Abstract
Towards the end of his life Leibniz wrote that “the transition from preestablished harmony to occasional causes doesn’t seem very difficult”. Nevertheless he was at pains to answer suggestions that his pre-established harmony is not essentially different from occasionalism. Two differences he points to are that occasionalism involves miracles, and that — like Cartesian interactionism — it involves physical impossibilities and causal correlations between body and mind. Just as the second difference marks him and Spinoza off from both Malebranche and Descartes, so the first marks him off from both Spinoza and Malebranche.
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Woolhouse, R.S. (1988). Leibniz and Occasionalism. In: Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 43. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2997-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2997-5_8
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