Author: Saul Fisher
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004119965
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 465
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Book Description
This study of Gassendi's philosophy and science puts forth the view that his atomism follows from his empiricism: as an outgrowth of our best theory of knowledge and sound scientific method, we get evidence that warrents the micorphysical theory.
Author: Antonia LoLordo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139460854
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 21
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Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive treatment of the philosophical system of the seventeenth-century philosopher Pierre Gassendi. Gassendi's importance is widely recognized and is essential for understanding early modern philosophers and scientists such as Locke, Leibniz and Newton. Offering a systematic overview of his contributions, LoLordo situates Gassendi's views within the context of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century natural philosophy as represented by a variety of intellectual traditions, including scholastic Aristotelianism, Renaissance Neo-Platonism, and the emerging mechanical philosophy. LoLordo's work will be essential reading for historians of early modern philosophy and science.
Author: B. Brundell
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400937938
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) lived in three civilizations in the span of one life-time: medieval ecclesiastic, Renaissance humanist and modern and he never cut himself loose from any of them. It is probably scientific; because he managed to be at home in all three that history has allocated to him a position somewhere on the fringe of the inner circle of genius in the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. While he was not a front-runner, Gassendi was nevertheless a pioneer of modern corpuscularianism and his influence on the development of empirical science was truly international. It is precisely because Gassendi was a figure of the second rank - a significant but lesser luminary - that we need to examine his work closely, for the less famous contemporaries help us to explain what the great ones do. It might seem that Gassendi has received his share of attention from scholars, even though it is sometimes suggested otherwise. Several full length monographs have been published in the past three decades, and there have been a number of articles in scholarly journals. Yet, despite the indisputable worth of these studies, the picture of Gassendi that has emerged from them has been partial and at times wide of the mark, so that the true story remains to be told.
Author: René Descartes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780941736121
Category : First philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Author: Lisa T. Sarasohn
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801429477
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
Sarasohn places Gassendi in his historical and intellectual context, considering him in relation to contemporary philosophers and within the patronage system that conditioned his own freedom. She investigates the links between his ethical thought and philosophy of science and makes sense of his attacks on astrology.
Author: Margaret J. Osler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521524926
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
The difference between Pierre Gassendi's (1592-1655) and René Descartes' (1596-1650) versions of the mechanical philosophy directly reflected the differences in their theological presuppositions. Gassendi described a world utterly contingent on divine will and expressed his conviction that empirical methods are the only way to acquire knowledge about the natural world. Descartes, on the contrary, described a world in which God had embedded necessary relations, some of which enable us to have a priori knowledge of substantial parts of the natural world. In this book, Professor Osler explores theological conceptions of contingency and necessity in the world and how these ideas influenced the development of the mechanical philosophy in the seventeenth century. She examines the transformation of medieval ideas about God's relationship to the Creation into seventeenth-century ideas about matter and method as embodied in early articulations of the mechanical philosophy. Refracted through the prism of the mechanical philosophy, these theological conceptualizations of contingency and necessity in the world were mirrored in different styles of science that emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century.
Author: René Descartes
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 1603840567
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
This edition features reliable, accessible translations; useful editorial materials; and a straightforward presentation of the Objections and Replies, including the objections from Caterus, Arnauld, and Hobbes, accompanied by Descartes' replies, in their entirety. The letter serving as a reply to Gassendi--in which several of Descartes' associates present Gassendi's best arguments and Descartes' replies--conveys the highlights and important issues of their notoriously extended exchange. Roger Ariew's illuminating Introduction discusses the Meditations and the intellectual environment surrounding its reception.
Author: Lynn Sumida Joy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521522397
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
An account of Gassendi's life and work, illuminating the influence of humanism on seventeenth-century thought.
Author: Catherine Wilson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191553522
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
This landmark study examines the role played by the rediscovery of the writings of the ancient atomists, Epicurus and Lucretius, in the articulation of the major philosophical systems of the seventeenth century, and, more broadly, their influence on the evolution of natural science and moral and political philosophy. The target of sustained and trenchant philosophical criticism by Cicero, and of opprobrium by the Christian Fathers of the early Church, for its unflinching commitment to the absence of divine supervision and the finitude of life, the Epicurean philosophy surfaced again in the period of the Scientific Revolution, when it displaced scholastic Aristotelianism. Both modern social contract theory and utilitarianism in ethics were grounded in its tenets. Catherine Wilson shows how the distinctive Epicurean image of the natural and social worlds took hold in philosophy, and how it is an acknowledged, and often unacknowledged presence in the writings of Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, Boyle, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley. With chapters devoted to Epicurean physics and cosmology, the corpuscularian or "mechanical" philosophy, the question of the mortality of the soul, the grounds of political authority, the contested nature of the experimental philosophy, sensuality, curiosity, and the role of pleasure and utility in ethics, the author makes a persuasive case for the significance of materialism in seventeenth-century philosophy without underestimating the depth and significance of the opposition to it, and for its continued importance in the contemporary world. Lucretius's great poem, On the Nature of Things, supplies the frame of reference for this deeply-researched inquiry into the origins of modern philosophy. .
Author: David S. Sytsma
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190274875
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Richard Baxter, one of the 17th century's most famous Puritans, is known as an author of devotional literature. But he was also skilled in medieval philosophy. In this work, David Sytsma draws on largely unexamined works to present a chronogolical and thematic account of Baxter's relation to the people and concepts involved in the rise of mechanical philosophy in late-17th-century England
