The Intellect in Pierre Gassendi's Materialist Theory

This thesis deals with Pierre Gassendi's philosophy, historically as well as systematically. The main focus will be Gassendi's conception of abstract knowledge and the question if and how the apparent tension between his materialistic, atomistic world-view and his account of the soul as immaterial can be resolved.

Gassendi was a materialist as well as a thoroughgoing empiricist. Not only does all knowledge of material objects depend on sense-impressions, both knowledge of universals and mathematical knowledge is explained as abstracted from sense-impressions. So, according to Gassendi, there are no innate ideas and no abstract objects of any kind that we might gain knowledge of. This philosophical position will be one of the two focuses of this project. In order to explicate his position, Gassendi's theory of ideas will have to be laid out in detail. The questions regarding abstract knowledge are, first, whether Gassendi has any specific idea of how the process of abstraction works. Abstraction seems to do a lot of works in his theory of knowledge and should be explained. Second, whether such an empiricist view of abstract knowledge is convincing.

Gassendis empiricism results in a moderate scepticism; i.e., Gassendi does not claim that knowledge is impossible, but his position involves that there are certain boundaries of our knowledge. A working hypothesis of this thesis is that Gassendi's atomism can be seen as an inference to the best explanation. Because material things must always appear to us in some way and it is therefore impossible for us to know what their essence is, it can not be proven that material things are made up of atoms. However, the things that appear to us and the way they seem to behave can be explained best under the supposition that they are made up of atoms. It follows that Gassendi is not forced to say that there is nothing in the word but atoms (he could not, in fact, accept such a position, because he never doubts that God, who is not made up of atoms, exists). Rather, he assumes that material things are made up of atoms that have certain properties because it enables him to explain the sense-impressions we get.

It seems, too, that to assume this does not contradict the view that the soul is immaterial. Knowledge about the soul lies outside the boundaries set up by the empiricist theory of knowledge.

We can never know what the soul is and how to explain its abilities. So the assumption that the soul is immaterial does not contradict the view that material objects are made up of atoms, neither does it have any explanatory force, however. To motivate this interpretation of Gassendi's philosophical system will be the task of this thesis.