Nicolas Malebranche was born on August 6th, 1638. His father, also Nicolas Malebranche, was a secretary to Louis XIII, and his mother, Catherine de Lauzon, is the sister of a Viceroy of Canada. He was tutored at home because of his malformation of spine and weak lungs, and when he was 16, he went to Collège de la Marche to study philosophy. Later he studies theology in Sorbonne, where he started to object Aristotle’s scholasticism. Year 1664, he ordained as a priest and read Treaties on Man, a work of Descartes’s. A decade after that in 1674 — he had been studying Cartesian and that provided him an alternative way of seeing the natural world instead of the scholastic way – he published the first volume of his very first philosophical work the Search After Truth.
As many philosophers, he spent a lot of time and pages in his work responding to people attacking his works, he received attacks from his fellow philosophers (and because of that, 2 of his works were prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church, being a Roman Catholic priest himself), and his first critic appeared quite early. Simon Foucher, also a Catholic priest and philosopher at that time, attacked the first volume of the Search After Truth, for himself being a skeptic and thus not a fan of Cartesian way of exploring the outside world in people’s mind. Nicolas Malebranche published the second volume of the Search After Truth in 1675, responding shortly to Simon Foucher who commented “the great Cartesian prejudice”. And in 1678 when Nicolas Malebranche added Elucidations to the Search After Truth, he replied to Simon Foucher with massive length.
1680, two years after Nicolas Malebranche stopped adding majorly to the Search After Truth, he published Treaties of Nature and Grace, claiming that the laws of God regulating behaviors not only extended to the natural world, but also his gift or grace to human beings. This work was attacked by his fellow Cartesian philosopher Antoine Arnauld, who is also a French Catholic theologian. Antoine Arnauld found Nicolas Malebranche’s claim that human beings’ perceptions finally based on God and thus only indirectly wrong.
1683, Nicolas Malebranche published Christian and Metaphysical Meditations, Antoine Arnauld published On True and False, and their debate went on and on, even did not stop till Antoine Arnauld died, became one of the intellectual events of the 17th century. Finally, the book Treaties on Nature and Grace that initiated so much debate was placed in the index of prohibited books of the Roman Catholic Church in 1690. 1709, the Search After Truth was also listed in the index.
A year before that in 1708, with the support of the apostolic vicar in China, Malebranche published Dialogue Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher with differences of how two parties view the nature of world and God. 1713-1714, he corresponded with de Mairan on Spinozism.
1715, Nicolas Malebranche died in Paris, the city he was born. He published 6 major works in his 77-year life, suffered from spine malformation his lifelong time.