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Marin Mersenne And Pierre Gassendi As Descartes’ Questioners, Alejandra Velázquez Zaragoza, Leonel Toledo Marín
Marin Mersenne And Pierre Gassendi As Descartes’ Questioners, Alejandra Velázquez Zaragoza, Leonel Toledo Marín
Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events
In the following pages, we will explore the proximity of Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi’s arguments against Descartes’ "Meditations." We will study how, in some of their objections, both Mersenne and Gassendi adopted a nominalist and an empiricist view regarding central topics in Cartesian epistemology, such as the idea of God, and the origin and classification of ideas in the mind. We propose that the assessment of the confrontation between the two objectors and Descartes may provide us a better picture of the complex intellectual debates that took place at the very beginnings of modern philosophy.
Spinoza On Language, Luis Ramos-Alarcón
Spinoza On Language, Luis Ramos-Alarcón
Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events
Some scholars have understood that Spinoza’s extreme rationalism, nominalism, conventionalism, and rejection of a semantic theory of truth make his philosophy incapable to use language for philosophical and scientific purposes; insofar he considered language a source of inadequate knowledge, falsity, and error. Thus Spinoza finds contradiction in his inevitable use of language to express his philosophy. This paper has four aims: first, propose an explanation on why language is inadequate knowledge for Spinoza; second, present differences between inadequacy, falsity, and error in language; third, argue on the Spinozian use of the geometrical method as a solution for the adequate use …