The canon has formed, and the poor Father Malebranche is decidedly excluded; a C-list philosopher at best, footnotes here and there; we will hear much talk of Rationalists Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, and none to spare. Hume predicted well that "the glory of Malebranche is confined to his age," and even earlier in the time of Berkeley it was supposed that a well-rounded empiricist argument would carry off his philosophy as quickly as it did his person.* Why then might anyone not simply ignore him?

In truth Malebranche strikes me as the most noble of the rationalists; he has none of the problems of Descartes, none of the quasi-mysticism of Spinoza, none of the contortions of Leibniz. Occasionalism is easily the most forward-thinking of any of the four theories; denying any overt or tacit causality between minds and bodies, while maintaining our ideas of bodies are clearer than our ideas of minds. It is almost quasi-empiricist in its approach, it certainly set the stage for Berkeley and Hume, and shows clearly a pristine gift for metaphysics.

The work I read was a collection of some parts of the Search for Truth, his most famous work, some of the Elucidations on the Search for Truth, a commentary he provides that is very helpful in certain sections, and some parts from a later work which I did not read but feel guilty for not doing so. I think I'm fortunate to have got this offhandedly, because Malebranche doesn't exactly fly off the presses, so copies of this are somewhat rare for the physical second-hand shopper. Worth picking up for the philosopher. Recommended reading: the Meditations and some familiarity with Augustine and Christian philosophy.

* I can't help but include this quotation from the Bishop's biography, included in his collected works by Rev. G. N. Wright, which is an interesting piece of historical knowledge, but virtually unknown. "At Paris, having now more leisure than when he first passed through that city, Mr. Berkeley took care to pay his respects to his rival in metaphysical sagacity, the illustrious Pere Malebranche. He found this ingenious father in his cell, cooking in a small pipkin a medicine for a disorder with which he was then troubled, an inflammation of the lungs. The conversation naturally turned on our author's system, of which the other has received some knowledge from a translation just published. But the issue of this debate proved tragical to poor Malebranche. In the heat of disputation he raised his voice so high, and gave way so freely to the natural impetuosity of a man of parts and a Frenchman, that he brought on himself a violent increase of his disorder, which carried him off a few days after."