Abstract

Nicolas Malebranche is perhaps most well-known for his enthusiastic defense of the doctrine of occasionalism. Occasionalism—at least Malebranche’s complete occasionalism—is the thesis that God alone has true causal power and that natural causes (e.g., a ball colliding with another or a volition of a finite will) are not true causes but only occasional causes. The focus of this chapter is Malebranche’s occasionalism, specifically Malebranche’s arguments for occasionalism. The author examines four such arguments: the no necessary connection argument, the divine concurrence argument, the passive nature argument, and the knowledge argument. The former two arguments are “global” in that they aim to establish occasionalism in and of themselves. The latter two are “local” arguments in that they aim to show that at least some finite things have no causal power.