Truth criterium according to Malebranche

Abstract

Along with a theological question, the protestat Reformation brought another one, epistemological: what is the criterion of truth? If truth is subjective, the spirit of a believer is the criterion, and one is free for deprehending whatever he pleases from his reading of the Bible. If it is objective, there must be some criterion of truth. At the beginning, catholics adopted skepticism and denied that truth could ever be known. That is why Father Malebranche attacks skeptics. But he also attacks Aristotelians. The present article shows how he solves the epistemological problem through occasionalism, and trows the foundations for English empiricism. At his attack ons skeptics, Malebranche repeats Contra Academicos and bets on the trueness of soul perceptions. On the other side, he shows that these perceptions cannot ever attain that truth of the things in themselves, and that their only utility is to reveal relations between ideas (which may be empirical). The knowledge would be the perception of such relations, without any Cartesian notion of objective causality. As for matters of faith, since they are not empirical, nor purely abstract, they must be subjected to the authority of tradition, and the most credible authority is the chronologically nearest to Revelation.