One True Cause: Causal Powers, Divine Concurrence, and the Seventeenth-Century Revival of Occasionalism

Occasionalism is the thesis that God alone is the true cause of everything that happens in the world, and created substances are merely "occasional causes." This doctrine was originally developed in medieval Islamic theology, and was widely rejected in the works of Christian authors in medieval Europe. Yet despite its heterodoxy, occasionalism was revived in the 1660s by followers of the philosophy of René Descartes, perhaps the most famous among them the French philosopher Nicolas Malebran...