ABSTRACT
During the period between the death of Descartes in 1650 and the publication of Nicolas Malebranche’s De la recherche de la verité (1st edn. 1674/5), most Cartesians turned in the direction of occasionalism in discussions of causality. However, despite the widespread approval for the new language of occasionalism, it is neither clear nor generally agreed what was meant by ‘occasional causality’, and any progress in its clarification presupposes an examination of the reasons, or at least of some of the reasons, why Cartesians introduced this apparently novel idea.1 Louis de La Forge (1632-64) was among the first exponents of Descartes’ theories to write systematically about occasional causality, and for that reason I shall focus in some detail on his analysis of the topic. I shall then examine the extent to which La Forge’s analysis can be used to clarify the initially ambiguous signs in Descartes’ theory of causality and, somewhat briefly, the extent to which it sheds light on the mature version of the theory which was later expounded by Malebranche. The focus of this discussion is the identification of the philosophical or theological question(s) for which occasionalism was proposed by Cartesians as a solution.
