The Debate on Plastic Natures in the Correspondence between Masham and Leibniz. Epistolary Exchanges as an Intellectual Framework in the République des Lettres

In the early years of the eighteenth century, Jean Le Clerc and Pierre Bayle engaged in a fervent dispute regarding Ralph Cudworth’s notion of plastic natures. This article examines how this debate indirectly prompted the beginning of the philosophical correspondence between Damaris Masham, Cudworth’s daughter, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Through this epistolary dialogue, Masham’s acumen is manifest, as she not only impels Leibniz to furnish a comprehensive and analytically rigorous exposition of his doctrine of pre-established harmony but also adeptly defends her father’s intellectual system against Bayle’s charges of atheism. The correspondence is valuable not only for its philosophical content, but also because it offers an example of how ideas circulate in the République des Lettres. In this supranational intellectual community, emblematic of the early modern epoch, epistolary exchanges function as pivotal conduits, bridging the realms of private discourse and public intellectual exchange.