Abstract

Occasionalism is the doctrine that God is the sole immediate cause of all events, to the exclusion of any causal participation on the part of creatures. While this doctrine clearly has interesting implications with regard to causation and the philosophy of natural science, few have noticed that it also seems to entail, not only that creatures have no causal power whatsoever, but that they are completely devoid of intrinsic natures, conceived as intrinsic dispositional properties. In this paper, I will outline what is probably the first systematic argument for occasionalism, mounted by the eleventh-century Muslim, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, and show how the implication in question follows from this argument.