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  1. Morality and Relations before Hume.Stewart Duncan - manuscript
    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 (...)
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  2. The Great Guide to the Preservation of Life: Malebranche on the Imagination.Colin Chamberlain - 2024 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy:1-26.
    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 (...)
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  3. Modality and Essence in Early Modern Philosophy.Anat Schechtman - 2024 - In Yitzhak Melamed & Samuel Newlands (eds.), Modality: A History. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 61-84.
    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 (...)
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  4. Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason.Katherine Brading & Marius Stan - 2023 - New York: Oxford University Press USA.
    Cover Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason Katherine Brading and Marius Stan Description From pebbles to planets, tigers to tables, pine trees to people; animate and inanimate, natural and artificial; bodies are everywhere. Bodies populate the world, acting and interacting with one another, and they are the subject-matter of Newton's laws of motion. But what is a body? And how can we know how they behave? In Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason, Katherine Brading and Marius Stan examine (...)
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  5. Cartesian and Malebranchian Meditations.Raffaele Carbone - 2023 - In Andrea Strazzoni & Marco Sgarbi (eds.), Reading Descartes. Consciousness, Body, and Reasoning. Florence: Firenze University Press. pp. 129-153.
    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 (...)
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  6. Malebranche on Space, Time, and Divine Simplicity.Torrance Fung - 2023 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 94 (3):257-280.
    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 (...)
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  7. Mary Astell on Neighborly Love.Timothy Yenter - 2022 - Religions 13 (6).
    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, (...)
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  8. How physics flew the philosophers' nest.Katherine Brading - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 88 (C):312-20.
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  9. The Most Dangerous Error: Malebranche on the Experience of Causation.Colin Chamberlain - 2021 - Philosophers' Imprint 21 (10).
    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 (...)
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  10. Malebranche on Intelligible Extension: A Programmatic Interpretation.Andrew Dennis Bassford - 2020 - Metaphysica: International Journal for Ontology and Metaphysics 21 (2):199-221.
    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 (...)
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  11. Personal Identity and Self-Interpretation & Natural Right and Natural Emotions.Gabor Boros, Judit Szalai & Oliver Toth (eds.) - 2020 - Budapest: Eötvös University Press.
    Collection of papers presented at the 2nd and 3rd Budapest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy.
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  12. ‘Let us imagine that God has made a miniature earth and sky’: Malebranche on the Body-Relativity of Visual Size.Colin Chamberlain - 2020 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6 (2):206-224.
    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 (...)
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  13. Our Body Is the Measure: Malebranche and the Body-Relativity of Sensory Perception.Colin Chamberlain - 2020 - Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 9:37-73.
    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.
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  14. Our Bodies, Our Selves: Malebranche on the Feelings of Embodiment.Colin Chamberlain - 2018 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5.
    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 (...)
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  15. La Philosophie moderne di Henri Lelevel: un manuale di filosofia malebranchiana.Mauro Falzoni - 2018 - Noctua 5 (2):116-160.
    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. (...)
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  16. The Evolution Concept: The Concept Evolution.Agustin Ostachuk - 2018 - Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 14 (3):354-378.
    This is an epistemologically-driven history of the concept of evolution. Starting from its inception, this work will follow the development of this pregnant concept. However, in contradistinction to previous attempts, the objective will not be the identification of the different meanings it adopted through history, but conversely, it will let the concept to be unfolded, to be explicated and to express its own inner potentialities. The underlying thesis of the present work is, therefore, that the path that leads to the (...)
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  17. Fontenelle, Malebranche et les limites de la philosophie.Mitia Rioux-Beaulne - 2018 - Science Et Esprit 70 (1):81-99.
    L’hypothèse de travail qui régit cette contribution est que les discussions sur les rapports entre théologie et philosophie forment un thème récurrent dans la réception de Malebranche depuis les premières lectures de La Recherche de la vérité, et que cela s’explique par la rupture qu’il provoque avec les horizons d’attente des philosophes et théologiens. Rupture qui tient largement à l’enchevêtrement singulier des registres discursifs que présente son argumentaire. C’est là, nous semble-t-il, l’intérêt indéniable de la lecture – plutôt négligée par (...)
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  18. A Bodily Sense of Self in Descartes and Malebranche.Colin Chamberlain - 2016 - In Jari Kaukua & Tomas Ekenberg (eds.), Subjectivity and Selfhood in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy. Cham: Springer. pp. 219-234.
    Although Descartes and Malebranche argue that we are immaterial thinking things, they also maintain that each of us stands in a unique experiential relation to a single human body, such that we feel as though this body belongs to us and is part of ourselves. This paper examines Descartes’s and Malebranche’s accounts of this feeling. They hold that our experience of being embodied is grounded in affective bodily sensations that feel good or bad: namely, sensations of pleasure and pain, hunger (...)
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  19. Biology and Theology in Malebranche's Theory of Organic Generation.Karen Detlefsen - 2014 - In Ohad Nachtomy & Justin E. H. Smith (eds.), The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy. New York, NY: Oup Usa. pp. 137-156.
    This paper has two parts: In the first part, I give a general survey of the various reasons 17th and 18th century life scientists and metaphysicians endorsed the theory of pre-existence according to which God created all living beings at the creation of the universe, and no living beings are ever naturally generated anew. These reasons generally fall into three categories. The first category is theological. For example, many had the desire to account for how all humans are stained by (...)
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  20. God’s creatures? Divine nature and the status of animals in the early modern beast-machine controversy.Lloyd Strickland - 2013 - International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 74 (4):291-309.
    In early modern times it was not uncommon for thinkers to tease out from the nature of God various doctrines of substantial physical and metaphysical import. This approach was particularly fruitful in the so-called beast-machine controversy, which erupted following Descartes’ claim that animals are automata, that is, pure machines, without a spiritual, incorporeal soul. Over the course of this controversy, thinkers on both sides attempted to draw out important truths about the status of animals simply from the notion or attributes (...)
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  21. Emotional sensations and the moral imagination in Malebranche.Jordan Taylor - 2013 - In Henry Martyn Lloyd (ed.), The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment. Springer Cham.
    This paper explores the details of Malebranche‘s philosophy of mind, paying particular attention to the mind-body relationship and the roles of the imagination and the passions. I demonstrate that Malebranche has available an alternative to his deontological ethical system: the alternative I expose is based around his account of the embodied aspects of the mind and the sensations experienced in perception. I briefly argue that Hume, a philosopher already indebted to Malebranche for much inspiration, read Malebranche in the positive way (...)
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  22. Malebranche and the Riddle of Sensation.Walter Ott - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (3):689-712.
    Like their contemporary counterparts, early modern philosophers find themselves in a predicament. On one hand, there are strong reasons to deny that sensations are representations. For there seems to be nothing in the world for them to represent. On the other hand, some sensory representations seem to be required for us to experience bodies. How else could one perceive the boundaries of a body, except by means of different shadings of color? I argue that Nicolas Malebranche offers an extreme -- (...)
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  23. Causal and Logical Necessity in Malebranche’s Occasionalism.A. R. J. Fisher - 2011 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (4):523-548.
    The famous Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) espoused the occasionalist doctrine that ‘there is only one true cause because there is only one true God; that the nature or power of each thing is nothing but the will of God; that all natural causes are not true causes but only occasional causes’ (LO, 448, original italics). One of Malebranche’s well-known arguments for occasionalism, known as, the ‘no necessary connection’ argument (or, NNC ) stems from the principle that ‘a true cause… is (...)
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  24. Leibniz and the vis viva controversy.Idan Shimony - 2010 - In Marcelo Dascal (ed.), The Practice of Reason: Leibniz and His Controversies. John Benjamins. pp. 51-73.
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  25. Régis's scholastic mechanism.Walter Ott - 2008 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 39 (1):2-14.
    Unlike many of Descartes’s other followers, Pierre-Sylvain Re´gis resists the temptations of occasionalism. By marrying the ontology of mechanism with the causal structure of concurrentism, Re´gis arrives at a novel view that both acknowledges God’s role in natural events and preserves the causal powers of bodies. I set out Re´gis’s position, focusing on his arguments against occasionalism and his responses to Malebranche’s ‘no necessary connection’ and divine concursus arguments.
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  26. Causation, intentionality, and the case for occasionalism.Walter Ott - 2008 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 90 (2):165-187.
    Despite their influence on later philosophers such as Hume, Malebranche's central arguments for occasionalism remain deeply puzzling. Both the famous ‘no necessary connection’ argument and what I call the epistemic argument include assumptions – e.g., that a true cause is logically necessarily connected to its effect – that seem unmotivated, even in their context. I argue that a proper understanding of late scholastic views lets us see why Malebranche would make this assumption. Both arguments turn on the claim that a (...)
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  27. Occasionalism and strict mechanism: Malebranche, Berkeley, fontenelle.Lisa Downing - 2005 - In Christia Mercer (ed.), Early Modern Philosophy: Mind, Matter, and Metaphysics. New York, US: Oxford University Press. pp. 206-230.
    The rich connections between metaphysics and natural philosophy in the early modern period have been widely acknowledged and productively mined, thanks in no small part to the work of Margaret Wilson, whose book, Descartes, served as an inspirational example for a generation of scholars. The task of this paper is to investigate one particular such connection, namely, the relation between occasionalist metaphysics and strict mechanism. My focus will be on the work of Nicholas Malebranche, the most influential Cartesian philosopher after (...)
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  28. Dieu fainéant? Bog in telesa pri Descartesu, Malebranchu in Leibnizu.Gregor Kroupa - 2005 - Filozofski Vestnik 26 (1):67-82.
    "Dieu fainéant? God and Bodies in Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz" Conservation, concurrence with secondary causes, and occasionalism are the three attitudes that God can have towards the created universe in early modern philosophy. The aim of this article is to show how and in what forms these three originally mediaeval theories had survived the seventeenth century in Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz. I argue that although it cannot always be unequivocally determined which of the three doctrines each of the thinkers is (...)
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  29. Self-knowledge in Descartes and Malebranche.Lawrence Nolan & John Whipple - 2005 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 43 (1):55-81.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.1 (2005) 55-81 [Access article in PDF] Self-Knowledge in Descartes and Malebranche Lawrence Nolan John Whipple 1. Introduction Descartes's notorious claim that mind is better known than body has been the target of repeated criticisms, but none appears more challenging than that of his intellectual heir Nicolas Malebranche.1 Whereas other critics—especially twentieth-century philosophers eager to use Descartes as their whipping boy—have often been (...)
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  30. Malebranche et Berkeley: Les créatures et les raisons éternelles.Philippe Gagnon - 2003 - Bulletin de la Société de Philosophie du Québec 29 (2):15-16.
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  31. Controlling the passions: passion, memory, and the moral physiology of self in seventeenth-century neurophilosophy.John Sutton - 1998 - In Stephen Gaukroger (ed.), The Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in the Seventeenth Century. New York: Routledge. pp. 115-146.
    Some natural philosophers in the 17th century believed that they could control their own innards, specifically the animal spirits coursing incessantly through brain and nerves, in order to discipline or harness passion, cognition and action under rational guidance. This chapter addresses the mechanisms thought necessary after Eden for controlling the physiology of passion. The tragedy of human embedding in the body, with its cognitive and moral limitations, was paired with a sense of our confinement in sequential time. I use two (...)
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  32. Locke e la discussione sugli universali.Dino Buzzetti - 1982 - In Dino Buzzetti & Maurizio Ferriani (eds.), La grammatica del pensiero. Logica, linguaggio e conoscenza nell' età dell' Illuminismo. Bologna: il Mulino. pp. 213-257.
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  33. Hegel on Malebranche, Berkeley and Hume.Brad Thomson - manuscript
    Analysis of Hegel on Malebranche, Berkeley and Hume.
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