Leibniz-Clarke CorrespondenceGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
About Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence
The is an exchange of five papers by Leibniz and five replies by Samuel Clarke, written in 1715 and 1716 and published by Clarke in 1717 after Leibniz's death. It began when Leibniz wrote to Caroline, Princess of Wales, warning that Newtonian natural philosophy undermined natural religion. Clarke, speaking for Newton, answered.
The dispute ranges over God's relation to the world, free will, miracles, the vacuum, and atoms. Its lasting core is space and time. Clarke defends absolute space and time as real quantities in which God is present. Leibniz insists that space and time are orders of coexistence and succession among things, and that absolute space would violate the principle of sufficient reason. The exchange fixed the terms of the absolute versus relational debate that Mach and Einstein later reopened.