Commentators will include: Professor Nina Zhiri (Department of Literature, UC San Diego), Azfar Moin (S Asia; Religious Studies, UT Austin), and Megan Behrend (a PhD student in English and UM).

Seventeenth and eighteenth-century European engagements with Chinese intellectual schools were largely concerned about the compatibility of Confucianism with Christian beliefs. A particular area of concern was the extent to which the Chinese should be charged with atheism or pantheism. In these controversies, the Dutch philosopher Spinoza was sometimes used as a mouthpiece for the Chinese, as he was the poster boy for both atheism and pantheism, depending on how he was interpreted. Similar to the way Spinoza’s system posed different kinds of threats to different Christian thinkers, different Christian intellectuals found different kinds of enemies in “Chinese thought.” The French Cartesian thinker Nicholas Malebranche was among the intellectuals who speculated on how to interpret Chinese philosophy in his Dialogue between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher on the Existence and Nature of God (1708). In Malebranche’s work, the Chinese are represented by Neo-Confucians, whom he construes in the image of Spinoza. Unlike someone like Leibniz who was still committed to intercultural dialogue, Malebranche’s account of “Chinese philosophy” was particularly unsympathetic and dismissive. This paper traces the Spinozistic elements in Malebranche’s own reading of Chinese philosophy and interpretation of Neo-Confucian conceptual vocabulary. It demarcates the contours of the enemy that Malebranche projected onto Chinese philosophy through an examination of the specific discrepancies between his metaphysical system and that of Spinoza. It demonstrates that in his engagement with the Chinese through Spinoza, a major source of concern for Malebranche was the issue of the source of order within nature.