Philosophers' Imprint 21 (10) (2021)
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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.
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Keywords | Malebranche causation contents of perception sensory perception Hume |
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References found in this work BETA
Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals.David Hume (ed.) - 1777 - Greenwood Press.
The Visual Experience of Causation.Susanna Siegel - 2009 - Philosophical Quarterly 59 (236):519-540.
The Search After Truth.Nicolas Malebranche - 1991 - In Aloysius Martinich, Fritz Allhoff & Anand Vaidya (eds.), Early Modern Philosophy: Essential Readings with Commentary. Blackwell.
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