Malebranche and Ideas

Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) was one of the leading French followers of Descartes and was one of the most influential philosophers in the seventeenth century. His metaphysical, epistemological, and theological doctrines - in particular, his occasionalism and the vision in God - were a focus of debate challenged by Arnauld, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and others. Malebranche's synthesis of Augustinianism and an unorthodox Cartesianism undoubtedly stands as one of the grand systems of the period. In past work, 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 Malebranche and Ideas, Nadler offers a new interpretation of the role ideas play in Malebranche's theories of knowledge and perception. 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 the light of his Cartesian and Augustinian commitments and in the broader seventeenth-century philosophical context.