Pierre Gassendi
A priest and scientist, he revives Epicurus's atomism and denies Descartes that everything can be drawn from reason alone.
Life
French priest, astronomer and philosopher (1592-1655), professor at the Collège royal in Paris. He observed Mercury crossing the Sun in 1631 and revived Epicurus's atomism, making it compatible with Christianity. In his objections to Descartes's Meditations he denies that reason alone can ground everything and defends the role of sense experience.
Main works
He contests the cogito and the proofs of God and defends sense experience.
A fuller reply to Descartes, published in Latin.
His posthumous summa of atomist philosophy.
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceA priest, he defends God's existence by the order of the world, against both atheism and Epicurean chance.
Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum (1658)
Against Descartes, every idea comes from the senses; there are no innate ideas.
Gassendi, Objections V to Descartes' Meditations (1641)
He holds that we know appearances and probabilities, not the hidden essences of things.
Gassendi, Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (1624)
He keeps an immaterial, immortal rational soul on religious grounds, even while explaining the rest by atoms.
Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum (1658)
He revives Epicurean ethics, where the good is pleasure rightly understood, within a Christian frame.
Gassendi, De vita et moribus Epicuri (1647)