Fred Ablondi

John Yolton describes this collection of nine essays as "a kind of a sequel" to his 1984 book Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid. Four of the chapters have previously appeared in print, and most can stand on their own, presuming little or no familiarity with previous chapters. Indeed, the title is somewhat misleading, for the material is not presented in chronological fashion, and there is little attention given to Leibniz and none to Spinoza--not what one would expect to find in a history from Descartes to Kant.

Nicolas Malebranche is often thought of as an ardent disciple of Cartesianism. Yet he parts ways with Descartes on a number of important points, one of the most important of which concerns the question of whether mind is able to affect body. It is clear from his letters to Elisabeth that Descartes believed that minds have it within their power to move bodies; Malebranche, on the other hand, denies this, not because mind and body are separate substances--the most frequent criticism of Descartes' dualism--but because he considered the human mind to be too weak to act as such a cause. From this view of the mind as relatively impotent follow Malebranche's anti-Cartesian views that bodies are, in a way, better known than minds, and that our sensations, as well as the mind itself, are known only confusedly. Given what Malebranche says about the limited ability of the human mind, the main focus of this dissertation concerns what we are and are not able to know about ourselves as mental substances. ;In the first chapter, I examine several interpretations of the Cartesian theory of will, as well as Descartes' definition of thought. In the second chapter, I briefly discuss Malebranche's occasionalism before turning to his theory of the will, which is contrasted with the Cartesian account presented in the first chapter. The third chapter focuses on ideas in Malebranche, and again, I stress the contrast with the Cartesian philosophy of ideas. The final chapter begins with an account of knowledge by sentiment interieur in Malebranche; I then argue that, despite initial appearances, it is not sentiment interieur, but his theory of will, taken together with his epistemology and ontology of ideas, which in Malebranche's psychology allow for the presence of unconscious mental processes in the human mind

Henri Gouhier once asked, "Après le mort de Descartes, qu'est-ce que le cartésianisme?" to which he replied, "C'est la philosophie de Descartes vue par ses disciples" (La vocation de Malebranche [Paris: J. Vrin, 1926], 80). In L'autorité d'un canon philosophique, Delphine Antoine-Mahut asks a similar question about who controls in just what a philosophical '-ism' consists, and she offers a nuanced and thoughtful answer. While "l'auctorialité du nom en question" is one part, she adds that we must also consider "l'auctorialité de celui ou de celle qui raconte cette histoire, dans un contexte et avec des enjeux très différent de ceux de l'individu d'origine auquel cette histoire est attachée" (10–11). The end result... Read More.