Abstract
One does not normally think of Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715)1 as a `natural law’ theorist – and indeed his main work on moral and political philosophy, the Traité de Morale (1684), uses the term loi naturelle only a handful of (non-crucial) times. For this there is a reason: Malebranche began his philosophical life as a Cartesian,2 and his first efforts in practical philosophy put forward the (more-or-less) `Cartesian’ argument that God governs the universe, justly, through simple, constant, uniform `general wills’ and `general laws’ (which should be imitated by human beings striving to avoid arbitrary, ad hoc ‘particular wills’).3 But later in his life, possibly under the influence of his friend and correspondent Leibniz, Malebranche increasingly weakened or abandoned Cartesian lawful généralité in favour of an `eternal’ law (reason-given, changeless, universal) which had absorbed many of the attributes of traditional natural law – though here Malebranche follows Leibniz’s collapsing of `natural’ and `eternal’ law into each other,4 deviating thereby from Thomistic orthodoxy (as will be seen). Since Malebranche was a Catholic priest who revered Augustine equally with Descartes, it is perhaps surprising that `natural law’ should make only a belated appearance in his practical philosophy; he loved not Augustine less, however, but Descartes more.
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Riley, P. (2003). Malebranche and Natural Law. In: Hochstrasser, T.J., Schröder, P. (eds) Early Modern Natural Law Theories. Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées / International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 186. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0391-8_3
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