Arnold Geulincx

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Arnold Geulincx (Antwerp, January 31, 1624 – November 1669), was a Flemish philosopher. He studied at the University of Leuven and was made professor of philosophy there in 1646. He was dismissed from his post in 1657 or 1658, possibly for religious reasons, following which Geulincx moved to the University of Leiden and converted to Calvinism. He was appointed reader in logic there in 1662 and extraordinary professor in 1665. He died in 1669, leaving most of his works, all written in Latin, to be published after his death.

Geulincx summarized his philosophy in the phrase, "Ita est, ergo ita sit", ("it exists, therefore it is so"). He believed in a "pre-established harmony" as a solution to the mind-body problem, dying 25 years before Leibniz's better–remembered formulation of the idea. In Leibniz's philosophy, the doctrine of pre-established harmony was linked with optimism, the notion of this world as the "best of all possible worlds". But Geulincx made no such linkage.

He is cited by Samuel Beckett, whose character Murphy remembers the 'beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx', and in particular the gloomy nostrum (frequently repeated by Beckett to inquisitive critics) Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis (roughly, 'Where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing.') Beckett's character Molloy describes himself as "I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck".