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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.