"Llull sought to create a universal tool for helping to convert people to the Christian faith through logical argumentation. He proposed eighteen fundamental general principles, accompanied by a set of definitions, rules, and figures in order to guide the process of argumentation, which is organised around different permutations of the principles. "
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"While critical towards the details of Llull’s proposed categories and procedures, Leibniz was taken with his overarching vision of the combinatorial art. He drew two key aspirations from Llull’s work: the idea of fundamental conceptual elements, and the idea of a method through which to combine and calculate with them."
"Leibniz spared no modesty in promoting the art and the various initiatives associated with it for which he hoped to raise funds from prospective patrons.
He presented his project as being the world’s most powerful instrument, an end to all argument, the ultimate source of answers to some of the world’s most complex and difficult theological, moral, legal, or scientific questions; and a foolproof means to converting people to Christianity and propagating the faith, amongst other things."
"The objects of their embryonic faith have become the living a priori of the digital age — providing the conditions of possibility for our experience and our reflection, our genres of deliberation, our forms of sociality, and our institutions of judgement — regardless of whether or not the machines operate in the ways that we imagine."
Three hundred years after the death of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and seven hundred years after the death of Ramon Llull, Jonathan Gray looks at how their early visions of computation and the “combinatorial art” speak to our own age of data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.
Thank you! Wonderful essay on #Leibniz efforts to reconcile math with humanity.
Makes me think about #KurtGödel and his #Undecidability work.
Joaquín Herrero 
PC