INTRODUCTION

During 2016, the year of the three hundredth anniversary of G.W. Leibniz’s death, a great amount of initiatives have been carried out all around the world in order to celebrate the last “universal genius”, as he was often defined after his death. Through the universality of his ingenium Leibniz has offered intellectual stimuli to the most diverse fields of human knowledge, which was reflected by the heterogeneity of the tributes he received last year. The figure of Leibniz as a philosopher is of course the most suitable to express the open range of his interests and his vivid curiosity, but underneath and sometimes beyond this image, he was a genial mathematician, a brilliant politician, a refined jurist, just to scratch the surface.