Ars generalis ultima

Introduction

Llull wrote this last and fullest version of his “Art” in Latin between 1305 and 1308, the final stage of a project he had begun three decades earlier. The system assigns letters from B to K to basic concepts – divine attributes such as goodness, greatness and eternity, relations such as difference and agreement, and a set of standard questions (whether, what, why, how much and so on) – and combines them by means of figures, tables and rotating circles. The purpose was missionary: to argue with Muslims and Jews from premises they also accepted. Leibniz took up the idea of a combinatorial art in his “Dissertation on the Art of Combinations” (1666).