ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Gassendi’s relationship with skepticism in its historical and intellectual context and, at the same time, traces its evolution through Gassendi’s career. On the former side, not only the impact of late Renaissance skeptical thinkers but also the polemical discussion with Descartes and the positive approach to the new science are analyzed in depth. On the latter side, the chapter shows how and why Gassendi evolved from the Pyrrhonism of the Exercitationes to the empiricism of the late Syntagma philosophicum. Taken together, skepticism and empiricism complement and correct each other. This does not mean that Gassendi became a ‘dogmatic’ philosopher, insofar as a certain skepticism remains at the basis of his empiricism. The kind of ‘science’ accessible to human beings is, according to him, still more similar to probability and hypothetical knowledge than to the necessity of apodictic demonstration. In the last phase of Gassendi’s philosophy, the more modest quest of “verisimilitude” replaces the pretense of attaining definitive truth; the reasonable but always revisable certainty that forces itself upon us through signs and inference drives from science both the illusion of metaphysical evidence and the delusion of Pyrrhonian doubt.
