 There is no doubt that the debate between the Leibnizians and the Newtonians concerning the status of space and time forms part of the essential background to Kant’s views throughout his career. Although Newton originally formulated his conception of space and time in response to Descartes’s views in the Principles of Philosophy (1644), by the turn of the eighteenth century, Newton and his followers were embroiled in an extensive debate with Leibniz and his supporters on the Continent. This reflected, in part, the famous priority dispute regarding the calculus, but it also reflected some of Leibniz’s fundamental criticisms of Newton’s views of space, time and motion in Principia mathematica (1687, 1713—second edition). Leibniz raised many of those criticisms in his correspondence with Samuel Clarke, who defended Newton’s ideas. Kant mentions this debate frequently in the Critique (see, e.g., A23/B37, A39/B56, &amp; A46/B64). Broadly speaking, Newton and his followers argued for the importance of thinking of space, time and motion as “absolute” or at least from an absolute point of view. This means that one regards space and time as existing independently of matter and relations amongst material bodies. As Newton (1999, 408) puts it, “Absolute space, of its own nature without reference to anything external, always remains homogeneous and immovable.” So absolute space, or space regarded from an absolute point of view, has a nature and has the properties of homogeneity and immovability independently of anything else. Since space on this conception has a nature and has properties independently of any relations, Newton was often interpreted as saying that space is a being or perhaps a substance. To the chagrin of many philosophers, Newton avoided using these categories in the Principia itself, although in a famous unpublished manuscript he denied that one should think of space as either a substance or as an accident (Newton 2014, 35–36). In his correspondence with Clarke (1715–1716), Leibniz then argued that Newton’s conception of space and time conflicts with the principle of sufficient reason: if space were to exist independently of all matter and material relations, then there could be no reason for God to have chosen to create matter in one location rather than any other; independently of matter, all locations are indistinguishable (see L 5: 3–4). In part to solve this problem involving the principle of sufficient reason, Leibniz then argues that space is merely the order of relations amongst material bodies. So on his view, space depends on objects and their relations, which solves the problem: since space does not exist independently of matter, God never faced the question of “where” to place bodies in space. To create a bunch of matter just is to create space.