Work · Empiricism, Enlightenment & Liberalism
Disquisitio metaphysica
Gassendi’s Fifth Objections to the Meditations, Descartes’ replies and Gassendi’s rejoinders, point by point: the mind knows itself and God only through ideas drawn from the senses, and existence could be inferred from any action, walking as well as thinking.
Introduction
In 1641 Mersenne sent Gassendi the Meditations, and his Fifth Objections, the longest of the set, were printed with Descartes’ replies in the first edition. Offended by the tone of the replies and by their appearance in print, Gassendi wrote detailed rejoinders (“instantiae”) and in 1644 published the whole exchange in Amsterdam as Disquisitio metaphysica. He goes through the six meditations in order: radical doubt is an artifice that no one can really carry out, the mind’s knowledge of itself is not clearer than its knowledge of bodies, existence could be inferred from any action, the idea of God is built up from experience, and a purely thinking thing could not be joined to an extended body. The book is the fullest empiricist critique of Descartes from his own lifetime.
Connections
Criticizes
- Meditations on First Philosophy1641 · René Descartes
More works by Pierre Gassendi
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