  On some ways of reading of Leibniz’s texts, the measure of dead force approaches very closely the measure of force more clearly at work in  Newton’s   Principia.[21]  It is therefore worth noting that although he could hardly deny the  technical achievement of Newton’s masterpiece, Leibniz was  nonetheless eager to distance his own thinking about force from that  of his great rival’s. In a polemical piece whose title has been  translated as “Against Barbaric Physics,” Leibniz writes: