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This volume consists of papers originally presented at the international conference "Occasionalism: History and Problems," held in Venice in 2015; it contains twelve chapters, nine of which are in English, three in French. In their introduction, the editors describe occasionalism as a theory that was viewed by Medieval Christian philosophers as a "dangerous and treacherous" threat (7), only later to be "proudly asserted" in the post-Descartes era (9). This raises the question of to what degree this transition should be seen as a result of interpretations of the commitments of Cartesian metaphysics, particularly with regard to questions concerning mind-body interaction. Many scholars have pointed out that to view the acceptance of occasionalism as an ad hoc solution to explain interaction between an immaterial soul and a physically extended body ignores the numerous philosophers who adopted occasionalism to cover other varieties—and in some cases, all varieties—of interaction in a world consisting only of minds and bodies. As the editors observe, "occasionalism now appears less and less a cheap solution to the mind-problem and more and more a family of theories on causality, which share the fundamental claim that God is the only real causal agent" (12).
This said, one cannot...