Nicolas Malebranche 1638 – 1715

Nicolas Malebranche was a French Oratorian priest and one of the most original Cartesian philosophers of the seventeenth century. His Search After Truth combined Descartes' rationalism with Augustinian theology in a system whose two central doctrines are occasionalism, the view that God is the only true cause, and the vision in God, the claim that we perceive the essences of things by seeing them in the divine intellect. He carried on a long debate with Antoine Arnauld over grace and ideas and corresponded with Leibniz. His work shaped Berkeley, Hume, and the development of empiricism.