CLAUBERG, Johann. — Calvinist, born in 1622 at Solingen (Westphalia), professor of philosophy at Herborn, later at Duisburg, where he died in 1665. He was the first to propagate Cartesian philosophy in Germany, attempting to reconcile it with the Platonic tradition. On the problem of the origin of ideas, he professed a certain occasionalism: the movements of our body are merely “causes procatarcticae,” which provide the occasion for the mind to produce the ideas it always possesses virtually within itself.
BIBL.: Opera, ed. J. Th. Schalbruch, 2 vols., Amsterdam 1691; Überweg, III, pp. 246-63. Giovanni Muller