Malebranche's occasionalism, the tradition Edwards draws on, was refuted by Leibniz: if creatures have no causal power, God performs infinitely many miracles constantly, violating divine simplicity and economy.
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Nicolas Malebranche was a 17th-century French philosopher who developed the idea that God is the only true cause of everything that happens in the world, and that our minds and bodies don't directly interact but are coordinated by God like two synchronized clocks. He's important because his unusual theory tried to solve the puzzle of how a non-physical mind can affect a physical body, and his ideas influenced later European philosophy. His work represents one of the most creative attempts in Western thought to explain the relationship between mind and matter.
divine simplicity(Central to both Malebranche's theodicy and his epistemology)
A divine attribute functioning as a side constraint on God's actions, requiring God to act through simple means.
miracles(Arendt uses 'miracles' not in a supernatural sense but to describe the radical novelty that action can bring into the world)
The introduction of what is totally unexpected through human action
occasionalism(Malebranche's metaphysics)
The doctrine that bodies cannot directly cause modifications in minds (or in each other); instead, a causal relation between body and mind obtains only when God intends the mind to undergo a certain modification on the occasion of a certain bodily change.