Abstract

It is well known that a central issue of the famous debate between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel Clarke is the nature of space. Leibniz and Clarke disagree on the ontological status of space rather than on its structure. Closely related to the disagreement on the ontological status of space is a further disagreement on the existence of vacuums in nature: While Leibniz denies their existence, Clarke asserts it. In this paper I shall focus on Leibniz’s position in the debate about these issues. The first part is an introduction. In the second part I shall try to reconstruct the theory of physical space which Leibniz presents in his letters to Clarke. This theory is particularly interesting for systematic reasons and gave rise to a lively discussion in modern philosophy of nature. In the third part I shall point out some major difficulties of the theory. In the fourth part I shall examine whether the existence of vacuums is ruled out by this theory of space, as Leibniz seems to imply in one of his letters. I shall confirm E. J. Khamara’s claim that Leibniz’s theory of space does not rule out the existence of vacuums in general. But, as I shall argue, this result can be refined: Leibniz’s theory of space rules out the existence of a certain kind of vacuum, namely extramundane vacuums; it does not, however, rule out vacuums within the world