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Samuel Clarke

Samuel Clarke was an English philosopher and Anglican clergyman, educated at Cambridge and later rector of St James's, Westminster. A close ally of Isaac…

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On the Coordinates: 1.5 Philosophy of Space

1675 – 1729 · Norwich; Cambridge; London

Traditions: Modern European

Schools: Rationalism

Samuel Clarke was an English philosopher and Anglican clergyman, educated at Cambridge and later rector of St James's, Westminster. A close ally of Isaac Newton, he defended Newton's views of absolute space and time and of God's relation to the world in his famous correspondence with Leibniz of 1715–16. He also gave the Boyle Lectures, presenting a cosmological argument for God's existence and a rationalist ethics grounded in the eternal fitness of things.

Key ideas

  • Space and time are real and absolute, not merely relations among things.
  • God's will need not always follow a sufficient reason to choose, against Leibniz.
  • A necessarily existing being must exist to explain the existence of dependent beings.
  • Moral truths are eternal relations of fitness, knowable by reason like mathematical truths.

Major works

  • A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1705)
  • A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion (1706)
  • A Collection of Papers which passed between the late learned Mr Leibnitz and Dr Clarke (1717)

In the conversation

In the Coordinates

The questions of philosophy where Samuel Clarke takes a place, from The Coordinates of Thought.