The last of his kind? Gottfried Ploucquet’s occasionalism and the grounding of sense-perception

British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30 (6):1055-1073 (2022)
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Abstract

Sufficiently grounding the origin of sense-perceptions in the mind is an issue that has concerned philosophers for a long time, and remains an issue even today. In eighteenth-century Germany prior to the publication of Kant’s Critical philosophy, the two main competing theories to causally ground sense-perceptions were pre-established harmony and physical influx, the latter of which ultimately carried the day. A third option had been around in the seventeenth century: occasionalism. However, historians of philosophy believe this option to have entirely disappeared in the eighteenth century. I will show that this is not the case. In this paper, I focus on one influential German occasionalist: Gottfried Ploucquet (1716–90). Ploucquet not only criticizes Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony for providing an ultimately ungrounded, subjective, and arbitrary account of the origin of sense-perceptions, but also presents his own daring alternative: a representationalist-occasionalist theory that locates the objective ground of sense-perceptions in the divine mind.

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References found in this work

Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality.Eric Watkins - 2005 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 68 (3):624-626.
The Search after Truth.Nicholas Malebranche, Thomas M. Lennon & Paul J. Olscamp - 1982 - Philosophy of Science 49 (1):146-147.
Malebranche.Andrew Pyle - 2003 - New York: Routledge.
Malebranche on Ideas and the Vision in God.Tad Schmaltz - 2000 - In Steven M. Nadler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche. Cambridge University Press. pp. 59--86.

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