CLAUBERG, JOHANN. – Calvinist, born in 1622 at Solingen (Westphalia), professor of philosophy at Herborn, then at Duisburg, where he died in 1665. He was the first to propagate Cartesian philosophy in Germany, and sought to connect it with the Platonic tradition. On the problem of the origin of ideas, he professed a form of occasionalism: the movements of our body are merely «causae procatarcticae», which provide the occasion for the spirit to produce the ideas that it always possesses virtually within itself.
BIBL.: Opera, ed. J. Th. Schalbruch, 2 vols., Amsterdam 1691; Überweg, III, pp. 246–63. Giovanni Muller