Andrew Pessin

The causal power of Malebranche's God is a function of the content of His will. Yet despite its significance for Malebranche, little exegetical attention has been paid to his notion of volitional content. In this paper I develop the notion of an 'incomplete' volition, note that Malebranche accepted and used something like it, and then examine Malebranche's natural theodicy in its light. This yields a new interpretation in which, unlike previous interpretations, Malebranche actually succeeds in reconciling his seemingly incompatible beliefs that: (1) God alone is causally responsible for all natural states of affairs; (2) God's power is His will; (3) God wills to produce only goods; and yet (4) genuine evils exist

In this book Clarke offers an interesting spin on Descartes: rather than see him simply as a substance dualist who offers a very poor account of the mind, Clarke sees him as a scientist pushing scientific explanation of the mind as far as it will go, and only exiting that path as a substance dualist when explanation has reached its limits. In this light Descartes comes out as an impressively successful thinker rather than as a blatantly poor one. Clarke is much to be commended for this reorientation of the bigger picture; but this book is even more to be commended for its detailed and thorough account of the various elements of Descartes’s theory of mind. In being nearly a compendium of Descartes’s views about various mental phenomena, as well as including sketches of some of the resulting controversies about these views, Clarke’s book will be of interest both to scholar and novice alike.