ABSTRACT
There is a bewildering diversity among seventeenth century theorists of perception. Some early modern philosophers paid a great deal of attention to the workings of the human perceptual apparatus. Various forms of neo-Platonism and humanism were extremely widespread. However, perhaps because Aristotelians hold that all mental content ultimately originates in perception, they seem to have had particular interest in perception. This chapter focuses on epistemological aspects of Hobbes's theory of perception. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz's metaphysical account of the world that is perceived by human minds is radically different from the roughly mechanist picture shared by Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi, Rene Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, and John Locke. The truth of the appearances influences Gassendi's theory of perception in two quite different ways. First, it motivates distinguishing perception from perceptual judgment and assigning a great deal of what looks like perception to judgment. Second, it requires an account of perceptual representation that has nothing to do with resemblance.
