About
The International Society for the Study of Occasionalism is founded in 2012. It is a non-profit organization established to foster academic studies on occasionalism. This society is a common ground for scholars from different traditions to study this theory in terms of both its historical background and theoretical dimensions. Membership is free.
Occasionalism is generally understood as a theory that ascribes all causal power to God on the one hand and treats cause-effect relations in the world as occasions indicating the manner of divine activity on the other. This doctrine was formulated first by the Ash’arite tradition in Islamic kalam, was echoed by scholastics such as Nicolas of Autrecourt in Medieval Europe. The philosophical statement of occasionalism can be traced back to St. Augustine (354–430). Arguably, Augustine presented some ideas that can be regarded as a limited form of occasionalism. He denies causal efficacy to bodies and affirms the causal agency of spirits while he insists on God’s continuous sustenance of the world. However, the first full-fledged and comprehensive formulation of occasionalism appeared among the Muslim scholars in the tenth century, that is, the AshÊ¿arites and Maturidites. It was transmitted to Europe via the works of Averroes (1126–1198) and Maimonides (1135–1204) in the thirteenth century. Occasionalism was discussed and criticized by scholastics such as Aquinas and Suarez. In the seventeeth century it reappeared among the Cartesian philosophers, famously in the works of Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715). Many philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including G. W. Leibniz (1638–1716) and D. Hume (1711–1776), took this theory into serious account, responded to it, and to a certain extent were influenced by it.
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