Alain Badiou is perhaps the world’s most significant living philosopher. In his annual seminars on major topics and pivotal figures, Badiou developed vital aspects of his thinking on a range of subjects that he would go on to explore in his influential works. In this seminar, Badiou offers a tour de force encounter with a lesser-known seventeenth-century philosopher and theologian, Nicolas Malebranche, a contemporary and peer of Spinoza and Leibniz. The seminar is at once a record of Badiou’s thought at a key moment in the years before the publication of his most important work, Being and Event, and a lively interrogation of Malebranche’s key text, the Treatise on Nature and Grace. Badiou develops a rigorous yet novel analysis of Malebranche’s theory of grace, retracing his claims regarding the nature of creation and the relation between God and world and between God and Jesus. Through Malebranche, Badiou develops a radical concept of truth and the subject. This book renders a seemingly obscure post-Cartesian philosopher fascinating and alive, restoring him to the philosophical canon. It occupies a pivotal place in Badiou’s reflections on the nature of being that demonstrates the crucial role of theology in his thinking.

This Companion contains specially commissioned essays addressing Malebranche's thought comprehensively and systematically.

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.

The seventeenth century witnesses the demise of two core doctrines in the theory of perception: naïve realism about color, sound, and other sensible qualities and the empirical theory, drawn from Alhacen and Roger Bacon, which underwrote it. This created a problem for seventeenth century philosophers: how is that we use qualities such as color, feel, and sound to locate objects in the world, even though these qualities are not real? Ejecting such sensible qualities from the mind-independent world at once makes for a cleaner ontology, since bodies can now be understood in purely geometrical terms, and spawns a variety of fascinating complications for the philosophy of perception. If sensible qualities are not part of the mind-independent world, just what are they, and what role, if any, do they play in our cognitive economy? We seemingly have to use color to visually experience objects. Do we do so by inferring size, shape, and motion from color? Or is it a purely automatic operation, accomplished by divine decree? This volume traces the debate over perceptual experience in early modern France, covering such figures as Antoine Arnauld, Robert Desgabets, and Pierre-Sylvain Régis alongside their better-known countrymen René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche.

Features the selections that provide the student of modern philosophy with both a view of Malebranche's philosophical system and a picture of his most important doctrines. This title presents Malebranche's occasionalism, his theory of knowledge and the 'vision in God', and his writings on theodicy and freedom.

A revised edition of the work which presents the most systematic exposition of Malebranche's philosophy.

This book is a retrospective view of modern philosophical anthropology through the works of two of its greatest exponents. the author demonstrates how mythology, the philosophy of history and language and Vico's concept of man had as a constant referral point Malebranche's psychology with its Cartesian formulation. The idolatrous and mythopoietic imagination that is described in La Scienza Nuova (New Science) has much in common with the "pagan" mind (that is to say the mind subjugated to passions, sensitivity and fantasy that is described in La Recherche (The Search after Truth). Some of the themes discussed here are myth, the metaphoric nature of thought, idolatry, the formation of mentality, the relationships which bind passions and representations and the association of ideas through iconic images. Also discussed are other themes such as the structure of society and imagination, imitation, persuasion and social relationships, communication within society between illustrious imaginations. Moreover in Malebranche has been found a complex and complete theory of imaginative universals (universali fantastici). The philosophy of the imagination in Vico and Malebranche is translated and edited by Giorgio A. Pinton.

This book offers a provocative interpretation of the theory of the soul in the writings of the French Cartesian, Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715). Though recent work on Malebranche's philosophy of mind has tended to emphasize his account of ideas, Schmaltz focuses rather on his rejection of Descartes' doctrine that the mind is better known than the body. In particular, he considers and defends Malebranche's argument that this rejection has a Cartesian basis. Schmaltz reveals that this argument not only provides a fresh perspective on Cartesianism but also is relevant to current debates in the philosophy of mind.

explanation might be understood in relationship to our mental, moral, and spiritual life, leapt to his attention and was to occupy it from that day until his death. II. MALEBRANCHE'S THEORY OF BEING His fIrst work, The Search After Truth, appeared from 1674-76, some fourteen to sixteen years after his dramatic encounter with Descartes' work; to this day it is the only work unfailingly associated with his name, though it was the first of nine studies and several volumes of responses in which he went on to explore and develop his thought. Malebranche criticizes the prevailing theories of sense perception, imagination, memory and cognition, and fIrst proposes his own theory of how we acquire and evaluate ideas - from mathematical to physical, and moral to self-reflective. Underlying this theory is his rejection of Scholastic Aristotelian metaphysics, in which particular beings are said to have powers or forms that act on our minds to inform us. Malebranche - here in company with other critics . of that metaphysics from Montaigne to Bacon and Hobbes - argues that the prevailing view of beings endowed with powers by which they act unilaterally, as "causes" in the full sense of that word, makes no sense and cannot be confirmed by experience. For Malebranche, on the other hand, power can be predicated univocally only of God. Created beings have only that limited power given by God under the conditions of creation.