ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes and discusses the occasionalism of Gottfried Ploucquet (1716–1790). Aware of the debates about occasionalism and Malebranche’s system, more specifically, his vision in God doctrine, Ploucquet launches a frontal attack on the two predominant theories of causation in eighteenth-century Germany, that is, physical influx and pre-established harmony. Both of them (argues Ploucquet) fail to provide a convincing answer to a pressing philosophical problem: finding an objective ground of sense-perception. He criticizes Leibniz’ pre-established harmony for providing a merely subjective and arbitrary ground of sense-perception as based on our own mind’s activity. Ploucquet offers a representationalist-occasionalist approach as an alternative. According to him, only God’s causal-representational activity can objectively ground our sense-perception of the external world. While Ploucquet never accepts wholesale occasionalism, he perhaps thinks that his own system logically entailed the former and therefore threatened the activity, substancehood, and freedom of humans. Otherwise, he might be afraid that his occasionalism gives rise to idealism. Either way, in his later career Ploucquet choses to adopt a humbler albeit somewhat naïve form of physical influx theory.
