Régis’s scholastic mechanism

Unlike many of Descartes’s other followers, Pierre-Sylvain Régis resists the temptations of occasionalism. By marrying the ontology of mechanism with the causal structure of concurrentism, Régis arrives at a novel view that both acknowledges God’s role in natural events and preserves the causal powers of bodies. I set out Régis’s position, focusing on his arguments against occasionalism and his responses to Malebranche’s ‘no necessary connection’ and divine concursus arguments.