Nicolas Malebranche is one of the most important philosophers of the 17th Century after Descartes. A pioneer of Rationalism, he was one of the first to champion and to further Cartesian ideas. Andrew Pyle places Malebranche's work in the context of Descartes and other philosophers, and also in its relation to ideas about faith and reason. He examines the entirety of Malebranche's writings, including the famous The Search After Truth , which was admired and criticized by both Leibniz and Locke. (...) Pyle presents an integrated account of Malebranche's central theses, occasionalism and 'vision in God', before exploring and assessing Malebranche's contribution to debates on physics and biology, and his views on the soul, self-knowledge, grace, and the freedom of the will. This penetrating and wide-ranging study will be of interest to not only philosophers, but also to historians of science and philosophy, theologians, and students of the Enlightenment or 17th Century thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ontological Status of Malebranchean IdeasMonte CookOnce again... we are brought back to a fundamental problem in Malebranche’s theory of ideas. What is the ontological status or nature of ideas? They are neither substances nor modifications of any substance. Yet in the Cartesian schema these are the only alternatives: something is either a substance or a modification of a substance. And Malebranche, however modified his Cartesianism, is at least (...) explicit in accepting this ontological dualism.(Steven Nadler, Malebranche and Ideas, 96.)Nadler nicely states a problem for Malebranchean scholarship: What, for Malebranche, is the ontological status of ideas? Despite their importance to his theory of vision in God, Malebranche seems to leave no metaphysical place for them. He seems to hold three jointly inconsistent positions—that everything is either a substance or a modification of a substance, that ideas are not sub-stances, and that ideas are not modifications.1 Since he clearly denies both that ideas are substances and that they are modifications, on the face of it the only way out of this apparent inconsistency is for him to reject the principle that everything is either a substance or a modification of a substance. And indeed, according to one common interpretation Malebranche restricts the dualism of substances and modifications to created things, thus excluding ideas.2I shall argue that Malebranche can and does consistently hold all three [End Page 525] positions. He escapes inconsistency by maintaining that although ideas fit into the category of substance, they are not different substances. Rather than being substances (plural), they are identical with one substance, God.I am of course not alone in seeing this identification of ideas with the substance of God. Nadler, for example, notes it but thinks that it fails to get Malebranche out of the problem of holding three jointly inconsistent positions.3 Nicholas Jolley not only notes it, but also thinks that it provides Malebranche an escape from inconsistency, if only on a surface level. For Jolley, the real problem is that ideas have features incompatible with their being identified with God: in particular, ideas are abstract entities whereas God is not an abstract entity. Though Malebranche admittedly does identify ideas with the substance of God, then, there is a sense in which he cannot really do this.4The problem Jolley raises is part of the larger problem of how ideas can be identical with the substance of God. Though I will not discuss Jolley’s problem directly, I hope that my discussion of the relation between ideas and the substance of God will throw light on what Jolley takes to be the real problem with identifying ideas with God. I will content myself with showing that Malebranche does hold all three positions in question and explaining how he develops his identification of ideas with the substance of God. In what follows, then, I shall first establish that Malebranche holds the three positions in question, and in particular that he does not restrict the principle that everything is either a substance or a modification to created things. I shall then show how he identifies ideas with the substance of God. Finally, I shall discuss a contrary passage in which Malebranche explicitly denies that intelligible extension (i.e., the idea of extension) is either a substance or a modification.11.1.Malebranche states the principle that everything is either a substance or a mode (or equivalently, a being or a mode) throughout his writings.5 Though he occasionally uses the principle only as it applies to the created world (see LO 237), he almost always states it as applying to everything, created or uncreated: “everything which is, whether it actually exists or not, and consequently [End Page 526] everything intelligible, reduces to being and mode” (LO 639).6 He treats it as a conceptual matter, and thus a necessary truth, that everything must be one or the other: everything “is necessarily either a substance or a mode of being. For in the end all that is can either be conceived of alone or it cannot; there is no middle in contradictory propositions” (LO 513).Reflecting on how Malebranche understands the principle makes... (shrink)

First published in 1931, A Study in the Philosophy of Malebranche examines the theories which constitute the philosophical system of Malebranche. Church specifically analyses theories pertaining to Malebranche's vision in god; knowledge; occasionalism; and imagination and sense.

From 1683 to 1685 Arnauld engaged in a controversy with Malebranche over the nature of ideas. While the occasion for the dispute was a disagreement over grace, the focus was the account of ideas given in Malebranche’s Search After Truth. Arnauld published his Des vraies et des fausses idées in 1683, and this was followed by a response from Malebranche in 1684 and a response by Arnauld shortly afterward. In his criticism of Malebranche, Arnauld claimed to be reacting not just (...) for himself, but for Descartes as well, and so a look at the controversy and the reasons given for the conflicting claims will, I believe, help in understanding Descartes’ own difficult remarks on ideas. (shrink)

This paper explores the ontology of Malebranche's notion of "intelligible extension", the archetypal divine idea of matter which he believed to be the immediate object of our own minds in all of our thoughts about corporeal things. Building on this account of its ontology, and through an examination of a form of isomorphism between intelligible extension and the created spatial world, the paper also attempts to explain the manner in which it could fulfill its epistemological role of representing all possible (...) bodies and supplying us with our abstract knowledge of geometry. (shrink)

I sketch a new interpretation of Malebranche's conception of ideas, thus shedding new light on various of his key doctrines, such as the efficacy of ideas, involuntarism concerning the eternal truths, indirect perception, and vision in God. Briefly, I argue that Malebranche's ideas may be construed as "possible divine volitions," where these are conceptually distinguishable aspects of God, primitively possessed of representational content, by whose exercise God manifests His efficacy. I also defend the claim that Malebranche, in fact, does not (...) subscribe to a "veil of ideas" representationalism, and give two alternative accounts of what he means by saying that we perceive bodies only "indirectly.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.1 (2005) 83-105 [Access article in PDF] Does Malebranche Need Efficacious Ideas? The Cognitive Faculties, the Ontological Status of Ideas, and Human Attention Susan Peppers-Bates But whatever effort of mind I make, I cannot find an idea of force, efficacy, of power, save in the will of the infinitely perfect Being. Malebranche, Elucidation 15 One of the signatures of 17th century rationalists is (...) their replacement of the Scholastics's dependence on the deliverances of the senses with a dependence on the deliverances of the intellect as the key to gaining knowledge.1 Correct use of the intellect leading to freedom from the passions and to certain knowledge figures prominently in the works of Spinoza and Leibniz. Descartes's Meditations uses skeptical doubt to withdraw the mind from the senses, and his reliance on the meditative genre not only reveals to his readers the intellect as a distinct source of knowledge, but also trains them to use properly their will or faculty of judgment. Commentators have argued persuasively that overthrowing the sense-based epistemology and metaphysics of the Aristotelians depended on "discovering" the primacy of one's intellect over the senses, and using the deliverances of the mind to establish solid foundations for a new metaphysics and epistemology.2 Indeed, [End Page 83] outlining the proper use of the mind's faculties arguably lay at the basis of the Cartesian program in particular. This importance can be seen in Arnauld and Nicole's influential Port-Royal Logic, which aimed at training its readers in the proper use of the intellect.3Few would question Nicolas Malebranche's inclusion in the rationalist tradition.4 For while Malebranche famously takes ideas out of the Cartesian mind and transports them to God's—thus privileging the divine over the natural light—he shares Descartes's belief that our intellect, not our senses, holds the key to metaphysical truths such as the essence of matter, the mind-body distinction, and the existence of God.5 Yet, recently, Nicholas Jolley has contended that Malebranche's later commitment to "efficacious ideas" undermines his earlier belief in the power of the cognitive faculties: he believes that Malebranche abandons his view that the mind makes "real use" of the intellect to know intelligible objects.6 Jolley's position builds upon Alquié and Robinet's claims that around 1694-95 Malebranche moved from a vision "in" God to a vision "by" God. Now God's ideas act on and modify the soul with both sensations and intellectual concepts, rather than the human intellect contemplating ideas in the Divine Reason.7Alquié and Robinet argue that Malebranche, pushed by the battles with Arnauld and Régis over the status of ideas, introduced the language of "efficacious" ideas to explain how the union of the human and the divine mind is supposed to work.8 Robinet in particular suggests that in cashing out the metaphor of God enlightening human minds, Malebranche moved from a static "ontologist" view of idea-objects in God to an active "illuminationist" view whereby divine ideas cause(intellectual [End Page 84] and sensory) perception by modifying the soul.9 Once one accepts this view of the place and function of efficacious ideas in Malebranche's metaphysics, it seems natural to accept Jolley's declaration that the only way for the mind to apprehend ideas in God is if those ideas "act directly on the mind; [if] they thereby cause cognitive states to arise in a substance which is devoid of all genuine cognitive capacities of its own."10 Indeed, Jolley suggests that Malebranche ultimately made the soul passive in all its states, including its volitional ones.11In this paper, I argue that a strong interpretation of efficacious ideas, whereby they appear to become true causal agents, must be rejected precisely because it pushes us into an incorrect reading of Malebranche's theory of the divine and human faculties. Making ideas true causal agents within God privileges divine reason at the... (shrink)

Nicolas Malebranche's account of the nature of ideas and their role in knowledge and perception has been greatly misunderstood by both his critics and commentators. In this work, Nadler examines Malebranche's theory of ideas and the doctrine of the vision in God with the aim of replacing the standard interpretation of Malebranche's account with a new reading. He argues that Malebranche's ideas should be seen as essences or logical concepts, and that our apprehension of them is thus of a purely (...) intellectual character and serves to provide us with knowledge of eternal truths. He then shows that the visionary representationalist reading usually given to Malebranche's theory of perception simply misconstrues the nature of ideas and the role he intended them to play in perception. Nadler's discussion includes detailed analyses of Malebranche's notion of representation and of his arguments for the presence of divine ideas in knowledge and perception. These aspects of Malebranche's system are considered both in light of his Cartesian and Augustinian commitments and in the broader seventeenth-century philosophical context. (shrink)

One of the hallmarks of Descartes' philosophy is the doctrine that the human mind has a faculty of pure intellect. This doctrine is so central to Descartes' teaching that it is difficult to believe that any of his disciplines would abandon it. Yet this is what happened in the case of Malebranche. This paper argues that in his later philosophy Malebranche adopted a theory of divine illumination which leaves no room for a Cartesian doctrine of pure intellect. It is further (...) argued that Malebranche's abandonment of the Cartesian doctrine left a void in his philosophy which he filled with the theory of efficacious ideas. (shrink)

Berkeley, Malebranche, and Vision in God NICHOLAS JOLLEY IN THE SECOND of the Three Dialogues Hylas, the materialist, asks Philonous: "But what say you, are not you too of opinion that we see all things in God? If I mistake not, what you advance comes near it."' In the first edition of the Dialogues Philonous's response was a temperate one; he expressed his agree- ment with Malebranche's emphasis on the Scriptural text that in God we live, move, and have our (...) being, and confined his disagreement with Malebranche to pointing out that, for him, the things we perceive are our own ideas. In the third edition, by contrast, Berkeley inserted a lengthy and rather ill-tempered expression of his differences from Malebranche: Few men think, yet all will have opinions. Hence men's opinions are superficial and confused. It is nothing strange that tenets, which in themselves are ever so different, should nevertheless be confounded with each other by those who do not consider them attentively. I shall not therefore be surprised, if some men imagine that I run into the enthusiasm of Malebranche, though in truth I am very remote from it. He builds on the most abstract general ideas, which I entirely disclaim. He asserts an absolute exter- nal world, which I deny. He maintains that we are deceived by our senses, and know not the real natures or the true forms and figures of extended beings; of all which I hold the direct contrary. So that upon the whole there are no. (shrink)

This book offers a provocative interpretation of the theory of the soul in the writings of the French Cartesian, Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715). Though recent work on Malebranche's philosophy of mind has tended to emphasize his account of ideas, Schmaltz focuses rather on his rejection of Descartes' doctrine that the mind is better known than the body. In particular, he considers and defends Malebranche's argument that this rejection has a Cartesian basis. Schmaltz reveals that this argument not only provides a fresh (...) perspective on Cartesianism but also is relevant to current debates in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The concept of an "idea" played a central role in 17th-century theories of mind and knowledge, but philosophers were divided over the nature of ideas. This book examines an important, but little-known, debate on this question in the work of Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. Looking closely at the issues involved, as well as the particular context in which the debate took place, Jolley demonstrates that the debate has serious implications for a number of major topics in 17th-century philosophy.