Knowra Nicolas Malebranche Nicolas Malebranche Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) was a French Oratorian priest and philosopher. His occasionalism held that God alone causes changes in the world, while created things provide occasions for divine action.
Occasionalism : The theory that created things do not cause events; God produces effects on the occasion of their apparent interactions. This is the central doctrine Malebranche developed into a systematic account of divine causation.
René Descartes : A French philosopher and mathematician whose work helped establish modern rationalism and dualism. Malebranche adopted Cartesian accounts of mind and matter, then rejected their account of created causation.
Antoine Arnauld : A French Catholic theologian and philosopher associated with Jansenism and the Port-Royal circle. Arnauld published sustained objections to Malebranche’s account of ideas and perception.
The Search After Truth : Malebranche’s philosophical work, first published in 1674–1675, on error, perception, and the causes of human judgment. This is his principal exposition of vision in God and occasionalist causation.
Pre-established harmony : Leibniz’s theory that mind and body unfold in coordination without directly interacting, through God’s prior arrangement. It preserves mind–body coordination without God producing each event as it occurs.
Vision in God : Malebranche’s theory that the mind perceives ideas in God rather than receiving them from material objects. It explains how finite minds perceive a world whose objects cannot act on them.
Cartesian dualism : The view that mind and body are distinct kinds of substance, one thinking and the other extended. His occasionalism addresses the causal interaction that Cartesian dualism leaves difficult to explain.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz : A German philosopher and mathematician who developed a system of monads and pre-established harmony. Leibniz’s harmony offered an alternative to Malebranche’s direct divine production of events.
Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion : Malebranche’s 1688 dialogue presenting arguments about God, the soul, nature, and divine action. The dialogues offer a concise, staged defense of his metaphysical system.
Concurrence : The theological view that God sustains created causes while creatures genuinely contribute to their effects. Unlike Malebranche, concurrence grants created beings real causal power under divine support.
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