  Commentators and historians conventionally designate Gassendi as an early modern thinker yet there is good reason to at least consider his work as belonging to the tail end of the preceding period. One facet of his work that closely resembles Renaissance philosophy and science is the historical focus of his method of inquiry. For almost every philosophical issue Gassendi deems worthy of discussion, he first introduces a wide range of previous competing views, beginning with the antique schools, which he considers as ‘live’ options. He engages with Aristotle and early (as well as late) Aristotelianism, and allows great debts to Skeptic, Stoic, and Epicurean thought. The history of philosophy is for him a source of vitally important reasoning, the generally correct way to frame our questions, and more occasionally, the answers to those questions. Thus one principal attraction of atomism for Gassendi is that it suggests a way to think about causation among material objects which he finds an attractive alternative to Aristotelian views on one hand and non-physicalist views on the other. In his theory of knowledge we find one more instance of using ancient frameworks to model contemporary problems: no criterion of truth, for example, is adequate unless it satisfies the standard points made by the classical Skeptics. Some may see this as evidence of Gassendi's modernism, but his broad concerns with Skeptical thought certainly place him among good Renaissance company. (The Skepticist and anti-Aristotelian strains of his Exercitationes are also thought to be influenced by his reading of near-contemporaries, including Juan Luis Vives and Pierre Charron.)