Arnold Geulincx

Arnold Geulincx was a Flemish philosopher, metaphysician and logician of the seventeenth century, born in Antwerp in 1624 and active first at the University of Leuven and then at Leiden, where he lived in poverty before gaining a chair in 1665. He belongs to the generation of thinkers who took up the philosophy of René Descartes and tried to work it out in more detail, and he is best known for an occasionalist ethics in which virtue is the love of God and of reason, built around humility and the knowledge and forsaking of self. He stated his view in the phrase ita est, ergo ita sit, and he reached a form of pre-established harmony as a solution to the mind and body problem some twenty five years before Leibniz. His Latin works appeared after his death in 1669, and later critics attacked him as a Spinozist, while Samuel Beckett took up his emphasis on human powerlessness.