INTRODUCTION

Between 1715 and 1716 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel Clarke were engaged in a theological and philosophical dispute mediated by Caroline, Princess of Wales. Ten letters were exchanged, five on each side, before the controversy was brought to an end by Leibniz's death in November 1716. During the controversy those involved agreed to publish the texts, which were edited in 1717 by Clarke, who also translated Leibniz's letters into English. His editio princeps is considered to be both fair and excellent, and contains Leibniz's original French on facing pages, as well as a useful selection of additional explanatory materials. This extraordinarily influential controversy is among the most famous and heavily studied philosophical disputative texts of all times, and, in the words of a recent interpreter, its intellectual intricacies are reserved only for the very learned or the foolhardy.

Despite the extent of interest and studies the correspondence has attracted, however, we still lack a comprehensive critical edition taking into account all the relevant texts, including Caroline’s and Clarke’s. Interestingly, eighteenth-century editions did not include the private correspondence between Caroline and Leibniz, which was first made available in the nineteenth century, notably by Onno Klopp in the most complete form. The private correspondence of the Princess ofWales was probably not available to Clarke and, even if it had been, publishing it at the time would have been highly inappropriate. That correspondence, however, provides interesting perspectives on the exchange between Leibniz and Clarke.