Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes

A FTER TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES the Newton-Leibniz disputes continue to inflame the passions. Only the very learned (or the very foolhardy) dare to enter upon this great killing-ground of the history of ideas. Recent intense concern with these controversies means that we can no longer reasonably expect the discovery of significant new facts. The emphasis has shifted to interpreting what is already known about these episodes and the setting in which they occurred. This is a highly desirable state of affairs, for the Newton-Leibniz controversies crystallize a number of issues of general significance. What is the proper interpretation of the relations between natural philosophy, mathematics, metaphysics, theology, and the social and political setting in which these matters were disputed? The elementary anatomy of the controversies is well known. From the late 1690s until about 1714 the stress was upon priority in the discovery of the calculus. Did Leibniz, as Newton and his disciples charged, obtain from Newton the secrets of the calculus in the 1670s? And did Leibniz then obscure this debt while representing his own work as totally independent and original? From about 1710 the disputes began to involve questions in natural philosophy, metaphysics, and religion. These issues reached their greatest prominence during 1715 and 1716, when Leibniz exchanged a series of five letters with the Reverend Samuel Clarke concerning metaphysics, natural religion, God's role in the natural order, the nature of space, matter, and force, and the status of mathematical principles in natural philosophy. Finally, the disputes continued after Leibniz's death in 1716 (and even after Newton's in 1727), developing into a largely experimental and theoretical confrontation between their respective followers over the nature of force in physical inquiries.'