Cognitive science has a pre-history traceable back to ancient Greek philosophical texts ( see Plato's Meno ); and certainly must include writers such as Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Benedict de Spinoza, Nicolas Malebranche, Pierre Cabanis, Leibniz and John Locke.

In 1678 he introduced Nicolaas Hartsoeker to French scientists such as Nicolas Malebranche and Giovanni Cassini.

Bossuet might scribble nova, mira, falsa in the margins of his book and urge on Fénelon to attack them ; Malebranche politely met his threats by saying that to be refuted by such a pen would do him too much honor.

De Mairan was sympathetic to the views of Baruch Spinoza, and felt that he had found similar views in his reading of Malebranche: Malebranche assiduously resisted such an association.

Because Descartes ' was such a difficult theory to defend, some of his disciples, such as Arnold Geulincx and Nicholas Malebranche, proposed a different explanation: That all mind – body interactions required the direct intervention of God.

Berkeley, influenced both by Bayle and directly by Malebranche himself, simply took the final step to a full denial of the existence of material substance.

What is more, with regard to psycho-physical interaction, Malebranche argues that body could not act on mind, nor mind on body.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz ( who met Malebranche in Paris in about 1675 and corresponded with him thereafter ) also rejected the vision in God, and his theory of pre-established harmony was designed as a new alternative to occasionalism as well as to the more traditional theory of efficient causal interaction.

Like Malebranche and others before him, Leibniz recognized the weaknesses of Descartes ' account of causal interaction taking place in a physical location in the brain.

Malebranche defined " truth " as a relation between ideas: since these ideas are in God, they are eternal and immutable, and consequently the only truths worthy of the name will themselves be eternal and immutable.

Malebranche divided these relations between ideas into two categories: relations of magnitude and relations of quality or perfection.

But in contrast to Descartes, who considered it possible to form a clear and distinct idea of the mind, Malebranche argues in the Dialogues on Metaphysics, a dialogue between Theodore and Aristes, that we do not have a complete conception of the powers of the mind, and thus no clear conception of the nature of the mind.

John Locke had also argued for this, but he had made no distinction between minds and bodies on this point, whereas both Berkeley and Malebranche maintained ( each in his own way ) that we could have ideas of bodies but not of minds.

He was one of the first to adopt the philosophy of René Descartes, though with certain orthodox reservations ; and between 1683 and 1685 he had a long battle with Nicolas Malebranche on the relation of theology to metaphysics.

His theory of the connection between the soul and the body is in some respects analogous to that of Malebranche ; but he is not therefore to be regarded as a true forerunner of Occasionalism, as he uses Occasion for the stimulus which directly produces a mental phenomenon, without postulating the intervention of God.

Like René Descartes, Malebranche held that humans attain knowledge through ideas – immaterial representations present to the mind.

In the early 18th century, Nicolas Malebranche wrote " An organized body contains an infinity of parts that mutually depend upon one another in relation to particular ends, all of which must be actually formed in order to work as a whole ," arguing in favor of preformation, rather than epigenesis, of the individual ; and a similar argument about the origins of the individual was made by other 18th century students of natural history.

Charles Bernard Renouvier was the first Frenchman after Nicolas Malebranche to formulate a complete idealistic system, and had a vast influence on the development of French thought.

The phrase was used by Diderot and also by Montesquieu ( and by his teacher, the Oratorian friar Nicolas Malebranche ).

Nicolas Malebranche ; ( 6 August 1638 – 13 October 1715 ) was a French Oratorian and rationalist philosopher.

Nicolas Malebranche was born in Paris in 1638, the youngest child of

Malebranche was ordained a priest in 1664.

Malebranche ’ s biographer, Father Yves André reported that Malebranche was influenced by Descartes ’ book because it allowed him to view the natural world without Aristotelian scholasticism.

With regard to this account of intellectual knowledge, Malebranche was more or less following Saint Augustine.

Malebranche was strongly influenced by Descartes but did not accept his philosophy uncritically.

Newton had already developed his position some thirty years earlier, but Malebranche probably would not have been aware of it until it was finally published in the Opticks of 1704, or, more likely, in its Latin translation of 1706.

( Arthur Collier, who was also influenced directly by Malebranche, and by Norris, made the same move at around the same time as Berkeley did, but, it would appear, entirely independently of him.

It was probably at Bossuet's urging that he now composed his Réfutation du système de Malebranche sur la nature et sur la grâce, a work in which he attacked Nicolas Malebranche's views on optimism, the creation, and the Incarnation.

Nicolas Malebranche argued that abstraction was impossible for women, because of the " delicacy of the brain fibers.

The most that can be said about him is that he was an intelligent student of Descartes and Malebranche, and had the ability to apply the results of his reading to the facts of his experience.

Ethical principles, for Malebranche, are therefore divine in their foundation, universal in their application, and to be discovered by intellectual contemplation, just as geometrical principles are.

In one form or another, the doctrine can be found in the writings of: Johannes Clauberg, Claude Clerselier, Gerauld de Cordemoy, Arnold Geulincx, Louis de La Forge, François Lamy, and ( most notably ), Nicolas Malebranche.

One possible explanation is that of a miracle, proposed by Arnold Geulincx and Nicholas Malebranche, where all mind – body interactions require the direct intervention of God.

According to Malebranche, " an infinite series of plants and animals were contained within the seed or the egg, but only naturalists with sufficient skill and experience could detect their presence.

Major rationalists were Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Nicolas Malebranche.

Nicolas Malebranche, a French 17th and 18th Century philosopher, argued that women's brain fibers were too delicate for abstract thought.

Indirect realism, the view held by John Locke and Nicolas Malebranche, proposes that we can only be aware of mental representations of objects.

Simon had endangered miracles by applying to them lay rules of evidence, but Malebranche abrogated miracles altogether.

Locke does speak of God " annexing " certain ideas to certain motions of bodies ; but nowhere does he propound a theory so definite as that here propounded by Hutcheson, which reminds us at least as much of the speculations of Nicolas Malebranche as of those of Locke.

Humanist Fritscher intended " homomasculinity " as an identity concept and never as an exclusionary concept as promulgated by Jack Malebranche in his latter-day book Androphilia.

The Malebranche threaten Virgil and Dante in the fifth Bolgia, portrayed by Gustave Doré.