist and geopolitician. Particular focus is on his Protogaea, the Annales Imperii and the Consilium Aegyptiacum, respectively a pre-history of the earth, a chronology of German nobility in the Middle Ages, and a military-strategic proposal to King Louis XIV. Making use of contemporary debates about ways of reading Leibniz, and drawing on a wide range of his writings, the paper indicates just how much remains to be discovered about his work.