The last of his kind? Gottfried Ploucquet’s occasionalism and the grounding of sense-perception

Abstract

Sufficiently grounding the origin of sense-perceptions in the mind is an issue that has concerned philosophers for a long time, and remains an issue even today. In eighteenth-century Germany prior to the publication of Kant's Critical philosophy, the two main competing theories to causally ground sense-perceptions were pre-established harmony and physical influx, the latter of which ultimately carried the day. A third option had been around in the seventeenth century: occasionalism. However, historians of philosophy believe this option to have entirely disappeared in the eighteenth century. I will show that this is not the case. In this paper, I focus on one influential German occasionalist: Gottfried Ploucquet (1716-90). Ploucquet not only criticizes Leibniz's theory of pre-established harmony for providing an ultimately ungrounded, subjective, and arbitrary account of the origin of sense-perceptions, but also presents his own daring alternative: a representationalist-occasionalist theory that locates the objective ground of sense-perceptions in the divine mind.

Do you need to know in order to act? The case for a Suárezian legacy in early modern occasionalism

“…Occasionalist arguments often engage with issues pertaining to physics and natural philosophy (Lennon, 1974), and they are endorsed by authors who do not necessarily identify themselves as “Cartesians” (Henkel, 2021). The impact of occasionalist‐inflected philosophies extended beyond the Franco‐Dutch Cartesian network, including at least Great Britain (Connolly, 2021) and the German Empire (Henkel, 2022a) and remaining alive as an intellectual interlocutor until at least the mid‐eighteenth century (Henkel, 2022b). Given the broad‐ranging and highly diverse configuration of occasionalist views that were discussed, it is unlikely that their revamping in the early modern period could be explained as something abrupt or be accounted for by one simple factor.…”