Logic and the Movement of Reasoning: Pierre Gassendi on the Three Acts of the Mind

The aim of this paper is to assess the central role the imagination acquires in Pierre Gassendi’s logic. I trace the structuring scheme of the three acts of the mind—common to a good number of late scholastic and early modern logics—to the Thomistic notion of the movement of reasoning in knowledge and argue that Gassendi revisits this notion in his logic. The three acts scheme is from the beginning a bridge between logic and the natural philosophical treatment of the soul. I show how Gassendi’s take on the three acts is similarly poised between his Logic and his Physics and I discuss the rationale, sources and consequences of his attribution of the three acts to the imagination. I argue for the following points: Gassendi’s conception of the logical role of the imagination answers to his empiricist epistemology, his naturalized view of the mind (which involves a defense of thinking in animals) and his notion of a natural logic; it is also operative in his pairing of the formal mechanism of logical operations with a progressive mechanism of the operations of the mind; and it serves as a counterpart to his experimental understanding of the progress of knowledge.1

Chemical Philosophy vs. Rationalistic Mechanicism

This chapter focuses on the mechanical philosophy as it relates to early modern chemistry and chemical philosophy. The chapter begins by addressing the Cartesian rejection of Scholastic substantial forms, since this is one of the aspects of mechanicism that made it attractive to Boyle. After this, the chapter discusses the revival of Epicurean atomism and its reformation by Pierre Gassendi and other early modern atomists. The chapter then addresses the limitations of the Cartesian mechanical philosophy for chemistry and the tensions that existed between mechanicism and experimental natural philosophy, focusing especially on the views of the French Cartesians. Finally, the chapter then discusses Boyle’s own commitment to the mechanistic theory of matter. To this end, the chapter proposes to examine Boyle’s experimental research programme from a Lakatosian perspective, and suggests that the mechanical philosophy functioned both as a negative and as a positive heuristic within that research programme.

La naturaleza de las entidades matemáticas. Gassendi y Mersenne: objetores de Descartes

La naturaleza de las entidades matemáticas ha sido un problema filosófico recurrente en diversas épocas; aquí mostraré que fue una pieza clave en la definición de las posturas ontológicas durante la Modernidad temprana. La piedra de toque para la fundamentación de los conocimientos científicos fue el carácter que se atribuyó a las entidades matemáticas —y, en general, a las entidades abstractas, incluidas las lógicas— en la filosofía natural. Expongo dos posiciones de la Modernidad: la que defendió René Descartes, quien las concibió como entidades perennes, inherentes a la propia constitución y funcionamiento de la mente y la de autores como Pierre Gassendi y Marin Mersenne, quienes defendieron el origen empírico e instrumental de esas entidades.

Hume and the Legacy of Pyrrhonian Scepticism

The last chapter of Part One’s historical quartet traces the development of Pyrrhonism across medieval, Renaissance, and early modern philosophy. Extending the work of Charles B. Schmitt, Richard H. Popkin, Luciano Floridi, et al., the chapter assesses the sceptical thought of Montaigne and devotes subsequent sections to the Pyrrhonian dimensions of work by François de La Mothe le Vayer, Pierre Gassendi, Pierre Bayle, and Pierre-Daniel Huet. Because Hume is typically understood to be anti-Pyrrhonian, Chapter Four develops a three-plank justification for attributing deeply Pyrrhonian dimensions to his work. Plank one is bibliographic and argues that Hume enjoyed access to Pyrrhonian texts and likely used them. Plank two argues for a hermeneutic of suspicion when reading Hume, largely grounded in the hostility he and others faced on account of their supposed scepticism. Plank three is conceptual and argues that Hume’s work exhibits philosophical qualities remarkably similar to those of historical Pyrrhonism. Synthesizing the results of Part One of Hume’s Scepticism, Chapter Four closes with a twelve-point General Framework defining scepticism generally.

Imágenes de imperio, erudición e historia en la nomenclatura lunar del siglo XVIII

Este artículo discute los procesos y criterios mediante los cuales los autores de las nomenclaturas lunares del siglo XVII desarrollaron una variedad de estrategias lingüísticas y retóricas para organizar y representar sus estudios telescópicos de la superficie lunar como espacio cartográfico. A través de una comparación de los sistemas toponímicos propuestos por Pierre Gassendi, Michael van Langren, Johannes Hevelius y Giambattista Riccioli, planteo que las toponimias de la Luna exhiben estrategias de nombramiento asociativas, analógicas, metafóricas y emblemáticas que derivan de erudición académica, prácticas cartográficas y contextos sociales. Estas nomenclaturas sirvieron para proyectar inquietudes políticas, filosóficas y disciplinarias de sus autores.

Gassendi as Critic of Descartes

Pierre Gassendi is best known today as a critic of Descartes. This chapter surveys Gassendi’s Objections to the Meditations, Descartes’s Reply, and Gassendi’s Counter-Objections in the Disquisitio Metaphysica. The central theme of this debate is methodology. Gassendi thinks that the methodology of the Meditations is hopeless: nobody can genuinely clear their mind of preconceived opinions, and if they did, they would not have discovered new foundations for the sciences, but instead be trapped in a state of suspended judgment. Gassendi’s critique is not entirely fair to Descartes, and Descartes’s reply fails to take seriously the main points of the critique.