Hobbes et Gassendi: la psychologie dans le projet mécaniste

AUTOR(ES)
FONTE

Kriterion: Revista de Filosofia

DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2002-12

RESUMO

Hobbes' and Gassendi's friendship and intellectual affinity constitute a tight thread hard to be untied. Beyond clearly defined convergent views such as the common aversion to Cartesian dualism and innatism and clear divergences in their specific philosophical orientations, the meaning of their often similar trajectories must be precisely clarified. The privileged context for a comparison between them is doubtless the construction of a psychology deeply influenced by empirical premises and whose aim is to establish a close relation between the processes of perception, desire (appetitus) and will on the one hand and their mechanical and material causes on the other. One can claim that Gassendi's works written in the beginning of the 1640s introduce a number of new hypothesis on the bases of which emerge a certain convergence with Hobbes' views developed in the same occasion. The texts written during the years 1640-41 where Gassendi inquires on the nature of light are emblematic. A number of aspects of Gassendi's inquiry can be easily confronted with Hobbes' writings: his explanation of the behavior of luminous bodies in terms of systole and diastole; his interpretation of the propagation of light, which is inspired-in a explicit and open polemical fashion against Descartes's thesis in his Dioptics about luminosity as nothing but inclination to movement-by the plain cinematic actuality; his belief in the existence of the void, which is peculiar to Gassendi, making possible the explanation of the phenomena of expansion and contraction of luminous sources (a view which was not at the occasion excluded by Hobbes); and finally, the material and mechanical representation of the phenomena of irradiation.

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