among nicolas malebranche’s most influential contributions to philosophy are his defense of occasionalism, his highly original theodicy, and his philosophical method elaborated in greatest detail in his magnum opus De la Recherche de la vérité. In his account of occasionalism, Malebranche argues that finite things have no causal power and that God is the only true causal agent. Malebranche’s theodicy—his attempt to reconcile the existence of evil in the world with the existence of an all-good and all-powerful God—is most thoroughly (...) developed in Traité de la nature et de la grâce. Malebranche’s theodicy revolves around a.. (shrink)

Malebranche held that God acts only by general volitions and so is not constantly interfering in the world. The content of God's volitions appears to include the general laws of nature and the particular initial configuration of the created world, so that occasional or natural causes have an important explanatory role. It is clear that at the least Malebranche meant by a 'general volition' the willing of events which followed general laws. Steven Nadler argued that this is all we should (...) understand by a 'general volition', and so we should think that general volitions are simply particular volitions which follow a general law. I argue that this view is not the correct interpretation of Malebranche's general volitions, for it does not do justice to the theological doctrine of the Treatise, masks the genuine difference between Arnauld and Malebranche, and conflicts with what Malebranche says about practical volitions. I then argue that despite Malebranche's view of general volitions, there is still an important difference between his view and Leibniz's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]. (shrink)

In two places, Nicolas Malebranche makes a strange moral argument that he presents as an advantage of his occasionalist metaphysics. Because God is the only true cause, every choice of sin can only be given causality by God's power. Every sinner, therefore, profanely forces God to serve sin; to avoid such sacrelige, the occasionalist has extra reason to avoid sin. My analysis of Malebranche's reasoning shows how this initially perplexing argument does indeed work and, in fact, provides a useful example (...) of how several distinct pieces of his philosophical theology come together to form a surprisingly cohesive argument. (shrink)

Central to Nicolas Malebranche’s theodicy is the distinction between general volitions and particular volitions. One of the fundamental claims of his theodicy is that although God created a world with suffering and evil, God does not will these things by particular volitions, but only by general volitions. Commentators disagree about how to interpret Malebranche’s distinction. According to the ‘general content’ interpretation, the difference between general volitions and particular volitions is a difference in content. General volitions have general laws as their (...) content and particular volitions have particular contents. The ‘particular content’ interpretation holds that all of God’s volitions have particular contents. The difference between general and particular volitions is whether the content of the volition is in accordance with the laws that God has established. A proper interpretation of this distinction is essential to understanding Malebranche’s theodicy, as well as his account of occasionalism and God’s causal activity in the world. In this paper, I defend the ‘particular content’ interpretation of the distinction. (shrink)

I consider a somewhat obscure but important feature of Descartes’s physics that concerns the notion of the “force of rest.” Contrary to a prominent occasionalist interpretation of Descartes’s physics, I argue that Descartes himself attributes real forces to resting bodies. I also take his account of rest to conflict with the view that God conserves the world by “re-creating” it anew at each moment. I turn next to the role of rest in Malebranche. Malebranche takes Descartes to endorse his own (...) occasionalist version of physics. However, he nonetheless rejects Descartes’s account of rest by appealing to the fact that whereas God’s production of motion requires a power beyond the mere power to create, his production of rest requires only the latter power. It turns out that this argument in Malebranche is incompatible with the sort of “re-creationist” account of divine conservation that he is widely thought to have inherited from Descartes. (shrink)

It is well known that the French Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) was both an occasionalist in metaphysics and a mechanist in physics. He consistently argued that God is the only true caus...

There is considerable debate among scholars over whether Descartes allowed for genuine body–body interaction. I begin by considering Michael Della Rocca’s recent claim that Descartes accepted such interaction, and that his doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths indicates how this interaction could be acceptable to him. Though I agree that Descartes was inclined to accept real bodily causes of motion, I differ from Della Rocca in emphasizing that his ontology ultimately does not allow for them. This is not (...) the end of the story, however, since two of Descartes’s successors offered incompatible ways of developing his conflicted account of motion. I contrast the occasionalist view of Nicolas Malebranche that changes in motion derive directly from divine volitions with the non-occasionalist claim of Pierre-Sylvain Regis that such changes derive from a nature distinct from God. In light of Della Rocca’s interpretation, it is noteworthy that the issue of eternal truths is relevant to both alternative accounts. Indeed, Regis took the doctrine that such truths are created to provide crucial support for his alternative to an occasionalist account of body–body interaction. What does not help Della Rocca, however, is that Regis’s view of motion requires a fundamental revision of Descartes’s ontology. Author Keywords: Descartes; Malebranche; Regis; Causation; Motion; Eternal Truths. (shrink)

'God needs no instruments to act', Malebranche writes in Search 6.2.3; 'it suffices that He wills in order that a thing be, because it is a contradiction that He should will and that what He wills should not happen. Therefore, His power is His will' (450). After nearly identical language in Treatise 1.12, Malebranche writes that '[God's] wills are necessarily efficacious ... [H]is power differs not at all from [H]is will' (116). God's causal power, here, clearly traces only to His (...) volitions - not merely to the fact that He wills, but specifically to the content of His volitions ('"what" He wills'). Yet despite the obviously key role the ordinary notion of volitional content plays for Malebranche, recent writers have paid surprisingly little attention either to it or its exegetical implications. I hope to rectify this situation here. The plan of this paper is this: first, to borrow current work in the philosophy of mind to sketch the notion of an incomplete volition, i.e. one whose content is 'incomplete' in a sense to be explained; second, to show that Malebranche clearly allows and uses something like this notion; third, to apply the notion to Malebranche's doctrine of human freedom. In so doing, I believe, we can understand this doctrine in a new way, and one which: (i) is clearly consistent with his texts, and (ii) unlike other interpretations makes coherent sense out of the conflicting streams in his heroic attempt to reconcile his occasionalism - the doctrine that no finite substances have genuine causal powers - with our freedom; fourth, Contrast my interpretation with those of two recent writers: Sleigh et al. (1998) and Schmaltz (1996); and Fifth, Summarize the major results. (shrink)

‘God needs no instruments to act,’ Malebranche writes in Search 6.2.3; “it suffices that He wills in order that a thing be, because it is a contradiction that He should will and that what He wills should not happen. Therefore, His power is His will”. After nearly identical language in Treatise 1.12, Malebranche writes that “[God's] wills are necessarily efficacious … His power differs not at all from His will”. God exercises His causal power, here, via His volitions; what He (...) causes depends not merely on the fact that He wills, but specifically on the content of His volitions, on “what He wills.” Yet despite the obviously key role the ordinary notion of volitional content plays for Malebranche, recent writers have paid surprisingly little attention either to it or its exegetical implications. I hope partly to rectify this situation here.The plan of this paper is this: to borrow current work in the philosophy of mind to sketch the notion of an incomplete volition, i.e. one whose content is ‘incomplete’ in a sense to be explained; to note that Malebranche accepts and uses something like this notion. (shrink)

Not much attention has been paid to Malebranche’s philosophy of time. Scholars who have written on it have typically written about it only in passing, and by and large discuss it only in relation to his philosophy of religion. This is appropriate insofar as Malebranche doesn’t discuss his views of time in isolation from his religious metaphysics. I argue that Malebranche’s conception of how created beings have their properties commits him to saying that God is omnitemporal rather than atemporal. For (...) just as bodies get their spatiality by participating in God’s omnipresence, so all creatures get their temporality by participating in God’s omnitemporality. Moreover, Malebranche is a substantivalist about space and time: infinite space and time are one and the same divinely simple substance, God (partially considered), who contains the world. My exploration of Malebranche’s metaphysics sheds light on his views of eminent containment, participation, and causation. (shrink)

Malebranche is both an occasionalist and an advocate of the preformationist theory of generation. One might expect this given that he is a mechanist: passive matter cannot be the source of its own motion and so requires God to move it (occasionalism); and such matter, moving according to a few simple laws of motion, could never fashion something as complex as a living being, and so organisms must be fashioned by God at Creation (preformationism). This expectation finds a challenge in (...) Kant's depiction of the relation between causation and generation. According to Kant, preformation is the generation theory one would expect the advocate of the pre-established harmony to endorse, while the occasionalist would endorse a theory whereby God directly forms the organism upon every insemination. I make sense of Malebranche's position in light of Kant's suggestion by examining the relation Malebranche sees between science and metaphysics, the roles that he believes empirical investigations and final causes have in scientific practice and explanation, and the role of the supernatural in Malebranche's philosophy. (shrink)

In VI.ii.3 of The Search After Truth Malebranche offers an argument for the view that only God is a cause. Here I defend an interpretation of the argument according to which Malebranche is supposing (quite rightly) that if there is a necessary connection between a cause and its effect, then if creatures were real causes, God's volitions would not be sufficient to bring about their intended effects. I then consider the argument from constant creation that Malebranche offers in Dialogues on (...) Metaphysics and on Religion. If Malebranche holds that God is literally creating things in their entirety at each and every moment, it is difficult to understand how his system could make room for finite substances, and it is difficult to understand how he can allow that finite minds are to be held accountable for what they do. Here I defend a weakened version of the doctrine of constant creation according to which God is constantly creating the modifications of things but is not constantly creating things in their entirety. (shrink)

The rich connections between metaphysics and natural philosophy in the early modern period have been widely acknowledged and productively mined, thanks in no small part to the work of Margaret Wilson, whose book, Descartes, served as an inspirational example for a generation of scholars. The task of this paper is to investigate one particular such connection, namely, the relation between occasionalist metaphysics and strict mechanism. My focus will be on the work of Nicholas Malebranche, the most influential Cartesian philosopher after (...) Descartes himself. I begin with two crucial facts about Malebranche’s philosophy: (1) Malebranche was an occasionalist, that is, he held that God was the only true cause, that all modifications of bodies and of minds can be produced by God alone. (2) Malebranche adhered firmly to strict mechanism. By strict mechanism, I mean the view, found most prominently in Descartes and in Boyle’s more ideological writings, that the qualities of bodies are exhausted by a very short list (size, shape, motion, and perhaps solidity) and that, most importantly, bodies interact only at contact by impact. Another way of describing this “contact action” requirement is as the thesis that the only fundamental laws of physics are laws of inertial motion and laws of the communication of motion at impact. In.. (shrink)