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There are two ways to understand early modern mechanism: first, as the view that what happens in the natural world is a result of the mechanical properties of bodies (call this “course‐of‐nature mechanism”), and second, as the view that the only properties bodies have are mechanical properties (“ontological mechanism”). In the work of Descartes and Malebranche, the two kinds of mechanism are starkly opposed: it is because they accept ontological mechanism (and so must reject scholastic powers) that these figures cannot endorse course‐of‐nature mechanism.

These two analyses of law, while consistent, allow us to explain Malebranche's complex attitude toward the connection between causation and explanation. Taken as summaries of God's volitions, laws cannot serve as explanations, since all bodily events have one and the same cause, namely, God. Taken, however, as conditionals, which themselves are made true in virtue of God's volitional activity, such laws can serve as explanations (though they can for that reason no longer be genuine causes).

There are three areas of particular concern to mechanists, concerns which highlight the legitimatory aspects of the mechanist project in natural philosophy. The first is the question of how mechanists deal with the explanatory load placed on their systems by a combination of minimal explanatory resources and ambitious explanatory aims. In particular, the role that the doctrine of primary and secondary qualities plays in this respect, especially in Malebranche's reworking of Cartesianism. Second, there is the attempt to extend mechanism into the realms of vital and cognitive functions, phenomena that were treated as part of natural philosophy in the early-modern period, and which generated a great deal of controversy. Finally, there is the question of the relation between natural philosophy expanded into the biological realm and the traditional practice of clinical medicine, which harbours a very different model of understanding biological processes as they relate to illness and health.

This chapter seeks to do three things. It raises a few remaining difficulties for Perler's account of the soul and its faculties in Suarez and Descartes. The chapter then proceeds to discuss the early modern critique of faculties and suggests a modest response for the defender of faculty-talk. Faculty-talk, it argues, may serve two modest but useful taxonomic roles in our thinking both about nature and about the mind. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Malebranche's critique of the notion of faculties of the mind, and his contention that the supposed faculties of intellect and will are really distinct neither from one another nor from the substance of the mind itself.

The chapter begins the task of elucidating Berkeley's active/passive distinction by focusing on his understanding of the concept of existence. The latter is elucidated by mapping Berkeley's understanding of its relationship to concepts such as simplicity, unity, identity, and substance. Berkeley's view of existence is contrasted with the competing views of Descartes and Locke. Throughout the chapter, the bundle-theory interpretation of spirits is used as a stalking horse and shown to be incompatible with Berkeley's account of existence as it applies to spirits.

This chapter applies the various interpretive tools developed in the previous chapters to the question of the relationship between Berkeley's metaphysics and occasionalism. It is widely believed that Berkeley's own views on human and divine agency imply a commitment to some form of occasionalism. This chapter makes plain just how deeply incompatible Berkeley's views and occasionalism are, and shows how difficult it is within Berkeley's metaphysics to raise the sort of problems that motivate occasionalism in the first place.

This chapter's particular concern is to identify and describe the way in which Hume's discussion of our idea of necessity (T,1.3.14) is intimately and intricately related to a number of theological issues and controversies that were of considerable interest and importance for Hume and his contemporaries. Not only does Hume present a skeptical challenge to the fundamental theological doctrines of omnipotence and Creation, he also suggests a comprehensive, integrated naturalism in respect of the causal relations governing matter and thought—doing away with the suggestion that spiritual agents are the only possible source of real activity in the world. In pursuing these various irreligious themes Hume is following a tradition and pattern of “atheistic” thought that was readily identified by his own contemporaries. These specific lines of argument are entirely consistent with the wider irreligious program that Hume pursues throughout the Treatise as a whole.

In the early eighteenth century context there was an intimate connection between problems concerning the existence of the material world and problems of natural religion. Two issues are of particular importance for understanding Hume's irreligious intentions in his discussion of the external world, as presented in the section entitled “Of scepticism with regard to the senses." First, if we are unable to establish that we know that the material world exists, then all arguments for the existence of God that presuppose knowledge of the material world (i.e. its beauty, order, design, etc.) are placed in doubt. Second, if we are naturally disposed to believe in the existence of body, but this belief is false, then it seems to follow that God must be a deceive—or does not exist. Hume's arguments in 1.4.2 are finely crafted to present both these irreligious challenges to the orthodox view.

This chapter examines Norris's views about faith. Norris was far from believing that everything in true religion, everything essential for salvation, could be determined by unaided human reason; to complete that sphere there is need also of faith. This position was one which set him against a growing trend in theological thinking that emphasized human reason as both the key to discover, and the test against which to legitimize, all religious belief. Norris's attempt to distance himself from that movement was the occasion of one of his most important books, An Account of Reason and Faith: In Relation to the Mysteries of Christianity, in which he attempts to explain the necessity and appropriateness of faith, as well as its relation to reason.

The chapter explores the development of the thought of John Locke. It begins with his early medical concerns, showing how these became connected with the issue of the standing of ‘experimental natural philosophy’. The most comprehensive statement of the philosophy to which Locke was opposed was that of Nicolas Malebranche, and Locke's mature views can be seen as a response to Malebranche. The reading offered brings to light an understanding of empiricism as a successor to, and philosophical refinement of, seventeenth‐century ‘experimental’ natural philosophy, something which is intimately tied up with natural‐philosophical practice, and is quite distinct from the speculative epistemology to which it is reduced in the ‘rationalism/empiricism’ debates.

This chapter is an examination of the myth that occasionalism arose as an ad hoc response to the mind-body problem bequeathed by Descartes. In fact, there are a number of arguments and motivations for the doctrine, none of which appeal to the alleged difficulty of explaining how, for the dualist, mind and matter can interact. This thesis is pursued by looking at the philosophers Malebranche, La Forge, Cordemoy, Geulincx, and Clauberg.

This chapter is an examination of the details of Malebranche’s account of divine activity in his occasionalism, and in particular his notion of divine general volitions. Contrary to a reading first offered by Arnauld in his correspondence with Leibniz, according to which Malebranche’s God acts by way of volitions with general content (or laws), this chapter argues that Malebranche’s God acts constantly and ubiquitously in nature by way of volitions with particular contents, although these volitions are always in accordance with general laws of nature.

Some occasionalists argue that there is an epistemic or cognitive condition for causality, whereby in order to count as the cause of an effect one must know how to bring that effect about. Finite minds do not have the knowledge necessary to move bodies, the argument runs; only God, as an omniscient mind, can adequately fulfill this condition. This unusual epistemic condition for causal power appears primarily in the arguments of Malebranche and Geulincx, which are examined in this chapter.

This chapter considers some implications of an important argument for occasionalism used by La Forge (and Malebranche). If God, as La Forge’s “continuous creation” arguments runs, is required to continually sustain finite substances in existence, and if this sustenance must extend to the modes or properties of such substances, then it would seem to follow that La Forge is no more entitled to attribute real causal powers to the mind than to the body. The conclusion is that the use of this argument commits a philosopher to a more thorough going occasionalism than he may initially intend.

A number of philosophers, from the medieval period on (some of whom were occasionalists), have argued that a central feature of causal relations is a necessary connection between cause and effect. But they have also concluded that no such necessary connections are ever to be found among things or events in nature. This chapter examines this argument in its epistemological and ontological versions in al-Ghazali, Nicolas of Autrecourt, Malebranche, and Hume.

This chapter is an examination of the approaches to the problem of evil, or theodicies, of three very different seventeenth-century philosophers who were in correspondence with each other and even, at one point, friends: Arnauld, Leibniz, and Malebranche. This chapter looks at the various issues that inform their differences on the question of God’s causal activity, and especially the differences in their prioritizing either divine freedom and power, on the one hand, or divine wisdom and justice, on the other hand.