ABSTRACT
The intellectual climate of seventeenth century Europe made for an exciting, if turbulent, setting for the philosophical understanding of causation. This chapter discusses Malebranche's various arguments for occasionalism, and examines his account of "occasional causation", with a focus on how creaturely states fit into this picture. Concurrentism and occasionalism share common ground in their rejection of conservationism. That is, both positions take divine causal activity to be operative directly and immediately in bringing about ordinary events. The chapter argues that Rene Descartes would have been inconsistent to have held that bodies are genuine causes. Fortunately, Locke's situation is somewhat better than Descartes's. Locke's views about the nature of bodies or corpuscles are significantly distinct from the Cartesian view, and solidity plays a prominent role. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz himself endorses the continuous creation thesis, and his various statements concerning the role of divine causation in producing the perfections have appeared to many interpreters as coming dangerously close to occasionalism.
