Download PDF by Steven Nadler: The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche

By Steven Nadler

ISBN-10: 052162729X

ISBN-13: 9780521627290

The French thinker and theologian Nicholas Malebranche used to be essentially the most vital thinkers of the early glossy interval. A daring and unorthodox philosopher, he attempted to synthesize the hot philosophy of Descartes with the spiritual Platonism of St. Augustine. this is often the 1st selection of essays to deal with Malebranche's proposal comprehensively and systematically. There are chapters dedicated to Malebranche's metaphysics, his doctrine of the soul, his epistemology, the prestigious debate with Arnauld, his philosophical strategy, his occasionalism and concept of causality, his philosophical theology, his account of freedom, his ethical philosophy, and his highbrow legacy.

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Extra resources for The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche

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In his argument against the Cartesians, Malebranche spoke, not of sensations, but of sensible qualities, and he was surely right to claim that the status of these qualities was a subject of controversy between the Cartesians and their Scholastic opponents. The Cartesians may have disagreed as to whether sensible qualities are dispositional properties of bodies or purely mind-dependent items, but they are at one in supposing that they are not straightforwardly manifest properties Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Malebranche on the Soul 49 of bodies in the way common sense takes them to be, and that this fact about them needs to be established against the Scholastics by philosophical argument.

Perhaps it will be said, on Malebranche's behalf, that though God is indeed causally responsible for producing sensations, the causal action in question does not consist in illuminating the soul. Thus, we can say that, apart from divine illumination, the soul finds only obscure and confused sensations in itself while still recognizing that God is their genuine cause. This is perfectly correct, but it is fair to note that in his later writings Malebranche tended to minimize the distinction between the ways in which sensations and perceptions are produced in the soul.

Ideas in God are immaterial - they are not at all like tables and chairs - but they are not spiritual in the sense in which the soul is supposed to be a spiritual substance; that is, they are not purely thinking or conscious beings. Perhaps it is possible to mount a defense of Malebranche's position here, which would take something like the following form. Anything that is immaterial is either an idea or it is spiritual. Now when I turn my consciousness on myself, I discover not merely that the object of such consciousness is immaterial but also that it is not an idea, for I find that it does not have the properties of infinity, necessity, and the like, which can be predicated of all ideas.

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The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche by Steven Nadler


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