SOURCE: “Mind Versus Flesh,” in The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655-1715, Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 106-37.
In this excerpt, Lennon considers in depth Gassendi's Objections to René Descartes' Meditations. Focusing on the problem of representation, Lennon defends Gassendi from the charge, put forth by both Descartes and later critics, that he simply did not understand the nature of Descartes' method. Nevertheless, as Lennon argues throughout his book, the materialism that provided the foundation for Gassendi's critiques eventually could not compete with the dominance of Cartesian philosophy.
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