Malebranche’s Influence on Leibniz’s Writings on China
Leibniz deserves the honor, frequently bestowed upon him, as the single most important early European interpreter of Chinese philosophy. Yet the story commonly told about this period of philosophical discussion of Chinese philosophy underestimates the importance of Malebranche’s brief encounter with Chinese philosophy and its influence on Leibniz’ interpretation of Chinese thought. In this article, evidence is provided of this influence by first discussing Leibniz’ writings on China prior to his encounter with Malebranche’s Dialogue between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher on the Existence and Nature of God, and then comparing that early work with the Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese, which Leibniz wrote almost immediately after reading Malebranche’s Dialogue.
The birth of enlightenment secularism from the spirit of Confucianism
ABSTRACT The aim of the essay is to demonstrate that the contact of European philosophy with Chinese thought in the second half of the 17th and 18th century influenced the rise and development of secularism, which became a distinctive feature of the Western Enlightenment. The first part examines how knowing the history of China and Confucian ethics has questioned biblical chronology and undermined faith as a necessary condition of morality. These allegations were afterwards countered by reinterpreting Confucianism as crypto-monotheism. I will argue this debate has contributed to the birth of secular philosophy of history, which put an end to the Enlightenment Sinophilism. Throughout those changes in the image of China, nothing but an image was discussed: as it would be presented on a basis of the thought of Wang Fuzhi and other representatives of Chinese kaozheng考證 movement, the encounter with the contemporaries of the Westerners would have opened a real dialogue.
Malebranche’s Ontology
In recent years Malebranche’s philosophical star has begun to rise. From the nadir of being almost completely ignored, he has risen of late to the position of “failure.”1 Most interpreters have rejected Malebranche’s claim to being a philosopher because of one or both of the following “failures”: (1) that he constructed a semi-Cartesian ontology which contradicts his epistemology, and that he hoped to repair the contradiction by a deus ex machina; maneuver; and (2) that whether or not the ontology contradicts the epistemology, both are entirely deductive and therefore epistemologically barren. The ontology could not serve as a theory for the interpretation of experience as we have it. Archetypes would be related to concrete beings only by the mysterious and arbitrary Will of God.