Occasionalism

philosophy

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Last updated

Nov. 3, 2026 •History

Occasionalism, version of Cartesian metaphysics that flourished in the last half of the 17th century, in which all interaction between mind and body is mediated by God. It is posited that unextended mind and extended body do not interact directly. The appearance of direct interaction is maintained by God, who moves the body on the occasion of the mind’s willing and who puts ideas in the mind on the occasion of the body’s encountering other material objects. For example, when a person actualizes his desire to pick up an apple, his mind does not act on his body directly, but his willing of the action is the occasion for God to make his arm reach out; and when his hand grasps the apple, the apple does not act on his mind directly, but the contact is the occasion for God to give him ideas of the apple’s coolness and softness.

Occasionalism was developed primarily by Arnold Geulincx and Nicolas Malebranche, 17th-century Dutch and 17th–18th-century French philosophers, respectively, to solve a specific problem in Cartesian metaphysics. For René Descartes, mind is active, unextended thinking, whereas body is passive, unthinking extension. But these two created substances, the bases of Cartesian dualism, are combined as a third, compound substance—the living human. The problem is that the essential unlikeness of mind and body in the Cartesian view makes it difficult to conceive how they can interact—i.e., how unextended mental ideas can push the body around and how bodily bumpings can yield ideas. Descartes’s opinion that direct interaction takes place in the pineal gland deep within the brain does not answer the question of how. The orthodox view of the French Cartesians Pierre-Sylvain Régis and Jacques Rohault was simply that God has made mind and body so that they interact directly even if scientists do not know how. The occasionalist’s answer to the question is to show how interaction appears to be direct when in fact it is mediated by the fourth, uncreated Cartesian substance, God.

Occasionalism was criticized by Simon Foucher, a 17th-century French Platonist, and others who pointed out that the problem remains of how God—a mental substance—can himself interact with the material substance, body. One answer is that he created it. Foucher believed that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the 17th–18th-century German philosopher and mathematician, took this way out in saying that monads, the units of reality, do not interact but only appear to do so, because God has created them in preestablished harmony. The apparent interaction of mind and body would also be preestablished. This reduction of the occasions of God’s mediation to the single occasion of creation was then seen to be both a logical outcome of occasionalism and a reductio ad absurdum argument against it.

Occasionalism

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