Steven Nadler

In this paper, I argue that Arnauld’s conception of God is more radical than scholars have been willing to allow. It is not the case that, for Arnauld, God acts for reasons, with His will guided by wisdom (much as the God of Malebranche and Leibniz acts), albeit by a wisdom impenetrable to us. Arnauld’s objections to Malebranche are directed not only at the claim that God’s wisdom is transparent to human reason, but at the whole distinction between will and wisdom in God, even if that wisdom were “hidden.” Arnauld’s God, in fact, approaches the extreme voluntarist God of Descartes, and thus transcends practical rational agency altogether.

Oxford University Press is proud to present the third volume in a new annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of philosophy. Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries---the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes papers on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The articles in OSEMP will be of importance to specialists within the discipline, but the editors also intend that they should appeal to a larger audience of philosophers, intellectual historians, and others who are interested in the development of modern thought.

The French philosopher and theologian Nicolas Malebranche was one of the most important thinkers of the early modern period. A bold and unorthodox thinker, he tried to synthesize the new philosophy of Descartes with religious Platonism. This is the first collection of essays to address Malebranche's thought comprehensively and systematically. There are chapters devoted to Malebranche's metaphysics, his doctrine of the soul, his epistemology, the celebrated debate with Arnauld, his philosophical method, his occasionalism and theory of causality, his philosophical theology, his account of freedom, his moral philosophy, and his intellectual legacy.

Oxford University Press is proud to announce an annual volume presenting a selection of the best new work in the history of philosophy.Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy will focus on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - the period that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It will also publish papers on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The core of the subject matter will, of course, be philosophy and its history. But the volume's papers will reflect the fact that philosophy in this period was much broader in scope that it is now taken to be, and included a great deal of what currently belongs to the natural sciences: so the notion of 'philosophy' will be interpreted rather broadly. Furthermore, philosophy in the period was closely connected with other disciplines, such as theology, and with larger questions of social, political, and religious history. Again, while maintaining a focus on philosophy, the volumes will also include articles that examine the larger intellectual, social, and political context of early modern philosophy.The articles in OSEMP will be of importance to specialists within the discipline, but the editors also intend that they should appeal to a larger audience of philosophers, intellectual historians, and others who are interested in the development of modern thought.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes and Augustine by Stephen MennSteven NadlerStephen Menn. Descartes and Augustine. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xvi + 415. Cloth, $74.95.As most readers of this journal well know, scholars in the history of philosophy can, however roughly, be divided into two distinct (and sometimes antagonistic) camps: those who think that work on the great philosophers of the past should focus almost exclusively on an analysis of their theses and arguments, and those who believe that we cannot truly understand any philosopher’s ideas without serious investigation into the historical, philosophical and even more general intellectual context of their thought. Stephen Menn’s book is a profoundly good example of the latter school.While it is undeniable that Descartes was strongly influenced by his Jesuit education and by his later reading of latter-day scholastics like Suarez, and that he was motivated in part by a desire to move philosophy beyond its sterile and unprogressive Aristotelian paradigm, one of the crucial questions in Cartesian scholarship concerns the extent to which Descartes was himself an Augustinian Platonist. In this long, brilliant, learned, at times tedious but generally fascinating study, Menn argues that in terms of both method and substance, with respect to motivation, discipline and goals, there was no thinker more important for Descartes’s intellectual development and philosophical project than St. Augustine. Taking on the great triumvirate of French Cartesian scholarship—Gilson, Gueroult and Gouhier, all of whom argued that, while it is possible to find Augustinian elements in Descartes’s philosophy, nonetheless his thought is radically anti-Augustinian, sharing neither “the Augustinian spirit nor the Augustinian conception of philosophy itself” (8–10)—Menn insists that Augustinian principles inform and sustain in a very deep way Descartes’s metaphysics and epistemology. Moreover, Descartes’s general philosophical project is fundamentally the same as that of the Bishop of Hippo: to show how true wisdom can be born only from scientia. For Descartes, this means showing how the failure of Aristotelian science should lead not to a suspicion of science in general, nor to limiting oneself to a skeptical prudentialist moralizing (such as that of the Renaissance humanists), but to a true wisdom based on certain knowledge of the world. That knowledge of the world will, of course, be a mechanistic one, but it will be grounded in an Augustinian metaphysics. In the end—and here is where Menn most clearly takes issue with Gilson [End Page 625] and Co.—the project is to reconcile Christianity and philosophical knowing, precisely what Augustine set out to do.Understanding Augustine, Menn claims, requires an understanding of Plotinus and the Platonist tradition. And this, he further insists, demands that we know the essential elements of Plato’s metaphysics itself. Menn’s pursuit of depth and attention to detail can sometimes be wearying—do we really need in a book such as this a discussion of the variations in Plato’s explanation of how sensible particulars relate to intelligibles between the middle and late dialogues?—but in the end most of it pays off. We find out what Augustine found of value in his reading of Plotinus and what he needed to leave behind. Of the greatest importance, especially for someone seeking to move beyond the materialism of the Manicheans, was a conception of the human soul as an incorporeal thing and an understanding of God or nous as an immaterial and transcendent source of being and, through illumination, of knowledge. “[Augustine] went to the Platonists to learn a method for understanding God and the soul, and he accepts a great deal of the doctrine that comes from this way of understanding them, but he knew from the beginning what it was he wanted to understand: it was the God and the human souls described in the Christian scriptures” (166).What Descartes wanted was much the same, although he hoped to put it to further use by returning from the heights of metaphysics to the most general science of the natural world (physics) and the particular, practical sciences (wisdom) that follow from it. If he could successfully ground his physics in proper metaphysical first principles, then his philosophical goals would...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Deux cartésiens: La polémique Arnauld MalebrancheSteven NadlerDenis Moreau. Deux cartésiens: La polémique Arnauld Malebranche. Paris: J. Vrin, 1999. Pp. 353. NP.The Arnauld-Malebranche debate is one of the great intellectual events of the seventeenth-century. Taking place over an eleven-year time span, and brought to a conclusion only by Arnauld's death, the debate ranged over a wide variety of philosophical and theological issues. At stake were some of the most important questions faced by early modern thinkers: the nature of human knowledge and its relationship to the divine understanding; the appropriate conception of human and divine freedom; the problem of causality; the ontology of evil and the possibility of engaging in theodicean speculation; even the nature of God itself. It is thus very surprising that there has not been, until now, a full-scale (but by no means exhaustive) study of the debate, especially its rich philosophical dimensions.Many readers approaching the documents of the affaire are, of course, put off by the unpleasant personal invective that characterizes many of the principals' exchanges, as well as by what appears to be the repetitive nature of much of the dialogue. Philosophers, as well, have probably been deterred by the debate's theological dimensions, especially the wrangling over questions of grace. More importantly, contemporary philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition have been led to believe that the philosophical side of the debate is fairly one-dimensional, centered only on the nature of representational ideas and the problems surrounding our perception of the external [End Page 595] world. In fact, as Denis Moreau shows in this learned, highly-readable and illuminating study of the debate, the controversy over ideas was only the opening round, Arnauld's point of entry into Malebranche's complex, systematic, but (to Arnauld's mind) highly objectionable philosophical theology.The title of this book is important. Part of Moreau's thesis is that much of the passion of the debate, especially on Arnauld's side, has its origin in the familial context. What is at stake, at least in Arnauld's mind, is the legacy of Cartesianism. Arnauld, Moreau argues convincingly (and contrary to a good deal of scholarly opinion), was a sincere and committed (but not uncritical) disciple of Descartes' (177). His attack on Malebranche was motivated, in part, by a desire to prevent "la philosophie cartésienne" from being transformed for posterity into "la philosophie malebranchiste." It was also motivated, of course and perhaps more importantly, by his desire to defend what he took to be the true Christian conception of God.Part One of the book is devoted to showing how Arnauld's polemical persistence was the result not just of a pugnacious character or personal animus towards his opponent, but rather of a principled approach to philosophical inquiry. His beliefs on the nature and validity of evidence, the proper method to be used in the search after truth, and especially philosophy as a social enterprise all demanded a personal and dialectical confrontation with a heavy dose of rhetoric. Malebranche, on the other hand, preferred a more solitary and meditative mode of inquiry, and was thus unprepared for Arnauld's agonistic onslaught. Thus, Moreau insists with great originality, "on peut ainsi lire cette polémique comme le conflit de deux théories de l'acquisition et de la constitution du savoir."The occasional cause of Arnauld's attack on Malebranche's theory of ideas and his doctrine of vision in God (in Des vraies et des fausses idées) was the publication of the Traité de la nature et de la grace (1680). The epistemological and ontological objections raised in the initial discussion over "êtres représentatifs" was meant ultimately to undermine Malebranche's theodicy by attacking the foundational principles upon which it rested. In Part Two of the book, Moreau looks at what, in Arnauld's eyes, was the essential flow in Malebranche's account: the assertion of the reality of evil. Evil, Malebranche insisted, was not to be explained away as merely illusory, or as forming an essential contributing ingredient of a larger, more perfect whole. Evil is irreducibly real; there is imperfection...