ABSTRACT
Descartes' radical overthrow of traditional philosophy terminated some of the Neo-Scholastic arguments as well as answering some of the principal challenges thrown out by the Neo-Skeptics, though some were not aware of these endings. The materialist thesis about the nature and composition of mind has its origins in the work of Thomas Hobbes. There has been much scholarly debate on how early in his career Hobbes' philosophical views were formed. Hobbes flirted with the outrageous notion that there is no acceptable evidence that we have an innate idea of God, and, in contrast to Descartes' claim that each one has an idea of his inner self, Hobbes insisted that any such idea must 'arise from sight, if we are thinking of "myself' as my body'. Gassendi is in many respects one of the earliest empiricist philosophers and elaborated a detailed if confusing theory of knowledge based on sensible experience and a posteriori reasoning.
