ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Gassendi’s Objections to Descartes’ Meditations—a side project for him, but the work he is best remembered for today. Although Gassendi and Descartes had been on good terms previously, the Objections are unsympathetic. Descartes’ Replies were frankly hostile, and the book-length Counter-Objections Gassendi followed up with continue in the same tone. The central disagreement between Descartes and Gassendi concerns proper philosophical methodology. Gassendi sees Descartes as relying almost entirely on what he calls clear and distinct perception. As Gassendi sees it, this amounts to forming beliefs just by introspecting allegedly innate ideas—without doing any of the work that would be required to establish that those ideas correspond to reality, such as providing arguments or empirical evidence.
