He was appointed professor extraordinary of philosophy at the university in 1665 and remained in Leiden until his untimely death, in 1669. Six years later the complete "Ethics" was published, under the title
Γνωθι σεαυτον, Sive … Ethica (Leiden, 1675). His "Physics," taken from manuscripts used in his classes, appeared in 1688 (
Physica Vera, Leiden); commentaries on René Descartes's
Principles of Philosophy in 1690 and 1691 (
Annotata Praecurrentia, Annotata Majora, Dordrecht); and the very important "Metaphysics," published apparently from a student's copy, in 1691 (
Metaphysica Vera et ad Mentem Peripateticam, Amsterdam).
Occasionalism
Geulincx is best known for his occasionalist theory of causation and his denial of the substantiality of particular created things. Following Descartes's order of procedure in his "Metaphysics," he considered at the outset the possibility and the limits of doubt and found that our first knowledge is of the self as a thinking thing. Consideration of the various states of the self or mind led him to formulate a principle, which he took to be self-evident though obscured by prejudices, that expresses a necessary condition implicit in our conception of an action: that something cannot be done unless there is knowledge of how it is done, or, as specifically related to activities of the self, that a person does not do what he does not know how to do (impossibile est, ut is faciat, qui nescit quomodo fiat; quod nescis quomodo fiat, id non facis).
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