25 Facts About Nicolas Malebranche

Nicolas Malebranche was a French Oratorian Catholic priest and rationalist philosopher.

Nicolas Malebranche eventually left the Sorbonne, having rejected scholasticism, and entered the Oratory in 1660.

In 1664, Nicolas Malebranche first read Descartes' Treatise on Man, an account of the physiology of the human body.

In others, Nicolas Malebranche placed a greater emphasis than he had previously done on his occasionalist account of causation, and particularly on his contention that God acted for the most part through "general volitions" and only rarely, as in the case of miracles, through "particular volitions".

Nicolas Malebranche expanded on this last point in 1680 when he published Treatise on Nature and Grace.

De Mairan was sympathetic to the views of Baruch Spinoza, and felt that he had found similar views in his reading of Nicolas Malebranche: Nicolas Malebranche assiduously resisted such an association.

Nicolas Malebranche argued that human knowledge is dependent on divine understanding in a way analogous to that in which the motion of bodies is dependent on divine will.

Nicolas Malebranche defined "truth" as a relation between ideas: since these ideas are in God, they are eternal and immutable, and consequently the only truths worthy of the name will themselves be eternal and immutable.

Nicolas Malebranche divided these relations between ideas into two categories: relations of magnitude and relations of quality or perfection.

Ethical principles, for Nicolas Malebranche, are therefore divine in their foundation, universal in their application, and to be discovered by intellectual contemplation, just as geometrical principles are.

Nicolas Malebranche's solution was to suggest that, whereas the mind's intellectual conception of these ideas is pure and direct, its sensual perception of them will be modified by "sensations".

Nicolas Malebranche was strongly influenced by Descartes but did not accept his philosophy uncritically.

Nicolas Malebranche is noted particularly for his view that we see all things in God and for his adoption of psycho-physical parallelism and 'occasionalism' to deal with the problem of interaction between mind and body.

In so far as God is not to be identified with the archetypal eternal truths in his mind, Nicolas Malebranche is not a pantheist.

Nicolas Malebranche's theodicy is his solution to the problem of evil.

Changes occurring in created things will exhibit regularities because God in creating the world observes what Nicolas Malebranche calls "order": he binds himself to act according to laws of nature chosen in accordance with his general will that the world be as good as possible, and thus that the laws be simple and few in number.

Nicolas Malebranche's theory was presented as a corrective to Descartes' view, rather than a refutation thereof, but it has important parallels with the rival optical theory of Isaac Newton.

When Nicolas Malebranche revised his 1699 paper for inclusion as the Sixteenth Elucidation of the 1712 edition of The Search After Truth, he inserted a number of references to "Newton's excellent work".

Nicolas Malebranche wrote on mathematics and, although he made no major mathematical discoveries of his own, he was instrumental in introducing and disseminating the contributions of Descartes and Leibniz in France.

Nicolas Malebranche introduced l'Hopital to Johann Bernoulli, with the ultimate result being the publication of the first textbook in infinitesimal calculus.

Nicolas Malebranche developed an original theory related to preformationism, postulating that each embryo probably contained even smaller embryos ad infinitum, like an idealized Matryoshka doll.

Nicolas Malebranche was held in widespread high regard within his own lifetime and for some time afterwards, and the influence of certain of his ideas can be discerned in the works of several important figures.

Nicolas Malebranche weakened Descartes' argument, concluding that, from a philosophical point of view, its existence could only be shown to be probable.

John Locke had argued for this, but he had made no distinction between minds and bodies on this point, whereas both Berkeley and Nicolas Malebranche maintained that we could have ideas of bodies but not of minds.

However, over the last three or four decades, Nicolas Malebranche's work has drawn renewed and ever-increasing interest.