Online research in philosophy

This is the first book to explore the ethical thought of Pierre Gassendi, the seventeenth-century French priest who rehabilitated Epicurean philosophy in the ...

The Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume 4 covers a period of three hundred and fifty years, from the middle of the fourteenth century to the early years of the eighteenth century and the birth of modern philosophy. The focus of this volume is on Renaissance philosophy and seventeenth-century rationalism, particularly that of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Science was ascendant during the Renaissance and beyond, and the Copernican revolution represented the philosophical climax of the middle ages. This volume is unique in its emphasis on the relationship between science and philosophy. Placing the philosophy of the age into its scientific, social and cultural context, it examines the scholastic thought which Renaissance philosophy both interacted with and reacted against. A grasp of the intellectual context of the rationalists is also critical to an understanding of this philosophical movement, and the writings of Bacon, Gassendi, Hobbes, and others are analyzed here. The Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume 4 provides a broad, scholarly introduction to this period for students of philosophy and related disciplines, as well as some original interpretations of these authors. It will be important reading both for the specialist and the general reader. It includes a glossary of over one hundred technical terms and a chronological table of philosophical, scientific, and other cultural events.

Gassendi holds both that we only have ideas of material things and that we know – by faith and, at least in later works, by reason as well – that the mind is immaterial. I examine the account of the mind provided in Gassendi’s Objections to the Meditations and show how Gassendi’s two theses can be rendered compatible. Indeed, the two theses, taken together, exemplify Gassendi’s account of the scope and limits of human understanding.