Arnold Geulincx

Arnold Geulincx (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈɑrnɔlt ˈxøːlɪŋks]; 31 January 1624 – November 1669), also known by his pseudonym Philaretus, was a Flemish philosopher, metaphysician, and logician.

He lost his post in 1658, possibly for religious reasons, or (as has been suggested) a combination of unpopular views and his marriage in that year.

[6][7] Despite Geulincx's thesis that God cannot act without an instrumentality of variety, he was strongly attacked in the early eighteenth century, for example, by Ruardus Andala and Carolus Tuinman, as a Spinozist.

Geulincx was also attacked by the Pietist Joachim Lange, as part of a campaign against Christian Wolff; and regarded with Pierre Bayle as insidiously anti-Christian by Johann Franz Buddeus.

He believed in a "pre-established harmony" as a solution to the mind–body problem, dying 25 years before Leibniz's better-remembered formulation of the idea.

Hence the universal principle of causality – quod nescis quo modo fiat, non facis – if you do not know how a thing is done, then you do not do it.

[12] Since, then, the movements of my body take place without my knowing how the nervous impulse passes to the muscles and there causes them to contract, I do not cause my own bodily actions.

[14] English editions of Geulincx's works: He is cited by Samuel Beckett, whose character Murphy remembers the "beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx" and in particular the gloomy nostrum (frequently repeated by Beckett to inquisitive critics) Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis (roughly: "Where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing").

In the novel Molloy (1950), Beckett's eponymous character describes himself as "I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck".

A quotation from his Ethics (In hoc mundo me extra me nihil agere posse, roughly "In this world I can do nothing outside myself") is used as the epigraph to, and in a sense the title of, A.G. Mojtabai's novel Mundome (1974).