Cordemoy and occasionalism

Journal of the History of Philosophy

Volumn 43, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 37-54

  Nadler, Steven ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949945929     PISSN: 00225053     EISSN: 15384586     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hph.2005.0013     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. Thus, in Descartes's Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992),
2. J.E. McGuire, while insisting that Robert Boyle "did not accept occasionalism," nonetheless argues that for Boyle "God's will. is the only causally efficacious agency in nature. Hence there are no laws or causal connections in nature existing as entities over and above particulars conceived as events, bodies or particles. . there are no secondary causes in nature which are miraculously dispensed with by Providence; rather, Providence is God's continual action in nature"; see "Boyle's Conception of Nature," Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972): 523-42.
3. For a critique of McGuire's reading, see Timodiy Shanahan, "God and Nature in the Thought of Robert Boyle," Journal of the History of Philosophy 26 (1988): 547-69.
4. The first occasionalists, in fact, had nothing to do with Cartesianism. The occasionalism among the Islamic followers of al-Ashari in the tenth and eleventh centuries, including al-Ghazali (1058-1114), was perhaps an even more extreme version of the doctrine than what would appear in the seventeenth century. For a study of this movement, see Majid Fakhry, Islamic Occasionalism and its Critique by Averroës and Aquinas (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958).
5. On this point, see Steven Nadler, "Occasionalism and the Mind-Body Problem," in M. A. Stewart, ed., Studies in Seventeenth Century European Philosophy, Oxford Studies in the History of Philosophy, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University'Press, 1997), 75-95.
6. See Francisque Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 2 vols. (Paris: Delagrave, 1868), vol. 1, ch. 24;
7. J. Prost, Essai sur l'atomisme et l'occasionalisme dans la philosophie cartésienne (Paris: Henry Paulin, 1907), chs. 4-6;
8. Jean-François Battail, L'avocat philosophe Géraud de Cordemoy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), ch. 5;
9. Henri Gouhier, La vocation de Malebranche (Paris: J. Vrin, 1926), 95-101;
10. and Pierre Clair, "Louis de la Forge et les origines de l'occasionalisme," Recherches sur le dix-septième siècle 1 (1976): 63-72.
11. See Steven Nadler, "The Occasionalism of Louis de la Forge," in Steven Nadler, ed. Causation in Early Modern Philosophy (University Park: Penn State Press, 1993), 57-73.
12. See Steven Nadler, "Occasionalism and the Question of Arnauld's Cartesianism," in Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene, eds. Descartes and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 129-44.
13. L'avocat philosophe, 150.
14. See also Gouhier, La vocation de Malebranche, 95-107, 120. Vincent Carraud insists that Cordemoy begins from difficulties regarding causation, not (like Malebranche) from "l'adoration . de la gloire de Dieu et de sa puissance . . . pour le dire autrement, la pensée de l'efficace divine, chez Malebranche, est antérieure àla solution occasionaliste. A la difference d'un La Forge ou d'un Cordemoy, Malebranche n'est pas d'abord occasionaliste"
15. (Causa sive ratio: La raison de la cause, deSuarez à Leibniz [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002], 376, 380).
16. See Battail, L'avocat philosophe, 141-46;
17. and Clair, "Louis de la Forge et les origines de l'occasionalsme."
18. L'avocat philosopihe, 140, 136.
19. A. G. A. Balz, Cartesian Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 16.
20. See also Daisie Radner, "Occasionalism", in G. H. R. Parkinson, ed., Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. 4: The Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Rationalism (London: Routledge, 1993), 358. Prost and Battail recognize that in this treatise, which I discuss below, Cordemoy "a dépouillé l'esprit aussi bien que le corps de toute efficacité causale" (Battail, 174). Battail, however-and this is where I take issue with his reading-seems to believe that this conclusion was already fully established in the Discernement.
21. Jean-Christophe Bardout, "Occasionalism: La Forge, Cordemoy, Geulincx," in Steven Nadler, ed. A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy (Boston: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 148.
22. La vocation de Malebranche, 101. Gouhier's claim is right only if by monde sensible he intends to refer only to the material world, as opposed to the created world at-large, with all its members, material and spiritual.
23. There is a good deal of discussion in the literature as to whether or not the Cartesian conservation principle rules out mind-body interaction. Daniel Garber, for example, argues that it does not, since for Descartes at least the conservation principle need not apply to anything except inanimate bodies; see "Mind, Body, and the Laws of Nature in Descartes and Leibniz," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 8 (1983): 105-33.
24. See also Andrew Pessin, "Descartes's Nomic Concurrentism: Finite Causation and Divine Concurrence," Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2003): 25-49.
25. See Descartes, "Fourth Replies," in Oeuvres de Descartes, Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, eds. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1964-76; henceforth, AT), vol. 7, 246.
26. Traité de l'esprit de l'homme, 177.
27. For a discussion of this aspect of La Forge's theory, see Nadler, "The Occasionalism of Louis de la Forge."
28. This same account also appears in Arnauld's "Port Royal Logic," La logique ou l'art de penser (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), 71-72.
29. For a discussion of Descartes's view, see Steven Nadler, "Descartes and Occasional Causation," British Journal for the History of Philosophy 2 (1994): 35-54.
30. Elmar Kremer does not see any substantive change or development in Malebranche's view here; see "Malebranche on Human Freedom," in Steven Nadler, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 190-219.
31. By contrast, see Robert Sleigh,Jr., Vere Chappell, and Michael Della Rocca, "Determinism and Human Freedom," in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, eds. The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 2, 1195-278
32. and Tad Schmaltz, Malebranche's Theory of the Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 220-27.
33. See, for example, André Robinet, Système et existence dans l'oeuvre de Malebranche (Paris: J. Vrin, 1965), 367-474;
34. Ginette Dreyfus, La volonté selon Malebranche (Paris: J. Vrin, 1958);
35. and Kremer, "Malebranche on Human Freedom."