Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

CHAPTER 7
Seventeenth-century materialism: Gassendi
and Hobbes
T.Sorell
In the English-speaking world Pierre Gassendi is probably best known as the
author of a set of Objections to Descartes’s Meditations. These Objections, the
fifth of seven sets collected by Mersenne, are relatively long and full, and
suggestive of a number of distinctively Gassendist doctrines—for example his
nominalism, his insistence on distinguishing mathematical objects from physical
ones, and his doubt whether we can know the natures of things, even our selves.
Perhaps more prominent than these doctrines, however, is a kind of materialism.
Gassendi adopts the ironic form of address ‘O Mind’ in challenging Descartes’s
claim that one’s nature has nothing to do with body. He insists that all ideas have
their source in the senses, and he sketches an account of perception that
dispenses with a role for a pure intellect but emphasizes the contribution of the
brain. In physics he was partial to explanation in terms of the motions of matter,
ultimately the motions of material atoms. These points suggest that Gassendi was
a mechanistic materialist of some kind, and they link him in intellectual history
with Hobbes, who proposed that physical as well as psychological phenomena
were nothing more than motions in different kinds of body.
The grounds for associating Gassendi and Hobbes are contextual as well as
textual. They both lived in Paris in the 1640s. They were close friends and active
in the circle of scientists, mathematicians and theologians round Mersenne. They
were both at odds, intellectually and personally, with Descartes. They read one
another’s manuscripts, apparently with approval. There are even supposed to be
important similarities of phrasing in their writings about morals and politics.
Gassendi wrote a tribute to Hobbes’s first published work, De Cive,and Hobbes
was reported in a letter as saying that Gassendi’s system was as big as Aristotle’s
but much truer.
Whatever the extent of the mutual admiration and influence, it did not produce
a particularly marked similarity of outlook except in psychology, where each
developed strongly materialistic lines of thought, and even in psychology the
match between their views is not perfect. Unlike Hobbes’s materialism,
Gassendi’s cannot be said to be wholehearted. He held that there was an
incorporeal as well as a corporeal or vegetative part of the soul, and he ascribed
to the incorporeal part cognitive operations that in some respects duplicated, and