Abstract
Malebranche argues that ideas are representative beings existing in God. He defends this thesis by an inference to the best explanation of human perception. It is well known that Malebranche’s theory of vision in God was forcefully rejected by philosophers such as Arnauld, Locke, and Berkeley. However, the notion that ideas exist in God was not the only controversial aspect of Malebranche’s approach. Another controversy centered around Malebranche’s view that ideas are to be understood as posits in an explanatory theory. Opponents of this approach, including Arnauld and Locke, held that our talk about ideas was not explanatory but instead merely descriptive: we use the word ‘idea’ to describe phenomena that we observe by reflecting on our own minds. This controversy has not received much attention from scholars, but in the present paper I will show that it was an explicit and important subject of concern for Malebranche, Arnauld, Locke, and Berkeley and that attention to this controversy can illuminate several aspects of these philosophers’ work.
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- Sommer, Andreas Urs, Kommentar zu Nietzsches Zur Genealogie der Moral. Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken. Band 5/2. Hrsg. von der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter 2019, xvii + 723 pp.
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Das Thothbuch: eine ägyptische Vorlage der platonischen Schriftkritik im Phaidros?
- Desire and Impulse in Epictetus and the Older Stoics
- Ideas and Explanation in Early Modern Philosophy
- Spinoza’s Analysis of his Imagined Readers’ Axiology
- Kant and Consequentialism in Context: The Second Critique’s Response to Pistorius
- Nietzsche’s English Genealogy of Truthfulness
- Book Reviews
- Karbowski, Joseph, Aristotle’s Method in Ethics: Philosophy in Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, xii + 275 pp.
- Sommer, Andreas Urs, Kommentar zu Nietzsches Zur Genealogie der Moral. Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken. Band 5/2. Hrsg. von der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter 2019, xvii + 723 pp.