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Cordemoy and Occasionalism

[37] 1 Thus, in Descartes’s Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Daniel Garber argues that the doctrine of occasionalism “is certainly flexible enough” to allow us to say that “Descartes is . . . an occasionalist when it comes to the inanimate world,” that is, with respect to the motion of bodies not united to souls (304). He also notes, however, that “while Descartes may share some doctrines with the later occasionalists of the Cartesian school, he is not an occasionalist, strictly speaking, insofar as he does allow some finite causes into his world,” namely, human minds and angels; see “Descartes and Occasionalism,” in Steven Nadler, ed. Causation in Early Modern Philosophy (University Park: Penn State Press, 1993), (24). Thus, according to Garber, Descartes still rejects both the negative and positive theses of occasionalism that I outline below. J.E. McGuire, while insisting that Robert Boyle “did not accept occasionalism,” nonetheless argues that for Boyle “God’s will . . . is the only causally efficacious agency in nature. Hence there are no laws or causal connections in nature existing as entities over and above particulars conceived as events, bodies or particles . . . there are no secondary causes in nature which are miraculously dispensed with by Providence; rather, Providence is God’s continual action in nature”; see “Boyle’s Conception of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972): 523–42. For a critique of McGuire’s reading, see Timothy Shanahan, “God and Nature in the Thought of Robert Boyle,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 26 (1988): 547–69. 2 The first occasionalists, in fact, had nothing to do with Cartesianism. The occasionalism among the Islamic followers of al-Ashari in the tenth and eleventh centuries, including al-Ghazali (1058– 1114), was perhaps an even more extreme version of the doctrine than what would appear in the seventeenth century. For a study of this movement, see Majid Fakhry, Islamic Occasionalism and its Critique by Averroës and Aquinas (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958). Cordemoy and Occasionalism