G. V. Leibniz on diplomacy, cosmopolitanism, tolerance and global civilizational tasks of the enlightenment
The introductory part of the article assesses the place of G. V. Leibniz in the European public life at the turn of the XVII-XVIII centuries. The author seeks to find out how much his philosophical position was related to his religious, scientific and political views. For this purpose, a set of historical, biographical, comparative and retrospective methods is used, as well as the methodology of rational and philosophical analysis and synthesis. The hypothesis of the article is that during the transition from the Reformation era to the Enlightenment era, when the thinker lived, a global Eurocentric mentality was already actively formed, in which the categories of «patriotism» and «cosmopolitanism», national interests and interethnic tolerance participated. In this context, the role of the deism movement in fostering inter-confessional tolerance at this historical stage becomes clearer, as well as the importance of setting large-scale civilizational tasks for European science, which «transferred» part of the church-religious «functions» to the field of law and ethics. As a result, the author discovers in Leibniz's philosophical «idealism» both a belief in the power of scientific progress, and the anticipation of new physical concepts, and the basis for organizing his projects, often very «utopian» and «opportunistic». Both the foundations of European colonial-geopolitical doctrines and the principles of the holistic-ecumenical trends of recent history are «derived» from Leibnizianism.