Islamic Occasionalism

Book excerpt: Originally published in 1958. Occasionalism is generally associated in the history of philosophy with the name of Malébranche . But long before this time, the Muslim Theologians of the ninth and tenth centuries had developed an occasionalist metaphysics of atoms and accidents. Arguing that a number of distinctively Islamic concepts such as fatalism and the surrender of personal endeavour cannot be fully understood except in the perspective of the occasionalist world view of Islam, the volume also discusses the attacks on Occasionalism made by Averroes and St. Thomas Aquinas.