Nicolas Malebranche

In this chapter, I identify a distinctive use of ‘sublime’ in Adam Smith’s philosophy of science. I show that for Smith a scientific discipline and its theories can be sublime. I trace this idea back to Malebranche. I show that in Smith it is a way to convey something about the irrational nature of the natural order lurking behind’s science’s intellectual achievements. In section 1, I diagnose and distinguish three uses of ‘sublime’ in Smith. I situate two of these in (...) the early modern discussions of the sublime in the wake of Boileau's and William Smith’s translations of Longinus. 1 I argue that the third in which Smith treats intellectual disciplines as themselves sublime is relatively distinctive, although not wholly unique to Smith. In section 2, I put this notion in context and trace it, somewhat speculatively, back to the reception of Isaac Newton by Smith and Smith’s reading of Malebranche. In the third section I conclude with some reflections on the significance of this discussion for Smith’s conception of the nature of scientific rationality. (shrink)

Assurant que « nous voyons toutes choses en Dieu », autrement dit par des idées universelles et infinies, la philosophie de Malebranche se doit d'affronter le problème de la connaissance des choses singulières, seules véritablement existantes. Après avoir montré que sa pensée échoue à fonder un authentique principe d'individuation physique des corps, nous tentons de mettre en évidence une difficulté identique à théoriser une véritable connaissance des êtres matériels. Ce déplacement de la question nous semble légitime dans la mesure où (...) les choses étendues ne sont accessibles qu'à partir de l'étendue intelligible et des sentiments qu'elle produit. Par là, nous souhaitons manifester l'inaptitude, peut-être irrémédiable, d'une métaphysique fondée sur la représentation à se saisir pleinement des singularités. Malebranche tells us that we see everything in Gods infinit and universal Ideas. In so doing, Malebranche seems unable to describe real knowledge of material singularities; more, it's quite difficult to discover a true principle of individuation in the physical treatment of matter. After all, the metaphysical background of the representative knowledge makes improbable a correct description, a philosophical experience of singularities. (shrink)

Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) holds that the senses, imagination, and passions serve the body’s needs. In this paper, I explain how the passions keep us alive by situating them in Malebranche’s account of ordinary bodily action. Malebranche holds a consent-based view of action. An agent translates her inclinations or motives into action only when she consents to them. The passions contribute to the preservation of life by helping the agent close the gap between inclination and action. The passions, according to Malebranche, (...) are complex psychophysiological phenomena whose various elements—perceptions, shifts of attention, evaluations, bodily preparation, feelings, etc.—work together to elicit the agent’s consent. -/- . (shrink)

In his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals David Hume said that a group of earlier modern philosophers, beginning with Malebranche, held that morality was founded on relations. In this paper I follow up on that suggestion by investigating pre-Humean views in moral philosophy according to which morality is founded on relations. I do that by looking at the work of Nicolas Malebranche, John Locke, and Samuel Clarke. Each of them talked prominently about relations in their accounts of basic aspects (...) of morality. Beyond that, each of them turns out to have held both metaphysical and epistemological views that might be described as founding morality on relations. Despite the definite differences between the three philosophers’ approaches, Hume does seem to have noticed a genuine connection here—even though he himself tended to ignore significant versions of this approach when criticizing it. (shrink)

En comparant les deux auteurs que cite Malebranche Iorsqu'il met en place sa doctrine de la vision en Dieu, on montre ce qu'il y a d'irréconciliable avec l'exemplarisme augustinien et thomasien. Aucun de ces deux auteurs n'avait dit en effet que nous voyons les corps en Dieu. De plus, l'influence de l'exemplarisme sur la noétique thomasienne suppose l'efficacité des causes secondes que la notion de cause occasionnelle récuse. La vision en Dieu est pourtant une tentative pour appliquer l'exemplarisme à la (...) nouvelle conception de la matière et de la connaissance, en vue de conserver une doctrine plus classique de la création que ne l'était celle de Descartes. This paper compares the affirmation of Malebranche that we see everything in God with the medieval doctrine of exemplarism, particularly the one of augustine and Aquinas that he cites. None of these authors has said that we see the bodies in God. Moreover, the role of exemplarism in the noetic of Aquinas implies the efficacity of the secondary cause that the notion of occasionnai cause in Malebranche refutes. The doctrine of vision in God is nevertheless an attempt to apply exemplarism to the new conception of matter and knowledge which purpose is to preserve a more classical conception of creation that the one of Descartes. (shrink)

This article is about how human freedom is understood in the philosophy of Nicolas Malebranche. According to Malebranche, the most important proponent of occasionalism in the modern period, God is the sole and real cause of the universe and all its functioning. In addition, according to him, people are free and responsible for their own actions. In this case, what it means for man to be free in this vision where God is the only reason for everything needs to be (...) explained. While Malebranche's basic views on occasionalism and human freedom are included in many of his works, these views are especially found in his famous six-volume book titled The Search after Truth and in the book of explanations he wrote for this book, Elucidations of the Search after Truth. In the article, the subject is discussed through Malebranche's basic texts. Firstly, the relationship between the human soul and God has been tried to be explained in order to explain Malebranche's understanding of freedom. At this point Malebranche; unlike the Aristotelian thinkers of the Middle Ages, seems to follow an Augustinian line. In this line, the human soul is towards God and in need of His light. Secondly, what freedom means according to him is examined. In Malebranche, it is seen that freedom is the power of man, who is naturally inclined towards the general good, that is, God, to stop his tendency towards this general good in worldly special goods, or to not consent to this and to move towards the better with attention and research. This view emerges on the basis of Malebranche's view of vision in God and the distinction between soul and body. In other words, since human beings are incomplete and limited in their knowledge, they may sometimes not go towards what they really need to reach and may accept any worldly good as true good for themselves. Or since this good is not the general good and will never satisfy him, he may not consent to it and seek out the general good. Freedom is precisely the power either to stop at the particular good or to pay attention and search beyond it. Then, how this power was reconciled with Malebranche's occasionalism was discussed and three prominent issues were examined. Firstly, Malebranche claimed that man has no causal contribution to the tendency towards general or particular goods, and that this occurs only with the influence of God. Secondly, although it seems that a power is attributed to humans in freedom, it can be said that this power is not a positive action that brings about any change. Third, there is the claim that since God is the only true cause, attention and investigation are not a cause of human knowledge but only an occasional, intermediary cause. With these claims, it has been seen that Malebranche associates freedom with sin because he treats it as a stop, that man cannot make any changes, and therefore he evaluates freedom as only the power to want, not the power to act. As a result, it can be said that it is debatable whether a power that does not cause any action or change, but only the desire to consent or not, can be called freedom. In this regard, Malebranche has moved freedom to a negative or incomplete place. Although this study specifically discusses the nature of freedom and its relationship with God through Malebranche's philosophy, it is aimed to contribute to studies on the nature of freedom. It has been seen that further studies on freedom of action and desire can be carried out, especially in the fields of religion and moral philosophy. (shrink)

Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) holds that the senses, imagination, and passions aim at survival and the satisfaction of the body’s needs, rather than truth or the good of the mind. Each of these faculties makes a distinctive and, indeed, an indispensable contribution to the preservation of life. Commentators have largely focused on how the senses keep us alive. By comparison, the imagination and passions have been neglected. In this paper, I reconstruct Malebranche’s account of how the imagination contributes to the preservation (...) of the body by compensating for the limitations of the senses. First, the imagination represents non-actual states of affairs, such as probable or possible future states. Second, the imagination forges new and often helpful associations based on past experiences. Third, the imagination (mis)represents that objects will cause pleasure and pain, thereby imbuing them with emotional significance they would otherwise lack. Together, these features flesh out Malebranche’s view that the imagination is necessary for the preservation of life. (shrink)

Justus Lipsius was a 16th -century renaissance humanist and literary scholar who, crucially for the history of philosophy, was involved in the publication and reinterpretation of Stoic thought, primarily focusing on the works of Seneca. Despite a fair amount of scholarship on Lipsius’s contribution to the history of philosophy, the role of Stoicism in the early to mid-17th century is still not well understood. In this thesis I show, through close examination of Lipsius’s work, that Neo-Stoic ethics in the 17th (...) century amounts to a view about the relationship between providence and human actions. After identifying ways that Stoic philosophy was used to explain this connection, I derive two key normative duties that are constitutive of a Neo-Stoic account of ethics: 1) a duty to accept the determinations of providence (whatever they may be) and 2) the duty to develop a large body of rational knowledge about the universe. In the remainder of this thesis, I map the influence of these Neo-Stoic positions on Rene Descartes, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, and Nicolas Malebranche’s moral philosophy. I contend that all these Cartesian-inspired thinkers draw upon the foundational components of Neo-Stoicism in their accounts of ethics. I first consider how the correspondence between Descartes and Elisabeth represents a debate about the viability of certain Neo-Stoic theses. And then, I argue that Malebranche’s moral philosophy should be read as the natural progression of the Neo-Stoic “seeds” planted throughout this correspondence. In developing a conceptual framework for what constitutes a Neo-Stoic position and mapping the influence of this system on prominent Cartesian thinkers, my thesis tells a conceptual story about the history of Stoicism. My thesis particularly seeks to emphasize the way that Stoicism becomes intertwined with the history of 17th century moral philosophy based on the desire of Early Modern figures to balance voluntarist and intellectualist intuitions. (shrink)

This essay defends two theses regarding the explanation, or ground, of modality in the early modern period. First, for philosophers in the period, essences ground a range of important modal facts. Second, as the period progresses, we witness increased skepticism about certain modal facts, due to a growing skepticism about the scope or existence of essences. These theses are supported by examination of three case studies: Descartes’ treatment of substance and mode (which forms the core of his ontology); Malebranche’s treatment (...) of causation (which bears on his defense of occasionalism); and Locke’s treatment of necessary connections among properties (which is related to his accounts of individuals and kinds). It is shown that in each case, claims about necessity and possibility take center stage, and that in each case, the status of these claims hinges on the status of claims about essences. (shrink)

This is a book about philosophy, physics, and mechanics in the 18th century, and the struggle for a theory of bodies. Bodies are everywhere, or so it seems: from pebbles to planets, tigers to tables, pine trees to people; animate and inanimate, natural and artificial, they populate the world, acting and interacting with one another. And they are the subject- matter of Newton's laws of motion. At the beginning of the 18th century, physics was that branch of philosophy tasked with (...) the study of body in general. With such an account in hand, the special areas of philosophy (whether natural, moral, or political) that presuppose special kinds of bodies (such as plants, animals, and human beings) could proceed assured of the viability of their objects and the unity of their shared enquiries. For all had "bodies" in common. So: What is a body? And how can we know? This is the Problem of Bodies, and the quest for a solution animated natural philosophy throughout the Age of Reason. (shrink)

In his Christian and Metaphysical Meditations (1683) Malebranche develops a reflection in which the self discovers in its interiority that the interlocutor able to answer some of its questions is the divine Word. Through references to the Holy Scriptures and to Augustine, Malebranche constructs a meditative itinerary that differs from the one proposed by Descartes, as it moves from the lumière naturelle in the Cartesian sense to the lumière of the Word. In the light of these historical-theoretical data, we propose (...) a reconstruction of the role played by interiority and meditation in certain texts by Malebranche, highlighting the moments in which he appropriated the Cartesian heritage and those in which he distanced himself from Descartes’ philosophical paradigm. (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)

This paper aims to examine the notion of representation that emerges from development of Malebranche’s thesis of the vision of ideas in God. To do so, we turn to the progressive clarification made by the author to the term idea, seeking to highlight the radically representative character of the concept. We then analyze how this representative idea, in the philosophy of the Oratorian, does not require some correspondence with existence. Finally, we show how this primacy of representation is articulated with (...) the thesis of vision in God. Thus, it becomes possible to conceive how these representative ideas can give the foundation to a true science. (shrink)

Los Ensayos de Montaigne nos sirven de prueba de la fuerza que tienen algunas de nuestras fantasías sobre otras, puesto que este autor tiene un cierto aire libre, dándole una vuelta tan natural y viva a sus pensamientos, que es difícil leerlo sin preocuparse. La negligencia que tanto le gusta le queda muy bien y lo vuelve amable a la mayor parte del mundo sin tornarlo despreciable, y su orgullo es como un orgullo de hombre honesto, si se puede decir (...) así, que inspira respeto sin suscitar odio. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Malebranche claims that God always, or nearly always, acts by general volitions. However, two possible interpretations of this claim have led to competing understandings of Malebranche's occasionalism. The General Content interpretation (GC) holds that God forms as few volitions as possible, and that aside from a limited number of particular volitions, God's normal mode of action consists simply in willing the general laws themselves. The Particular Content interpretation (PC) affirms that God forms a distinct volition for each event or state (...) of affairs, but that those volitions count as general when they are issued "in accordance with" some general law. This essay examines five lines of evidence that purport to reveal Malebranche's commitment to PC and explains why they all fail. As a result, GC emerges unscathed as a consistent and viable interpretation, and, at the same time, much of the case for PC is undermined. (shrink)

Comme Descartes, Malebranche réduit le concept de la stupidité à celui de l’erreur. Mais il y introduit une notion qui déborde le cadre cartésien, celle de ténèbres. L’âme ou le cogito n’est pas une idée claire et distincte, mais un « sentiment intérieur ». C’est de ces ténèbres que remontent les confusions qui caractérisent la bêtise : notre âme n’est que pure modification de soi qui dans sa dynamique auto-affective emporte avec elle les distinctions fondamentales autour desquelles s’établissent aussi bien (...) la connaissance que l’expérience que nous acquérons des choses hors de nous. Cette âme de ténèbres et de confusion est ainsi la source des erreurs répandues par ces philosophes stupides qui confondent corps et âme, objets et extériorité, matière et étendue. (shrink)

This article explores Nicolas Malebranche's approach to fashion: an inescapable postlapsarian consequence of God's sociable design of the human mind and body as manifested in the imagination. A problematic side effect of the general laws established by God governing the soul-body relationship, fashion wreaked havoc on individuals' thinking and potential for redemption yet pointed to a larger providential plan for social benefit. These ideas led Malebranche to a distinctive nonpolitical approach to fashion—both “Enlightenment project” and theodicy—in which he sought to (...) promote, toward human liberation and salvation, an enlightened understanding of the processes that created fashion and a charitable approach to managing it. Ultimately, however, his brain-based analysis ended up limiting individual freedoms (imaginative, cognitive, and behavioral), notably for those endowed with certain kinds of minds, in ways that had long-lasting effect. It also helped lay foundations for the Enlightenment's conflicted views about fashion as individual folly and beneficial social phenomenon. -/- Cet article montre que, pour Nicolas Malebranche, la mode constitua une conséquence inévitable de la Chute et du dessin sociable et providentiel de l'esprit et du corps, manifesté dans l'imagination. Effet secondaire et problématique des lois générales établies par Dieu pour gouverner les relations entre l'esprit et le corps, la mode entrave la réflexion et l'accès au salut tout en dessinant un plan providentiel, au bénéfice de tous. A la fois projet des Lumières et théodicée, cette approche apolitique s'efforce, dans une visée mêlant libération, salut et charité, de saisir les processus qui créent la mode afin de s'en accommoder. Parce qu'elle met l'accent sur le cerveau, cette approche tend pourtant à restreindre, de manière durable, les libertés individuelles (imagination, cognition, comportement), surtout pour certains types d'esprit. Et elle montre comment, pour les Lumières, la mode peut être à la fois une folie individuelle et un phénomène à multiples vertus sociales. -/- Copyright 2022 by Society for French Historical Studies. (shrink)

Hume’s discussion of pride and sympathy in the _Treatise_ shows direct engagement with Malebranche’s discussion of ‘imitation’ in the _Search_. For Malebranche, imitation—both of passions and belief—and our tendency to judge ourselves by comparison, generate the passion of pride or grandeur, which plays a useful social role. However, as both cause and effect of the admiration of others, grandeur is ungrounded and thus imaginary. Hume disagrees. He invokes the principle of sympathy to explain how the evaluations of others can support (...) pride by indicating, without constituting, grounds for pride. Hume’s argument depends on his underappreciated claim that sympathy can communicate the evaluative opinions as well as the passions of others. Working with the Malebranchean inventory of principles—sympathy and comparison—Hume refines their characterization, thereby redeeming the human tendency to feel pride and humility by characterizing it as corrigible and subject to social regulation. (shrink)

In discussing the obligation to love everyone, Mary Astell (1666–1731) recognizes and responds to what I call the theocentric challenge: if humans are required to love God entirely, then they cannot fulfill the second requirement to love their neighbor. In exploring how Astell responds to this challenge, I argue that Astell is an astute metaphysician who does not endorse the metaphysical views she praises. This viewpoint helps us to understand the complicated relationship between her views and those of Descartes, Malebranche, (...) Henry More, and John Norris, as well as her sophisticated approach to biblical interpretation and theology. Attending to theocentrism opens up new avenues of research in the study of early modern philosophy. It also helps us to see connections between Astell and other theocentric philosophers such as Spinoza and Anne Conway. (shrink)

En identifiant l’ ego et la substance, Descartes affirme qu’il subsiste par lui-même et qu’il est le support des modes de la pensée, conformément aux deux caractères reconnus à la substance. Sans interroger la signification de cette équivalence, la présente étude examine la manière dont la postérité, de Locke et Malebranche jusqu’aux Lumières, récuse les principales affirmations qu’implique le dire cartésien. L’ ego se libère d’une substance devenue inutile autant qu’invisible. Les nouvelles figures du moi incarnent à leur manière la (...) mutation, si ce n’est la crise de la métaphysique. Un motif originairement cartésien (le fait que la substance ne nous affecte pas immédiatement), explique paradoxalement la récusation du cartésianisme lui-même. (shrink)

Do the senses represent causation? Many commentators read Nicolas Malebranche as anticipating David Hume’s negative answer to this question. I disagree with this assessment. When a yellow billiard ball strikes a red billiard ball, Malebranche holds that we see the yellow ball as causing the red ball to move. Given Malebranche’s occasionalism, he insists that the visual experience of causal interaction is illusory. Nevertheless, Malebranche holds that the senses represent finite things as causally efficacious. This experience of creaturely causality explains (...) why Aristotelian philosophers and others struggle to recognize occasionalism’s truth. (shrink)

This book is the English translation of Alain Badiou’s seminar on Nicolas Malebranche, part of a series of seminars on Being, the One, and the Infinite. In this extraordinary seminar, originally ta...

The Meditations chretiennes et metaphysiques represent a renewed attempt to delve into the theoretical themes of the Recherche de la verite and the Conversations chretiennes. Their strategy consists in making God himself speak, the eternal Word, who teaches and enlightens all minds.

Malebranche argues that ideas are representative beings existing in God. He defends this thesis by an inference to the best explanation of human perception. It is well known that Malebranche’s theory of vision in God was forcefully rejected by philosophers such as Arnauld, Locke, and Berkeley. However, the notion that ideas exist in God was not the only controversial aspect of Malebranche’s approach. Another controversy centered around Malebranche’s view that ideas are to be understood as posits in an explanatory theory. (...) Opponents of this approach, including Arnauld and Locke, held that our talk about ideas was not explanatory but instead merely descriptive: we use the word ‘idea’ to describe phenomena that we observe by reflecting on our own minds. This controversy has not received much attention from scholars, but in the present paper I will show that it was an explicit and important subject of concern for Malebranche, Arnauld, Locke, and Berkeley and that attention to this controversy can illuminate several aspects of these philosophers’ work. (shrink)

An intellectual history of the philosophers who grappled with the problem of evil, and the case for why pessimism still holds moral value for us today In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers engaged in heated debates on the question of how God could have allowed evil and suffering in a creation that is supposedly good. Dark Matters traces how the competing philosophical traditions of optimism and pessimism arose from early modern debates about the problem of evil, and makes a (...) compelling case for the rediscovery of pessimism as a source for compassion, consolation, and perhaps even hope. Bringing to life one of the most vibrant eras in the history of philosophy, Mara van der Lugt discusses legendary figures such as Leibniz, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, and Schopenhauer. She also introduces readers to less familiar names, such as Bayle, King, La Mettrie, and Maupertuis. Van der Lugt describes not only how the earliest optimists and pessimists were deeply concerned with finding an answer to the question of the value of existence that does justice to the reality of human suffering, but also how they were fundamentally divided over what such an answer should look like. A breathtaking work of intellectual history by one of today's leading scholars, Dark Matters reveals how the crucial moral aim of pessimism is to find a way of speaking about suffering that offers consolation and does justice to the fragility of life. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is exegesis. I explicate Nicolas Malebranche's (1674, 1678, 1688, 1714) concept of intelligible extension. I begin by detailing how the concept matured throughout Malebranche's work, and the new functions it took on within his metaphysical system. I then examine Gustav Bergmann's “axiomatic” interpretation, as well as the criticism of it offered by Daise Radner. I argue that Radner's criticism of the interpretation is only partly successful; some of her objections can be met; others cannot. I (...) then develop a novel interpretation of the concept, given insights from this dispute. I call it the “programmatic interpretation.” I argue that this interpretation coheres well with Malebranche's famous Vision in God thesis, as well as many of his other commitments. I conclude by considering a certain pertinent objection to my proposal, summarizing the dialectic, and forcefully restating my case. (shrink)

Collection of papers presented at the 2nd and 3rd Budapest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy.

Malebranche holds that sensory experience represents the world from the body’s point of view. I argue that Malebranche gives a systematic analysis of this bodily perspective in terms of the claim that the five familiar external senses and bodily awareness represent nothing but relations to the body.

Malebranche holds that visual experience represents the size of objects relative to the perceiver's body and does not represent objects as having intrinsic or nonrelational spatial magnitudes. I argue that Malebranche's case for this body-relative thesis is more sophisticated than other commentators—most notably, Atherton and Simmons —have presented it. Malebranche's central argument relies on the possibility of perceptual variation with respect to size. He uses two thought experiments to show that perceivers of different sizes—namely, miniature people, giants, and typical human (...) beings—can experience the very same objects as having radically different sizes. Malebranche argues that there is no principled reason to privilege one of these ways of experiencing size over the others and, more specifically, that all three kinds of perceivers experience size veridically. From the possibility of this kind of veridical perceptual variation, Malebranche infers that visual experience represents only body-relative size. (shrink)

Nicolas Malebranche est généralement présenté comme l'un des grands métaphysiciens du XVIIe siècle et un disciple de René Descartes. Pourtant il a rédigé un Traité de morale que l'on ne peut pas qualifier de cartésien et il a défini la morale comme la seule science que l'on doit nécessairement cultiver. L'étude cerne les thèses principales de la morale de l'auteur, ébauchées dans la Recherche de vérité, définies dans le Traité de morale et enfin réaffirmées, avec des formules radicales, dans les (...) écrits sur le pur amour. L'essai examine les raisons pour lesquelles l'historiographie a négligé la contribution de Malebranche comme philosophe morale, ainsi que les éléments qui ont suggéré aux contemporains l'interprétation de son éthique comme hédoniste."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This article presents a new approach to Japanese Zen Buddhism, alternative to its traditional views, which lack exact definitions of the relation between the meditator and the Buddha’s ultimate cause, dharma. To this end, I offer a comparative analysis between Zen Buddhist and Christian views of causality from the medieval to early modern periods. Through this, human causation with dharma in the Zen Buddhist meditations can be better defined and understood. Despite differences between religious traditions in deliberating human causal accounts, (...) there are parallel ways of thinking and practicing between Christian and Buddhist meditators. Firstly, I reconstruct three sorts of Christian scholastic theories of creaturely causality: conservationism, occasionalism, and concurrentism. Secondly, Zen Buddhist doctrines are introduced by placing particular emphasis on dharma as causal agency. Focusing on the Japanese Zen practice of meditation, finally I expound two theories of human causality: Sōtō Zen quasi-occasionalism following Master Dōgen’s teaching of enlightenment, and Rinzai Zen quasi-concurrentism given the meditator’s interactive kōan practice. Hence, my comparative analysis explains why religious beings are causally active, passive, or interactive in relation to the first agency, God or dharma, whereby systematically establishing alternative definitions of human causality in Zen Buddhism. (shrink)

Cette étude examine la philosophie naturelle de Nicolas Malebranche et son devenir au cours du XVIIIe siècle. Des savants énoncent ou discutent des principes, des lois et des méthodes explicatives dont l'origine est à chercher dans De la recherche de la vérité. La présence de Malebranche se manifeste alors par un occasionnalisme physique et par une critique de la force des corps au repos de Descartes, ce qui conduit à une conception nomologique de la causalité et à un rejet de (...) la force d'inertie, et par une interprétation des phénomènes physico-chimiques à l'aide de la théorie des petits tourbillons. Malebranche est ainsi à l'origine d'une des formes prises par la philosophie mécanique dont ce livre établit les caractéristiques essentielles."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage met en valeur la contribution que la philosophie de Malebranche a donnée au développement des Lumières. En effet, la richesse de la réflexion de l'oratorien a alimenté des courants de pensée différents, voire opposés, tels le matérialisme et le spiritualisme, le déisme et l'athéisme, le scepticisme et l'empirisme. En outre, l'auteur de la Recherche de la vérité a joué un rôle crucial dans certains processus capitaux de l'époque moderne, dont la transformation de la métaphysique en théorie de la (...) connaissance. Le concept de réception comme phénomène complexe qui dirige ce travail rend enfin raison de l'attention portée aux croisements de la postérité de Malebranche et de celle d'autres auteurs."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This article, which seeks to connect philosophy, polite culture, and the Enlightenment, shows how Malebranche’s Cartesian science presented a full-frontal attack on the worldly notion of a good taste aligned with reason. It did this by arguing that the aesthetic tastes that people experience were the result of mechanically-transmitted sensations that, like all physical sensations, were inaccurate, erroneous and relativistic. The mechanics of this process is explored in detail to show how Malebranche was challenging honnête thinking. The article suggests that (...) Malebranche’s demystifying approach was at once a hallmark of the Enlightenment, and that his views would ironically come to inform much Enlightenment thought about taste in ways he would have despised. (shrink)

One of the longest and most acrimonious polemics in the history of philosophy is between Antoine Arnauld and Nicolas Malebranche. Their central disagreements are over the nature of ideas, theodicy, and, the topic of this paper, grace. We offer the most in-depth English language treatment of their discussion of grace to date. Our focus is one particular aspect of the polemic: the power of finite agents to assent to grace. We defend two theses. First, we show that as the debate (...) progresses, the differences between Arnauld and Malebranche become, surprisingly, less pronounced—despite mutual accusations of Pelagianism and Calvinism. Our second thesis is developed to explain the outcome of the first. We argue that the employment of different methodologies to interrogate the relationship between efficacious grace and human power prohibits any possibility of reconciliation between Arnauld and Malebranche. (shrink)

Alain Badiou offers a tour de force encounter with a lesser-known seventeenth-century philosopher and theologian, Nicolas Malebranche, a contemporary and peer of Spinoza and Leibniz. The seminar is at once a record of Badiou's thought at a key moment and a lively interrogation of Malebranche's key text, the Treatise on Nature and Grace.

Malebranche holds that the feeling of having a body comes in three main varieties. A perceiver sensorily experiences herself (1) as causally connected to her body, in so far as the senses represent the body as causing her sensory experiences and as uniquely responsive to her will, (2) as materially connected to her body, in so far as the senses represent the perceiver as a material being wrapped up with the body, and (3) as perspectivally connected to her body, in (...) so far as the external senses represent the world from the body’s perspective. In addition to distinguishing these varieties of embodied experience, I explain why the perceiver experiences her connection to the body in these ways. Although Malebranche often casts the experience of embodiment in a negative light, his considered view is that this experience contributes to our survival and salvation. (shrink)

Henri Lelevel’s La philosophie moderne par demandes et réponses is a very interesting as well as pretty neglected attempt to disseminate the new philosophy among a larger audience, including the non specialists. Either the style of presentation or the oversimplification of the topics discussed is clearly intended to reach people interested to a smattering of philosophy. More than the comparisons between the traditional and the new philosophy and the compendia, this work vouches for the great interest toward the new philosophy. (...) In this particular case the model is the philosophy of Malebranche, whose interpretation of Descartes thought is preferred by Lelevel, worried by the excessive twist given toward empiricism in P.-S. Régis rendering of Cartesian philosophical system. Lelevel’s logic is directed to eliminate the confusion between sense data and knowledge, echoing also Malebranche’s notion of éténdue idéale, one of the major contribution to the reconsideration of Descartes’ thought. This paper aims to sketch the mains topics discussed in the four sections of Lelevel’s work, with some cross-references to Malebranche’s writings. (shrink)