La Forge, Louis de (1632–66)

Louis de la Forge, a medical doctor by profession, was an important champion of Cartesian philosophy in mid-seventeenth century France. Through his work on the first published edition of Descartes’ Traité de l’homme, as well as in his own Traité de l’esprit de l’homme, La Forge sought to complete Descartes’ project of giving a full and detailed account of the human being as a union of two essentially distinct substances: mind and body. His analysis of causation introduced occasionalist elements into his otherwise orthodox Cartesian system, and he is credited with being one of the originators of occasionalism.