Kail on Malebranche and Hume

P. J. E. Kail has a nice article on Malebranche and Hume at the European Journal of Philosophy (which can be accessed for free; hat-tip). I'm not sure it really tells us anything that wasn't already pretty obvious, but it's a great summation of a number of important features of the relation between the two. My only criticism would be that Kail repeatedly talks about something he calls the "Augustinian preoccupation with error and sin" without ever once saying what it is, showing that it is Augustinian, or proving that it does, in fact, have the role in shaping Malebranche's philosophy that he attributes to it. I would argue that (1) what is genuinely Augustinian in Malebranche's philosophy is something else entirely than a 'preoccupation with error and sin'; (2) Kail exaggerates the extent to which the science of the mind is shaped by this preoccupation rather than what Hume somewhere calls the 'Cartesian philosophy of the brain'; and (3) that the strong link between error and sin is not a major shaping factor in Malebranche's philosophy at all, but an incidental result of Malebranche's unusually strong rationalism. But that would be a long argument; the article overall is quite good.