Pierre Gassendi: Humanism, Science, and the Birth of Modern Philosophy 9781138697454, 9781032480435, 9781315521732

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Pierre Gassendi

Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) was a major figure in seventeenth-century philosophy and science and his works contributed to shaping Western intellectual identity. Among “new philosophers,” he was considered Descartes’ main rival, and he belonged to the first rank of those attempting to carve out an alternative to Aristotelian philosophy. In his writings, he promoted a revival of atomism and Epicureanism within a Christian framework, and advocated an empiricist and probabilistic epistemology which was to have a major impact on later thinkers such as Locke and Newton. He is moreover important for his astronomical work, his defense of Galileo’s mechanics and cosmology, and activity as a biographer. Given the importance of Gassendi for the history of science and philosophy, it is surprising to see that he has been largely ignored in the Anglophone world. This collection of essays constitutes the first book on Gassendi in the English language that covers his biography, bibliography, and all aspects of his work. The book is divided into three parts. Part I offers a reconstruction of the genesis of Gassendi’s Epicurean project, an overview of his biography, and analyses of Gassendi’s early attacks on Aristotle, his advocacy of Epicurean philosophy, and his relation to the skeptical tradition and Cicero’s thought. Part II addresses Gassendi as a participant in seventeenth-century philosophical and scientific debates, focusing especially on his controversies with Descartes and Fludd. Part III explores Gassendi’s contributions to logic, theories of space and time, mechanics, astronomy, cosmology, and the study of living beings, and presents the reception of Gassendi’s thought in England. This book is an essential resource for scholars and upper-level students of early modern philosophy, intellectual history, and the history of science who want to get acquainted with Pierre Gassendi as a major philosopher and intellectual figure of the early modern period. Delphine Bellis is Assistant Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at Paul Valéry University, Montpellier, France. She edited, together with Frederik A. Bakker and Carla Rita Palmerino, Space, Imagination and the Cosmos from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (2018). Daniel Garber is the A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University (USA), with additional appointments in History of Science and Politics. Garber is the author of Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (1992) and Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad (2009), as well as numerous articles. Carla Rita Palmerino is Professor in the Director of the Center for the History of University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. In piece of Gassendi’s manuscript De vita et British Museum.

History of Modern Philosophy, and Philosophy and Science, at Radboud 1998, she discovered the last missing doctrina Epicuri in the library of the

Routledge Studies in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy

18 Experiment, Speculation and Religion in Early Modern Philosophy Edited by Alberto Vanzo and Peter R. Anstey 19 Mind, Body, and Morality New Perspectives on Descartes and Spinoza Edited by Martina Reuter and Frans Svensson 20 Locke’s Ideas of Mind and Body Han-Kyul Kim 21 Causation and Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy Edited by Dominik Perler and Sebastian Bender 22 Leibniz’s Legacy and Impact Edited by Julia Weckend and Lloyd Strickland 23 Freedom, Action, and Motivation in Spinoza’s Ethics Edited by Noa Naaman-Zauderer 24 The Cartesian Semantics of the Port Royal Logic John N. Martin 25 Locke’s Twilight of Probability An Epistemology of Rational Assent Mark Boespflug 26 Pierre Gassendi Humanism, Science, and the Birth of Modern Philosophy Edited by Delphine Bellis, Daniel Garber, and Carla Rita Palmerino For more information about this series, please visit: https://www. routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Seventeenth-Century-Philosophy/ book-series/SE0420

Pierre Gassendi Humanism, Science, and the Birth of Modern Philosophy Edited by Delphine Bellis, Daniel Garber, and Carla Rita Palmerino

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Taylor & Francis The right of Delphine Bellis, Daniel Garber, and Carla Rita Palmerino to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-138-69745-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-48043-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-52173-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781315521732 Typeset in Sabon by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

Contents

Notes on Contributors vii Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations x

Introduction 1 DELPHINE BELLIS AND CARLA RITA PALMERINO

PART I

Gassendi’s Epicurean Project, Its Genesis, and Its Sources

19

1 The Life and Work of Pierre Gassendi

21

SYLVIE TAUSSIG

2 Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos: An Intellectual Biography

41

DANIEL GARBER

3 Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism 75 GIANNI PAGANINI

4 Gassendi and Epicureanism

106

SAUL FISHER

5 Tranquility as the Highest Good: Gassendi between Epicurus and Cicero DONALD RUTHERFORD

144

PART II

Gassendi the Polemist

167

6 Gassendi in the Philosophical Debate: Stakes of the Essay Concerning the Principles of Robert Fludd’s Philosophy (1630)

169

ÉDOUARD MEHL

7 Gassendi’s Critique of Descartes

193

ANTONIA LOLORDO

PART III

Gassendi’s Science and Philosophy in Context

213

8 Gassendi’s Logic

215

RODOLFO GARAU

9 Gassendi’s Theory of Space and Time

241

DELPHINE BELLIS

10 Pierre Gassendi and the New Science of Motion

266

CARLA RITA PALMERINO

11 Astronomy, Cosmology, and the Limit of Empiricism in Gassendi’s Thought

292

KUNI SAKAMOTO

12 Gassendi’s Theory of Living Beings

312

FRANÇOIS DUCHESNEAU

13 “The Best Philosopher in France”: The Reception of Gassendi’s Natural Philosophy in England

334

ANTONIO CLERICUZIO

Bibliography 377 Index 406

Contributors

Antonio Clericuzio is Professor of History of Science at Roma Tre University, Italy. He has published extensively on Boyle and early modern chemistry, medicine, and matter theory. He is the author of Elements, Principles and Atoms. A Study of Chemistry and Corpuscular Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century (2001). François Duchesneau is Emeritus Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at Université de Montréal, Canada. He recently published Organisme et corps organique de Leibniz à Kant (2018). Saul Fisher is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Provost at Mercy College, New York, USA. He is the author of Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy and Science (2005) and “Pierre Gassendi,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008). Rodolfo Garau is researcher at the University of Hamburg, Germany. With Pietro Omodeo, he edited Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science (2019). More recently, Garau edited, with Doina Rusu, the special issue of Early Science and Medicine “Action at a Distance in Pre-Newtonian Natural Philosophy” 27/5 (2022). Antonia LoLordo is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, USA. Her publications include Mary Shepherd’s Essays on the Percep­ tion of an External Universe (Oxford, 2020), Locke’s Moral Man (2012), and Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (2007), plus papers on a variety of topics. Édouard Mehl is Professor in History of Early Modern Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, France, and a Fellow at USIAS (University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Studies). He is the author of several books on Descartes and the rise of Copernican revolution (recently: Descartes et la fabrique du monde, 2019).

viii Contributors Gianni Paganini is Professor Emeritus of History of Philosophy at Piedmont University, Vercelli, Italy, and Fellow of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome. He published Skepsis. Le Débat des modernes sur le scepticisme (2008), which was awarded the Prix La Bruyère by the Académie Française. Donald Rutherford is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, USA. He is the author of Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature (1995), and many other publications on the history of early modern philosophy and the reception of ancient philosophy in the period. Kuni Sakamoto (PhD 2012) is Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Letters, Meiji University, Japan. The main focus of his research is on early modern Aristotelianism and Cartesianism. His works include Julius Caesar Scaliger, Renaissance Reformer of Aristotelianism: A Study of His Exotericae Exercitationes (2016). Sylvie Taussig is Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France. She is the author of Pierre Gassendi (1592– 1655): Introduction à la vie savante (2003) and the French translator of several of Gassendi’s works and his Latin Letters.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the financial support we received for the preparation of this book from the correction subsidy fund of the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies at Radboud University; the Center for the History of Philosophy and Science; and the GASSENDI project funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (PI Delphine Bellis, project number ANR-19-CE27-0004). We would also like to express our gratitude to Manon Lambooij for preparing the index of names, to Omar Hraoui for his precious help with the bibliography, and Brian Clarke for the care and proficiency with which he conducted the copy-editing of the volume. The idea for this book was first suggested to us by Mihnea Dobre (University of Bucharest). We would like to thank him for having prompted us to realize this project and hope that the result will meet his expectations.

Abbreviations

AT CM CSM CSMK

OO TL

Œuvres de Descartes, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 11 vols. 2nd ed. Paris: Vrin, 1996. Correspondance du Père Marin Mersenne, 18 vols. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1932–1988. Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings, 2 vols. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1985. Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings: The Correspon­ dence. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Petri Gassendi Opera omnia in sex tomos divisa. Lugduni: Sumptibus Laurentii Anisson, & Ioan. Bapt. Devenet, 1658. Peiresc, Claude Nicolas Fabri de. Lettres de Peiresc publiées par Philippe Tamizey de Larroque, vol. IV. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1893.

Introduction Delphine Bellis and Carla Rita Palmerino

For his contemporaries, Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) was a major figure. “New philosophers” in the seventeenth century considered him to be Descartes’ main rival, and among the first rank of those attempting to carve out an alternative to the Aristotelian philosophy of the schools.1 Gassendi was a central member of the famous Mersenne Circle in Paris in the 1630s and 40s, the group that was to lead to the foundation of the Académie Royale des Sciences in the 1660s. He was also associated with late humanist figures such as Peiresc,2 with scientific figures such as Galileo, and with the intellectual movement in France that has come to be known as the “Erudite Libertines,” including figures like La Mothe Le Vayer and Naudé.3 In his extensive writings, he promoted a revival of atomism and Epicureanism within a Christian framework, and advocated an empiricist and probabiblist epistemology which was to have a major impact on later thinkers such as Locke and Newton. In addition, he was also important for his astronomical work,4 and for his biographies of Epicurus,5 Peiresc,6 Tycho, Copernicus, Peuerbach, and Regiomontanus.7 Gassendi’s works were widely read in England, where some were reprinted or translated. Despite his central role in the philosophical and scientific life of the early modern period, the fate of Gassendi’s works and influence progressively diverged from those of Descartes: while the latter, for many, became the father of modern philosophy, Gassendi was eventually eclipsed by his rival.8 This decline has been reflected in scholarship: Gassendi has remained, in the history of philosophy and science, an understudied author, overshadowed as he was by the canonical figures of Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Spinoza, or Newton, to name but a few. Nowa­ days, Gassendi’s name is most often associated with his objections—the fifth set—to Descartes’ Meditations and is thus used indirectly as a way of sanctioning the latter’s victory in the history of philosophy. In our view, the fact that Gassendi was excluded from the gallery of the most important early modern thinkers tells us more about the contemporary criteria upon which membership of our intellectual pantheon is DOI: 10.4324/9781315521732-1

2  Delphine Bellis and Carla Rita Palmerino based, than about Gassendi’s own intellectual importance.9 Indeed, if Gassendi is nowadays often viewed as a second-rate author, this is mainly due to the fact that his philosophical style was that of an antiquarian. He aimed at reviving Epicurean philosophy, but also considered that it was not possible to develop personal arguments without first reviewing all the main positions on the topic with which he was dealing. This included all Ancient classical sources—Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Skeptics, etc.— and many lesser known sources which do not always evoke much for twenty-first century readers. Gassendi’s writings are therefore heavily weighted with humanist erudition, and occupy long pages and thick volumes, to the point that an exhaustive reading of them proves quite challenging. Another hurdle to the recognition of Gassendi’s importance in contemporary histories of philosophy and science is a more philological one: Gassendi’s Latin is quite different from that of, for example, Descartes or Leibniz. Gassendi tended to develop his arguments in terse Latin through long sentences based on an often complex set of subordinate clauses—an opaque style that requires specific philological Latin skills from the contemporary reader. To further complicate matters, there is the fact that no modern critical edition of Gassendi’s works is available to scholars. For twenty-first century readers, the latter problem is compounded by the fact that the Syntagma philosophicum (posthumously published in the 1658 Opera omnia), Gassendi’s main work, has never been entirely translated into any modern language. Only some selected excerpts of Gassendi’s works have been translated, either into English, French, or German.10 Admittedly, François Bernier’s Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi, which underwent four editions (1678, 1681, 1684, 1699), helped propagate Gassendi’s thought in French and in a more synthetic version than the two thick volumes included in the Opera omnia. Walter Charleton’s Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana (1654), based on Gassendi’s Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenes Laertii (1649), also played an important role in disseminating Gassendi’s thought through vernacular language. The English translation of Gassendi’s Life of Peiresc (1657) played a crucial role in defining the scientist’s ethos and method within the Royal Society.11 Be that as it may, Bernier published only an abridged version of his master’s opus magnum, while Charleton’s Physiologia should be seen more as an eclectic work than an English compendium of Gassendi’s Animadversiones. One more obstacle that must be negotiated by those who seek to fully understand the genesis and evolution of Gassendi’s philosophy is the fact that some of the aspects of these developments can be found and studied only in unpublished manuscripts. Indeed, Gassendi’s philosophical project underwent several changes throughout his career.12 He started working on Epicurus at least as early as 1626.13 His project was first conceived as an apologia of the Ancient Greek philosopher, but then extended to a

Introduction  3 more encompassing presentation, rehabilitation, and discussion of the life and doctrine of Epicurus under the title De vita et doctrina Epicuri. From 1629 to 1645, Gassendi worked on this project, reshaped it, and eventually wrote more than 20 books toward this work, all of which have remained in manuscript form and are kept in various libraries across Europe (Tours, Carpentras, Florence, London). On the basis of the available manuscripts, René Pintard has managed to reconstitute the structure of the De vita et doctrina Epicuri, the chronology of its composition, and how the various parts were reused (or not) in later works (especially in the Animadversiones and the Syntagma philosophicum): after the first seven books on Epicurus’ biography and mores, Book VIII on Epicurean philosophy in general preceded Books IX to XI on logic, and Books XII to XXV (followed by an unnumbered book) on physics. The work was supposed to end with a section on ethics.14 Book VIII (De philosophia Epicuri universe) was the last missing part of the manuscript to be discovered, coming to light in 1998 in the library of the British Museum.15 Sylvie Taussig has provided an edition and French translation of Books IX to XI of De vita et doctrina Epicuri, but those are the only ones that have thus far been edited.16 In 1647, Gassendi published De vita et moribus Epicuri, the biographical part of his project (corresponding to the first books of De vita et doctrina Epicuri). In 1649, another part of Gassendi’s Epicurean project appeared in print: his Latin translation of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers Book X on Epicurus, with philological and philosophical comments deriving from his work on Epicurean philosophy. This publication also contained as an appendix a summary of Epicurean philosophy (Philosophiae Epicuri syntagma, not to be confused with Gassendi’s posthumous Syntagma philosophicum). The successive dismantling of his initial Epicurean project—and his repurposing of its various components—obliged Gassendi to constantly rearrange the material he had accumulated over many years. This makes the task even more complex for contemporary scholars who would like to follow Gassendi’s intellectual evolution through the different layers of publications as well as manuscripts that are not easily accessible. Regarding Gassendi’s correspondence, no complete edition is available, but scholars can rely on several partial editions, like the Latin letters included in volume 6 of the Opera omnia, and his correspondence with François Luillier in 1632–1633.17 Also helpful are the available editions of his correspondents’ letters, like those of Mersenne, Peiresc, Gui Patin, or Schickard. However, even the edition of Peiresc’s correspondence includes many, but not all the surviving letters that he exchanged with Gassendi.18 Despite recent research and editorial projects related to Gassendi, one can therefore still subscribe to the appraisal of Sylvia Murr who in 1997 evoked the image of an “immense building site” of Gassendian studies.19

4  Delphine Bellis and Carla Rita Palmerino However, the difficulties we have outlined here did not prevent Gassendi’s thought from arousing some interest in twentieth- and twentyfirst-century scholarship. But the dearth of editions of Gassendi’s texts— and of translations of these texts into modern languages—has led to a somewhat paradoxical and unfortunate situation in the secondary literature: while Gassendi is nowadays little read due to the lack of available translations, his thought has nevertheless given rise to extremely diverging interpretations. Such interpretative divergences are not trivial because they touch on philosophical issues that are crucial to understanding Gassendi’s pivotal role in the early modern period. Pintard, for instance, saw Gassendi as a “libertin érudit”—as distinct from the libertines of mores—who covertly espoused materialism, was on the verge of philosophical heterodoxy, and whose authentic doctrine would be the sort of radical skepticism presented in the Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (1624) and not the more moderate positions to be found in the later Syntagma philosophicum. Among other things, Pintard put the emphasis on Gassendi’s early arguments in favor of a material human soul.20 The more balanced arguments of the Syntagma philosophicum would amount to nothing else but a “renunciation of his ideas” and a “pact of treason,” prompted by a timorous aging character and, as a result, a form of prudent hypocrisy; hence Pintard’s assertion that Gassendi, in fact, had “two philosophies.”21 Without endorsing Pintard’s assumption of Gassendi’s late duplicity, several scholars, like Henri Berr, Richard Popkin, or Tullio Gregory, also placed specific emphasis on Gassendi’s early skepticism, sometimes at the cost of an accurate analysis of the consistency and progressive evolutions of his thought.22 At the other end of the interpretative spectrum, Margaret Osler pictured Gassendi as a philosopher who, right from the start of his intellectual career, placed a great emphasis on the role of God in Creation, and who developed a voluntarist theology which was to pervade all aspects of his philosophy.23 However, if Osler correctly unveiled the flaws in Pintard’s interpretation, it remains difficult to entirely agree with the much theologized portrait of Gassendi that she has painted.24 In particular, it is difficult to retrace the supposedly structuring role of Gassendi’s voluntarist theology for his natural philosophy on the basis of explicit textual evidence of such a role throughout his works.25 Despite being, to some extent, close to Pintard’s interpretation, one of the most convincing and encompassing analyses of Gassendi’s philosophy as a whole remains that put forward by Olivier Bloch.26 Bloch left almost no stone unturned in order to offer an interpretation of Gassendi’s natural philosophy and metaphysics from the early works to more mature developments, including intermediate positions as can be understood from some of those works only available in manuscript. Bloch also evaluated the impact on his natural philosophy of Gassendi’s reading of numerous sources, like Galileo’s mechanics or seventeenth-century chymistry. According to Bloch,

Introduction  5 Gassendi’s philosophical and scientific materialism coexisted with a metaphysics based on faith and which aimed, in part, at overcoming a theory of the double truth leaning toward skeptical fideism.27 Contrary to Pintard, Bloch saw no duplicity nor treason in Gassendi’s final positions, but a sincere attempt—albeit a rather unsuccessful one—to overcome, through various philosophical adjustments, an initial tension due to the juxtaposition of his materialist natural philosophy and his more orthodox metaphysics.28 While Bloch did not want to limit his analysis of Gassendi’s thought to epistemology29 and while he focused much on the interplay between Gassendi’s natural philosophy and metaphysics, other scholars paid particular attention to the role played by Gassendi’s work as a historian of philosophy for the elaboration of his own philosophy. This is especially the case with the studies by Bernard Rochot and by Lynn Sumida Joy which contributed to show—using Gassendi’s case as an example—that in the seventeenth century, antiquarianism and innovation were not antithetical.30 More recently, Antonia LoLordo offered a rather comprehensive study of the main topics of Gassendi’s epistemology and principles of physics, mostly focused on the Syntagma philosophicum.31 Gassendi’s ethics has been studied by Lisa Sarasohn.32 Gassendi’s thought has also sparked renewed interest among philosophers of science who adopted a systematic approach and tried to make explicit Gassendi’s scientific methodology, as well as its possible shortcomings. While Wolfgang Detel contrasted Gassendi’s methodology— based on the critical control by the intellect of sense perceptions—with Epicurus’ more fundamental empiricism,33 Saul Fisher examined the internal coherence of Gassendi’s argumentation on empiricism, atomism, and the theory of motion.34 He identified a circular dimension in Gassendi’s philosophy, insofar as his theory of perception based on atomism was supposed to justify his empiricism, while his empiricism aimed at giving arguments in favor of atomism. From the foregoing examples, it is clear that Gassendi’s importance as an empiricist philosopher has started to receive some attention in scholarship. This has important consequences for it helps counterbalance some of the oppositions built by historians of philosophy and which have tended to ossify, for example that between Continental rationalism on the one hand, and British empiricism on the other. But what if Gassendi was one of the major sources of seventeenth-century empiricism, including British empiricism?35 Shouldn’t a careful study of Gassendi’s thought and its influence lead us to a renewal of our picture of the early modern philosophical landscape? Taking more seriously into account the judgment of Gassendi’s contemporaries over what may be determined by hasty anachronistic evaluations, we consider that it is crucial to analyze Gassendi’s thought in the various connected fields upon which it touched (logic, physics, ethics)

6  Delphine Bellis and Carla Rita Palmerino and under the diverse forms in which it appeared (correspondence, polemical works, biographies and philological works, etc.), while always resituating it in its specific intellectual context.36 This volume is intended to be a contribution to such a reevaluation of the importance of Gassendi’s thought, by offering to an Anglophone readership the first collection of papers covering all the most important aspects of Gassendi’s intellectual activities. The contributions to this volume are organized into three parts which are devoted, respectively, to the genesis and sources of Gassendi’s Epicurean project, to Gassendi as a polemist, and to specific aspects of his science and philosophy. Taussig’s chapter, which opens part I, provides not only an account of Gassendi’s life and works, but also a reflection on the very concept of philosophical biography. In Taussig’s view, Gassendi’s own activity as a biographer shows that he had a “non-ontological vision” of a philosopher’s life, which he interpreted as a mission rather than as a state. As for Gassendi’s own life, Taussig argues that the post-mortem reconstruction offered by his biographers—Sorbière, Bougerel, Taxil—who depicted him as the epitome of the Christian philosopher, probably so as to defend him from the charge of libertinage, does not do justice to Gassendi the intellectual, but has the merit of yielding a “narrative and substantive unity.”37 In his contribution, Garber also sketches an intellectual biography, not of Gassendi himself however, but of the never accomplished Exercitationum paradoxicarum adversus Aristoteleos libri septem. By reconstructing the life of the book, originally projected to have comprised seven volumes, of which however only two were ever published—the first in 1624, and the second in the posthumous Opera omnia—Garber sheds light on Gassendi’s intellectual milieu, on the sources of his anti-Aristotelian project, and on the possible reasons why the Exercitationes were left unfinished. Garber documents that in 1630 the project was still “very much alive” and had evolved to include a defense of Epicurus. In subsequent years, however, Gassendi “abandoned the Exercitationes as a serious statement of his views.” Toward the end of his life, this did not prevent him from approving the publication in the Opera omnia of Books I and II, which had by then “attained the status of a kind of historical document.”38 Garber also touches upon a question that forms the core of Paganini’s chapter, namely the interplay in Gassendi’s thought between skepticism and empiricism. Paganini shows how Gassendi’s “eclectic skepticism,” which combined Academic and Pyrrhonistic elements with the influence of Renaissance anti-scholastic authors, informed his views on the limitations and possibilities of human knowledge. The chapter follows the development of Gassendi’s theory of knowledge throughout his oeuvre. It starts with the Exercitationes, where skeptical phenomenalism, probabilism, and empiricism are strongly connected, and the field of knowledge is reduced to the objects of direct experience. Paganini then documents

Introduction  7 how Gassendi’s own engagement with scientific activity as well as his epistolary contact with Galileo and other scientists, led him to embrace the ideal of the “craftsman’s science,” according to which artificial objects are more accessible than natural objects. He subsequently analyzes the role of skepticism in Gassendi’s polemics with Descartes and finally dwells on the Syntagma, where Gassendi tries to find a middle way between skepticism and dogmatism by developing a theory of “signs” that combines empirical observation and rational inference, thereby making it possible to formulate hypotheses concerning the causes of the phenomena and the hidden structure of physical bodies. As mentioned above, one of the most debated issues in the scholarship concerns the sincerity of Gassendi’s attempt to “baptize” Epicurean philosophy. This question plays a central role in Fisher’s chapter, which tries to ascertain “whether, and how, Gassendi is true to core Epicurean thinking, and what he preserves and promotes as valuable to the philosophical and natural investigations of his time.”39 In order to answer this question, Fisher offers a thorough comparison of the central tenets of classical Epicureanism with Gassendi’s own brand of Epicureanism, drawing the conclusion that although Gassendi departs in many ways from Epicurus’ original worldview he remains faithful to the goal of attaining tranquility (ataraxia) through philosophy. Fisher does not doubt the sincerity of Gassendi’s baptismal strategy and shows that his amendments to Epicurus’ natural philosophical, political, and ethical views were mostly theologically motivated. But if it is true, as Fisher suggests, that “a mélange of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and other ancient sources” contributed to Gassendi’s worldview, does it make sense to consider him an Epicurean at all? This question, which Fisher addresses in the concluding pages of his chapter, forms the core of Rutherford’s contribution, which is specifically devoted to Gassendi’s ethics and to his ideal of tranquility as the highest good. Like Fisher, Rutherford stresses that, with respect to this important topic, Gassendi “finds important common ground with Epicurus,” and yet, as there is disagreement on other key issues, “this agreement does not justify describing him as an Epicurean.” Through a thorough analysis of Gassendi’s idea of philosophy, and of its dual ends— wisdom and happiness—Rutherford reaches the conclusion that Gassendi has formulated an eclectic system which is “uniquely his own” and which displays the strong influence of Cicero. Gassendi draws not only on Cicero’s account and interpretation of ancient theories but also on his skeptical method, which he uses to evaluate the pro and contra of Epicurus’ hedonism. Part II includes two chapters devoted to Gassendi the polemist. In the first, Édouard Mehl examines the Gassendi–Fludd controversy, with the double aim of shedding light on the birth and functioning of a broad scientific network in early modern Europe and on the role of criticism in Gassendi’s philosophical work. Mehl reconstructs the political and

8  Delphine Bellis and Carla Rita Palmerino scientific background of the controversy, which originated in the 1620s with criticisms by Kepler and Mersenne of Fludd’s hermetical and theosophical theories. It was upon Mersenne’s invitation that Gassendi reacted to Fludd’s works in the Epistolica exercitatio, published in 1630. Mehl analyzes the work against the background of early modern astronomical, theological, and metaphysical debates and also tries to assess whether Gassendi’s instrumentalist view of astronomical hypotheses, which is a far cry from “the realism that forms the backbone of Kepler’s science,” was “dictated by political precaution, or whether it was based on the principles of his phenomenal epistemology.”40 As mentioned above, Gassendi is today mostly remembered for his criticism of Descartes’ Meditations. This criticism is the object of LoLordo’s chapter. As she recalls, when Gassendi wrote the fifth set of objections to the Meditations, he and Descartes were on good terms. The tone of the objections was harsh, however, no less so than that of Descartes’ replies; these Gassendi found so dismissive that he decided to answer in turn with a whole book, the Disquisitio metaphysica, written in 1641 and published in 1644. LoLordo offers an insightful analysis of Gassendi’s criticism, which touches upon all central aspects of the Meditations. Gassendi objects to the Cartesian truth rule and to the very possibility of identifying clear and distinct perceptions: he takes issue with Descartes’ use of skepticism; with the role he assigns to intuition; the distinction he establishes between intellect and imagination; his double commitment to eternal truths and to true and immutable natures; and with his proofs of God’s existence and of the real distinction between body and mind. In her analysis, LoLordo places particular emphasis on the issue of methodology. She shows that the two authors “conceive of the order of knowledge in opposing ways”: according to Gassendi, knowledge of existence must precede knowledge of essences, and hence Descartes’ methodology cannot show the essence of any actual thing, be it the intellect, a material body, or God.41 LoLordo mentions the overview of the history of logic found in the Syntagma, where Gassendi refers to the Meditations as a logical work, and to the truth rule as Descartes’ main principle of logic. The reason behind this characterization becomes clear in Garau’s chapter, which opens the third and last part of this volume. Garau endorses Fred Michael’s view that Gassendi inaugurated a new way of understanding logic as the study of “the nature, origin, and formation of ideas in the mind.”42 While Gassendi located this origin in the senses, Arnauld and Nicole, in their Logique (1662), remained faithful to Descartes in locating the origin of ideas—as well as the criterion of truth—in the mind. Garau follows the evolution of Gassendi’s logic throughout his entire oeuvre. He starts with a criticism of Aristotelian dialectics in the Exercitationes; continues with an analysis of Books IX–XI of De vita et doctrina Epicuri (ca. 1636), where Gassendi discusses Epicurus’ rejection

Introduction  9 of traditional logic and his criteria of truth; he then turns his attention to the Syntagma philosophicum, where Gassendi offers a critical overview of the history of logic, before presenting his own theory in the Institutio logica. In the conclusion of his chapter, Garau dwells on the reception of Gassendi’s logic, stressing its influence on British empiricism. Equally influential in Britain was Gassendi’s theory of space and time, which forms the object of the chapter by Delphine Bellis. Bellis’ chapter, like that of Palmerino which follows it, opens with a reference to Koyré’s ambivalent judgment on the merits of Gassendi’s science. Koyré, on the one hand, praised Gassendi for his formulation of the principle of inertia, for his deep understanding of Galileo’s science, and for having provided the new science with an ontological foundation. On the other hand, however, he criticized Gassendi for having remained extraneous to “the spirit of mathematization” and for his failure to harmonize the physical theories he borrowed from different sources. The result was a physics made “of bits and pieces.”43 Bellis’ chapter deals with Gassendi’s theory of space and time, which forms the ontology of the new science. Gassendi was progressively led to conceive space and time through a parallelism, as neither substance nor accident, but as physical entities whose existence was independent of bodies and motions, as well as of our mind, thus anticipating Newton’s theory of absolute space and time. Bellis shows that Gassendi’s theory of space and time was both the product of his humanist—at times ­critical— reading of ancient and more recent sources (Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, the Scholastics) and of his reflections on scientific matters. Gassendi’s theory of space was soon related to his research in cosmology and chemistry, and to experiments allowing the creation of void by artificial means. His theory of time evolved from an Epicurean one—as an accident of accident—to an absolutist one, as a sequel to Gassendi’s reflections on the Galilean law of free fall. The parallelism between space and time applied to the relation of both entities with God. Gassendi tried to link the immensity of extramundane void space with the immensity of God, while God’s eternity implied that God existed in any time. But the uncreated and independent dimension of space and time vis-à-vis God raised more problems for Gassendi’s followers than his theory could solve. Palmerino’s chapter offers a reconstruction of Gassendi’s engagement with Galileo’s mechanics and cosmology, starting with the De motu impresso a motore translato epistolae duae (1642), passing through Gassendi’s polemics with Cazre and Morin, which resulted in the third Epistola de motu (first published in 1649) and in the Epistolae de proportione qua gravia decidentia accelerantur (1646), and ending with the Syntagma. Palmerino focuses on three themes: namely, Gassendi’s account of free fall and projectile motion, his alleged formulation of the principle of inertia, and his reinterpretation of Galileo’s theory of tides. Her analysis

10  Delphine Bellis and Carla Rita Palmerino confirms Koyré’s judgment that Gassendi had a deep understanding of Galileo’s science, but also reveals some major inconsistencies in Gassendi’s account of the above-mentioned phenomena. Gassendi struggled to reconcile Galileo’s law of falling bodies with a mechanistic explanation of gravity; he was not able to bridge the gap between the principle of inertia, valid at the level of the res concretae, and the theory of the self-motion of atoms; furthermore, he put forward an explanation of the tides “that is neither in agreement with Galileo’s, nor with the observed phenomena, nor with Gassendi’s own cosmological views.”44 Gassendi’s cosmological and astronomical views are the central theme of Sakamoto’s chapter. Rather than providing an overview of Gassendi’s engagement and achievements in these fields, Sakamoto connects “Gassendi’s astronomical pursuits to his broader intellectual concerns,” stressing the paradigmatic role that he attributed to astronomy as a science. This is already true for the Exercitationes, where Gassendi ­ invokes astronomy as a typical example of scientia experimentalis, against the dogmatic assertions of the Aristotelians. Like Paganini, Sakamoto also notes the gradual shift in Gassendi’s conception of science, and his attempt to find a middle way between skepticism and dogmatism, by “expanding the business of sciences into providing causal explanations in probabilistic terms.”45 Yet, astronomy did not lose the status of paradigmatic science. In polemical works such as the Fifth Objections to the Meditations, the De proportione, or the anti-astrological passages of the Syntagma and the Parhelia sive soles, Gassendi invoked the hypothetical accounts of celestial movements given by astronomers as “the model of natural philosophy in general.” Sakamoto, however, also points to some inconsistencies in Gassendi’s view of the status of astronomy, notably in the Inaugural Oration of 1645, where Gassendi endorsed a realistic interpretation of astronomical truths, and in his remarks on the genesis of the world and the possibility of extraterrestrial life, which were not supported by observational data. Duchesneau’s chapter deals with a relatively understudied aspect of Gassendi’s science, namely his theory of living being as complex corporeal entities. Duchesneau describes and analyzes Gassendi’s causal hypotheses concerning the generation, growth, and vital functions of living organisms, paying particular attention to the epistemic considerations accompanying them. He documents how properties that the Aristotelians traditionally attributed to substantial forms are explained by Gassendi in terms of hypothetical schemes of organization of atoms that combine to form molecules and higher-level corpuscular compounds. This applies to inorganic and organic bodies alike, but Gassendi interprets the functional dispositions of living beings as properties “elicited in sui generis corpuscular contextures.” Living seeds and animal souls are formed by the “coalescence of the tiniest, most subtle, most active, most rapid corpuscles.”46 According to Duchesneau, there is no latent vitalism in Gassendi’s

Introduction  11 reductionist explanations of biological phenomena, but final causes play an essential role in bridging the gap between the physiological processes and the underlying corpuscular structures. This becomes apparent in Gassendi’s account of the different forms of generation, all of which imply a teleological organization of atoms in seeds. In the last chapter of the volume, Clericuzio deals with the reception of Gassendi’s natural philosophy in England, which was so diverse as to include virtually all aspects of his thought discussed in the other contributions to this volume. The chapter, which is structured chronologically, opens with a section on Gassendi’s quarrel with Fludd and Herbert of Cherbury, which testifies to the influence of Gassendi’s early philosophical and astronomical works, as well as to the influence of his empiricism and mitigated skepticism in England. Clericuzio then documents how, in the 1640s, the members of the Hartlib circle and the British émigrés in Paris contributed to the diffusion of Gassendi’s works in England, where the “purged” Epicureanism of the Animadversiones was particularly well received. One of these émigrés was Walter Charleton, whose Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana (1654), largely based on the Animadversiones, played a major role in the spread of Gassendi’s atomism. In the 1650s, during the Interregnum, the members of the so-called “Oxford Philosophical Club”—among others, William Petty, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis—enthusiastically endorsed Gassendi’s atomism and relied on his observations and experiments. Much more critical was the reaction of the Cambridge Platonists, who took issue with Gassendi’s mechanical philosophy and with his doctrine of the corporeal soul. As Clericuzio shows in the second part of his chapter, Gassendi’s views concerning the divisibility of matter, the motion of atoms, the nature of space, and the existence of vacuum exerted a crucial influence on Hobbes, Digby, Charleton, Evelin, Boyle, and on the young Isaac Newton.

Notes 1 See Barry Brundell, Pierre Gassendi: From Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy (Dordrecht–Boston, MA: Reidel, 1987). 2 On Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, see Peiresc-Gassendi: l’humanisme triomphant dans la Provence baroque (Bruxelles: Fondation Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, 1992); Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe. Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000); idem, Peiresc’s History of Provence. Antiquarianism and the Discovery of a Medieval Mediterranean (Philadelphia, PA: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 2011); idem, Peiresc’s Orient. Antiquarianism as Cultural History in the Seventeenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); idem, Peiresc’s Mediterranean World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Marc Fumaroli, La République des Lettres (Paris: Gallimard, 2015). 3 See René Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du xviie siècle (Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1943) (on which more below).

12  Delphine Bellis and Carla Rita Palmerino 4 Pierre Humbert, L’Œuvre astronomique de Gassendi (Paris: Hermann, 1936). 5 See Sylvie Taussig, “La Vie d’Épicure par Gassendi,” in Der Garten und die Moderne. Epikureische Moral und Politik vom Humanismus bis zur Aufklärung, eds. Gianni Paganini and Edoardo Tortarolo (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2004), 139–159; eadem, Introduction to Pierre Gassendi, Vie et mœurs d’Épicure, ed and trans. Sylvie Taussig (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2006), vol. 1, VII-CXIV. 6 See Lynn S. Joy, Gassendi the Atomist. Advocate of History in an Age of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 41–65. 7 See Claus Zittel, “Gassendis Astronomen-Viten,” in Die Vita als Vermittlerin von Wissenschaft und Werk: Form- und Funktionsanalytische Untersuchungen zu frühneuzeitlichen Biographen von Gelehrten, Wissenschaftlern, Schriftstellern und Künstlern, eds. Karl Enenkel and Claus Zittel (Berlin: LIT, 2013), 123–156; idem, “‘Copernicus Found a Treasure the True Value of Which He Did Not Know at All’: The Life of Copernicus by Gassendi,” in The Making of Copernicus: Early Modern Transformations of a Scientist and His Science, eds. Wolfgang Neuber, Thomas Rahn, and Claus Zittel (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 251–286. 8 This is made explicit in Graham A.J. Rogers, Tom Sorell and Jill Kraye, eds., Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (London–New York: Routledge, 2010) where Gassendi is classified among the outsiders. Margaret Osler, in her chapter included in that volume, explains how this was actually the result of a historical process: see Osler, “Becoming an Outsider: Gassendi in the History of Philosophy,” in ibid., 23–42. 9 From this point of view, we intend to contribute to a renewal of canon-building in the history of philosophy and science. For such projects, especially centered on reevaluating the role of women in early modern philosophy, see, for example, Project Vox: https://projectvox.org (accessed 17 April 2022); Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy: www.newnarra tivesinphilosophy.net/index.html (accessed 17 April 2022). 10 The partial English translation of Gassendi’s works by Craig Brush, though useful, is compromised by a few gross errors, some of which were spotted by Karl Schuhmann: see “Zehn Jahre Gassendi-Forschung,” Philosophische Rundschau 29, no. 3/4 (1982): 271–279 (esp. 273). 11 See Marc Fumaroli, “Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, prince de la République des Lettres,” in Peiresc-Gassendi: l’humanisme triomphant dans la Provence baroque, 23–53. 12 See Bernard Rochot, Les Travaux de Gassendi sur Épicure et sur l’atomisme, 1619–1658 (Paris: Vrin, 1944); Delphine Bellis, “Un document inédit sur le projet de publication des Opera omnia de Pierre Gassendi,” xviie siècle 71, no. 1 (2019): 149–162. 13 See Rochot, Les Travaux de Gassendi, 30. 14 See René Pintard, La Mothe Le Vayer, Gassendi, Guy Patin. Études de bibliographie et de critique suivies de textes inédits de Guy Patin (Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1943), 32–46. 15 Carla Rita Palmerino, “Pierre Gassendi’s De philosophia Epicuri universe Rediscovered: New Perspectives on the Genesis of the Syntagma philosophicum,” Nuncius XIV, no. 1 (1999): 263–294. 16 Pierre Gassendi, La Logique de Carpentras, ed. and trans. Sylvie Taussig (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012). 17 See Robert Alan Hatch, “The Correspondence of Pierre Gassendi: Lettres Latines, Opera Omnia, and the ‘Primal Archive’,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 39 (2008): 518–527.

Introduction  13 18 This is especially, but not only, true of letters dealing with scientific topics: see, for example, Jean Charron, “Quelques rectifications et remarques concernant les lettres de Gassendi à Peiresc publiées par Tamizey de Larroque dans sa collection: Lettres de Peiresc,” xviie siècle 68 (1965): 50–56. 19 Sylvia Murr, “Avant-propos,” in Gassendi et l’Europe (1592–1792), ed. Sylvia Murr (Paris: Vrin, 1997), 5 (our translation): “un immense chantier.” For a recent translation project of Gassendi’s works, see the forthcoming English translation of the Logic of the Syntagma philosophicum by Rodolfo Garau and Justin Smith at Oxford University Press. 20 Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit, 489–490: the rational immaterial soul would be only a “true epiphenomenon without any action, it seems, on the rest of the [human] being, and without any connection with the whole of its vital functions: not the thoughtful conception of a thinker consistent with himself, but the subterfuge of a desperate heresiarch.” (our translation of the following: “véritable épiphénomène sans aucune action, semble-t-il, sur le reste de l’être, et sans rapport avec l’ensemble de ses fonctions vitales: non point conception réfléchie d’un penseur conséquent avec lui-même, mais subterfuge d’un hérésiarque aux abois”). The (material or immaterial) nature of the human soul, as can be demonstrated through rational arguments, is a watershed between interpretative camps; on this topic, see Margaret J. Osler, “Baptizing Epicurus and Atomism: Pierre Gassendi on the Immortality of the Soul,” in Religion, Science and Worldview, in Honor of R.S. Westfall, eds. Margaret J. Osler and Paul Lawrence Farber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 163–184; Antonia LoLordo, “Gassendi on Human Knowledge of the Mind,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 87, no. 1 (2005): 1–21; Sophie Roux, “Les Recherches métaphysiques de Gassendi: vers une histoire naturelle de l’esprit,” in Gassendi et la modernité, ed. Sylvie Taussig (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 105–140; Vlad Alexandrescu, “Regius and Gassendi on the Human Soul,” Intellectual History Review 23, no. 4 (2013): 433–452; Delphine Bellis, “Comment penser l’âme humaine et Dieu? Gassendi et la redéfinition de la métaphysique,” Libertinage et philosophie à l’époque classique (xvie-xviiie siècle) no. 18 (2021): 65–81. 21 See Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit, 501 (our translation): “ce grand reniement des idées,” “ce pacte de trahison.” According to Pintard, this philosophical heterodoxy did not exclude, even during Gassendi’s youth, some form of sincere faith, but the latter had no relation whatsoever with Gassendi’s rational intellectual activities; this so-called “dualism” was supposed to induce a psychological inner conflict between Gassendi’s heart and mind (Le Libertinage érudit, 154), an inner turmoil of which it is however difficult to find the least trace in Gassendi’s texts. Bernard Rochot fiercely attacked Pintard’s assumption according to which Gassendi’s later positions could be explained only as a form of duplicity, the necessary mask of a libertine who could no longer publicly endorse his youthful and sincere philosophical positions. Rochot also supported the idea of the unicity of Gassendi’s philosophy, whose guiding principle was the primacy of observation over speculation: see Rochot, “Le cas Gassendi,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 47, no. 4 (1947): 289–313; Pintard, “Modernisme, humanisme, libertinage. Petite suite sur le ‘cas Gassendi’,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 48, no. 1 (1948): 1–52. 22 Henri Berr, Du scepticisme de Gassendi, trans. Bernard Rochot (Paris: Albin Michel, 1960); Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1960); Tullio Gregory, Scetticismo ed empirismo. Studio su Gassendi (Bari: Laterza, 1961). In complete disregard of any continuity or progressive evolution within Gassendi’s work, Popkin

14  Delphine Bellis and Carla Rita Palmerino was led, like Pintard, to split Gassendi’s philosophy into two irreconcilable parts: the first, endorsing Pyrrhonian skepticism; the second, a form of “mitigated skepticism.” For a critical appraisal of Popkin’s reading of Gassendi, see Delphine Bellis, “Nos in Diem Vivimus: Gassendi’s Probabilism and Academic Philosophy from Day to Day,” in Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy, eds. Sébastien Charles and Plínio Junqueira Smith (Cham: Springer, 2017), 125–152. Berr and Gregory adopted a more nuanced and evolutionist interpretation. 23 Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 24 Margaret J. Osler, “When Did Pierre Gassendi Become a Libertine?” in Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion, eds. John Brooke and Ian Maclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 169–192. 25 See Antonia LoLordo’s critique of Osler’s interpretation: Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 251–252. It indeed remains difficult to assess whether it was Gassendi’s theological voluntarism that shaped his natural philosophy, or if it was rather the other way around. 26 Olivier René Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi: Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971). 27 Ibid., 348–349. 28 Ibid., 475–478. 29 In addition to references mentioned above on Gassendi’s relation to skepticism, see Howard T. Egan, Gassendi’s View of Knowledge: A Study of the Epistemological Basis of His Logic (Lanham: University Press of America, 1984). 30 Rochot, Les Travaux de Gassendi; Lynn S. Joy, Gassendi the Atomist. 31 LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy. 32 Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 33 Wolfgang Detel, Scientia rerum natura occultarum. Methodologische Studien zur Physik Pierre Gassendis (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1978). 34 Saul Fisher, Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy and Science: Atomism for Empiricists (Leiden: Brill, 2005). 35 David F. Norton, “The Myth of British Empiricism,” History of European Ideas 1, no. 4 (1981): 331–344. For an analysis of Gassendi’s empiricism focused on the psychological genesis of our ideas and the epistemological justification of their truth value, see Maria Seidl, Pierre Gassendi und die Probleme des Empirismus (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2019); for an analysis of the reception of Gassendi’s thought in England, see Dmitri Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), esp. ch. 5. 36 See Margaret J. Osler, “The Search for the Historical Gassendi,” Perspectives on Science 19, no. 2 (2011): 212–229. 37 See Taussig’s chapter, p. 22. 38 See Garber’s chapter, p. 64. 39 See Fisher’s chapter, p. 106. 40 See Mehl’s chapter, p. 171. 41 See LoLordo’s chapter, pp. 203–204. 42 See Garau’s chapter, p. 216. 43 Alexandre Koyré, “Le savant,” in Pierre Gassendi 1592–1655: Sa vie et son œuvre, ed. Centre International de Synthèse (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1955), 108.

Introduction  15 4 See Palmerino’s chapter, p. 283. 4 45 See Sakamoto’s chapter, p. 296. 46 See Duchesneau’s chapter, p. 322.

Bibliography Alexandrescu, Vlad. “Regius and Gassendi on the Human Soul,” Intellectual History Review 23 (2013): 433–452. Bellis, Delphine. “Comment penser l’âme humaine et Dieu? Gassendi et la redéfinition de la métaphysique,” Libertinage et philosophie à l’âge classique 18 (2021): 65–81. Bellis, Delphine. “Nos in Diem Vivimus: Gassendi’s Probabilism and Academic Philosophy from Day to Day,” in Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Plínio Junqueira Smith and Sébastien Charles, 125–152. Cham: Springer, 2017. Bellis, Delphine. “Un document inédit sur le projet de publication des Opera omnia de Pierre Gassendi,” xviie siècle 71/1 (2019): 149–162. Berr, Henri. Du scepticisme de Gassendi. Paris: Albin Michel, 1960. Bloch, Olivier René. La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971. Brundell, Barry. Pierre Gassendi. From Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht–Boston, MA: Reidel, 1987. Charron, Jean. “Quelques rectifications et remarques concernant les lettres de Gassendi à Peiresc publiées par Tamizey de Larroque dans sa collection: Lettres de Peiresc,” xviie siècle 68 (1965): 50–56. Detel, Wolfgang. Scientia rerum natura occultarum. Methodologische Studien zur Physik Pierre Gassendis. Berlin, New York: W. de Gruyter, 1978. Egan, Howard T. Gassendi’s View of Knowledge. A Study of the Epistemological Basis of His Logic. Lanham: University Press of America, 1984. Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy. Accessed 17 April 2022. www.newnarrativesinphilosophy.net/index.html Fisher, Saul. Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy and Science: Atomism for Empiricists. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Fumaroli, Marc. La République des Lettres. Paris: Gallimard, 2015. Fumaroli, Marc. “Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, prince de la République des Lettres,” in Peiresc-Gassendi: l’humanisme triomphant dans la Provence baroque, 23–53. Bruxelles: Fondation Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, 1992. Gassendi, Pierre. La Logique de Carpentras. Edited and translated by Sylvie Taussig. Turnhout: Brepols, 2012. Gassendi, Pierre. Vie et Mœurs d’Épicure. Edited and translated by Sylvie Taussig. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2006. Gregory, Tullio. Scetticismo ed empirismo. Studio su Gassendi. Bari: Laterza, 1961. Hatch, Robert Alan. “The Correspondence of Pierre Gassendi: Lettres Latines, Opera Omnia, and the ‘Primal Archive’,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 39 (2008): 518–527. Humbert, Pierre. L’Œuvre astronomique de Gassendi. Paris: Hermann, 1936. Joy, Lynn Sumida. Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

16  Delphine Bellis and Carla Rita Palmerino Koyré, Alexandre. “Le savant,” in Pierre Gassendi: Sa vie et son œuvre 1592– 1655, edited by Centre International de Synthèse, 59–70. Paris: Albin Michel, 1955. Levitin, Dmitri. Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1640–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. LoLordo, Antonia. “Gassendi on Human Knowledge of the Mind,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 87, no. 1 (2005): 1–21. LoLordo, Antonia. Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Miller, Peter N. Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Miller, Peter N. Peiresc’s History of Provence. Antiquarianism and the Discovery of a Medieval Mediterranean. Philadelphia: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 2011. Miller, Peter N. Peiresc’s Mediterranean World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Miller, Peter N. Peiresc’s Orient. Antiquarianism as Cultural History in the Seventeenth Century. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Murr, Sylvia, ed. Gassendi et l’Europe, 1592–1792. Paris: Vrin, 1997. Norton, David Fate. “The Myth of ‘British Empiricism’,” History of European Ideas 1 (1981): 331–344. Osler, Margaret J. “Baptizing Epicurus and Atomism: Pierre Gassendi on the Immortality of the Soul.” In Religion, Science and Worldview, in Honor of R.S. Westfall, edited by Margaret J. Osler and Paul Lawrence Farber, 163–184. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Osler, Margaret J. “Becoming an Outsider: Gassendi in the History of Philosophy.” In Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, edited by Graham A.J. Rogers, Tom Sorell and Jill Kraye, 23–42. London–New York: Routledge, 2010. Osler, Margaret J. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Osler, Margaret J. “The Search for the Historical Gassendi,” Perspectives on Science 19/2 (2011): 212–229. Osler, Margaret J. “When Did Pierre Gassendi Become a Libertine?” In Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion, edited by John Brooke and Ian McLean, 169–192. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Palmerino, Carla Rita. “Pierre Gassendi’s De philosophia Epicuri universe Rediscovered: New Perspectives on the Genesis of the Syntagma philosophicum,” Nuncius 14 (1999): 131–162. Peiresc-Gassendi: l’humanisme triomphant dans la Provence baroque. Bruxelles: Fondation Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, 1992. Pintard, René. La Mothe le Vayer, Gassendi, Guy Patin: Études de bibliographie et de critique suivies de textes inédits de Guy Patin. Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1943. Pintard, René. Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du xviie siècle, 2 vols. Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1943/Genève: Slatkine, 1983. Pintard, René. “Modernisme, humanisme, libertinage. Petite suite sur le ‘cas Gassendi’,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 48, no. 1 (1948): 1–52.

Introduction  17 Popkin, Richard H. The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1960. Project Vox. Accessed 17 April 2022. https://projectvox.org Rochot, Bernard. “Le cas Gassendi,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 47, no. 4 (1947): 289–313. Rochot, Bernard. Les Travaux de Gassendi sur Épicure et sur l’atomisme 1619– 1658. Paris: Vrin, 1944. Rogers, Graham A. J., Tom Sorell and Jill Kraye, eds. Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. London–New York: Routledge, 2010. Roux, Sophie. “Les Recherches métaphysiques de Gassendi: vers une histoire naturelle de l’esprit.” In Gassendi et la modernité, edited by Sylvie Taussig, 105–140. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Sarasohn, Lisa T. Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1996. Schuhmann, Karl. “Zehn Jahre Gassendi-Forschung,” Philosophische Rundschau 29, no. 3/4 (1982): 271–279. Seidl, Maria. Pierre Gassendi und die Probleme des Empirismus. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2019. Taussig, Sylvie. “La Vie d’Épicure par Gassendi.” In Der Garten und die Moderne: Epikureische Moral und Politik vom Humanismus bis zur Aufklärung, edited by Gianni Paganini and Edoardo Tortarolo, 139–159. Stuttgart: FrommannHolzboog, 2004. Zittel, Claus. “‘Copernicus Found a Treasure the True Value of Which He Did Not Know at All’: The Life of Copernicus by Gassendi.” In The Making of Copernicus: Early Modern Transformations of a Scientist and His Science, edited by Wolfgang Neuber, Thomas Rahn, and Claus Zittel, 251–286. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Zittel, Claus. “Gassendis Astronomen-Viten.” In Die Vita als Vermittlerin von Wissenschaft und Werk: Form- und Funktionsanalytische Untersuchungen zu frühneuzeitlichen Biographen von Gelehrten, Wissenschaftlern, Schriftstellern und Künstlern, edited by Karl Enenkel and Claus Zittel, 123–156. Berlin: LIT, 2013.

Part I Gassendi’s Epicurean Project, Its Genesis, and Its Sources

1 The Life and Work of Pierre Gassendi Sylvie Taussig

1.1 The Problem with the Biography of a Philosopher “I do not think that more has happened to him than is worth noting as regards a philosopher, so that I need not be more verbose in these lighter circumstances of life.” These words of Samuel Sorbière follow the frontispiece of the Opera omnia.1 This statement is not only a captatio benevolentiae: it provides a framework for what will be the narrated portrait of Gassendi, emerging from a genre similar to that of funeral oration. It is said that after death everything changes. Coming from the pen of one of Gassendi’s closest disciples—alongside Thomas Martel, Abraham Du Prat, François Bernier, and Antoine La Poterie—Sorbière’s statement is somewhat paradoxical, given that Gassendi, himself a biographer, proposes to speak of his heroes without neglecting any detail whatsoever, even if it is apparently anecdotal. History encompasses both unity and division; no one knows any other unity than that which is the sum of all the parts (ultimately, an atomistic position). The meaning of a life will always have to be rewritten according to the demands of the time. Thus, in Gassendi’s biography on Copernicus, he does not focus on the work of the astronomer, but mentions everything else instead, not only because a human life is a whole and includes everything, but also because he wants to leave room for the possibility that Copernicus might later be remembered for something other than that for which he is best known at the time of writing. This is a non-ontological vision par excellence; Gassendi does not give a description of what it is to be a philosopher, a designation common to all the great men whose lives he describes, but rather he explains what the philosopher’s life mission is—the search for wisdom—philosophy being an exercise, not a state. The search for an approach to totality guides Gassendi’s method; for the biographies, observations, and doxographies, it is a matter of noting everything and making “naked and raw” observations. The postulation of unity, which is evasive, is the only way to avoid

DOI: 10.4324/9781315521732-3

22  Sylvie Taussig descending into a “cosmology of small things” or dust, or to write collections of anecdotes or to trace the silhouette of the skeptic based on the model of Pyrrho. Gassendi constructs portraits of his heroes by combining the different threads, or conceives the same kind of unity for himself in selecting parts of his correspondence for publication. The letters, on which he worked devotedly in his last years, appeared posthumously at the end of his Opera omnia; they are presented chronologically and contain minute details, although their interpretation is often obscure; they are the object of choice, with all the edifying dimensions that this entails. The narrative and substantive unity chosen posthumously by Gassendi’s biographers (Sorbière, Bougerel, Taxil) is the epitome of a “Christian philosopher’s” life,2 which renders it possible to resolve all contradictions and, above all, impose meaning onto the constituent facts. His contemporaries concertedly refused to do this, because they had access to witnesses to his life and could recount a wealth of their personal experiences. The portrayal given by his biographers is somewhat false, but it is preferable to a fragmented version because Gassendi was never a skeptic, but a philosopher convinced of the existence of truth. The truth about Gassendi, according to the incomplete account of his contemporaries, is that he led a rather unspectacular life (they say nothing about the details of his astronomical work, his life as an ecclesiastical administrator, his work as feudal lord of Notre-Dame-du-Bourg in Digne, nor his involvement in his community). In this regard, Charles Perrault’s account of Gassendi, likewise incomplete, corresponds with the paradox that Gassendi embodies soon after his death and that is reflected upon his life as a whole. Indeed, Perrault, who builds his figure in parallel to that of Descartes, is an advocate for Gassendi’s reputation as a wise man, that is, as one who knows how to live purely (the man of virtue as conceptualized by the ancient Greek philosophers), as opposed to the philosopher— Descartes—who knows how to reason purely (Perrault described him as a man of good reasoning, the model of the Modern) and who questioned the usefulness of studying the history of philosophy when studying philosophy itself.3 Should the contemporary biographer, therefore, set about dismantling Gassendi’s favorable reputation, because it concealed a denial of him as an intellectual, even though the emphasis on his moderate and good life stemmed from a desire of those close to him to protect his reputation from the charge of being a “swine” associated with Epicurus? By the irony of history, those who categorized him as a libertine4 were, thus, to a certain extent substantiating his philosophy. Today, no one accuses him of a façade of piety to cover up lived atheism; however, he is accused of having been superbly ignorant of mathematics and of having left works only in Latin. In addition to this, like all atomists, he suffers from the mischaracterization according to which atomism amounts to pure materialism; such is not the case, however.5

The Life and Work of Pierre Gassendi  23

1.2 The Sources The facts of Gassendi’s life that have come down to us are based on sources that have still not been sufficiently exploited. However, new details cannot be expected unless new archives are somehow discovered. The sources are the Latin Letters6—a monument approved for official statue—the letters to Luillier, which, unfortunately, span only a few years; the whole of his written work, including the diaire astronomique (a diary of astronomical phenomena, in which all of Gassendi’s observations are recorded, year by year); the Life of Peiresc (in which he speaks of himself, for example, about the expedition to Marseille with Peiresc to measure the altitude of the sun at noon); the letters scattered in the correspondence of his friends (Peiresc, Boulliau); and the texts in the Memoir, namely the Lives and the eulogies, which are to be read cum grano salis, for some of them are hagiographies, while the rest are panegyrics. Because some of his sources have since disappeared, one need certainly not necessarily exclude Gassendi’s Life by Bougerel.7 One should not focus only on the accounts of very close associates, such as La Poterie,8 Sorbière,9 Bernier,10 Taxil,11 and Gassendi’s nephew.12 The Grenoble bundle, of which one has not yet fully made use, undoubtedly contains material for the hurried completion of a biography; that project was abandoned, however.13 It must be said that Gassendi had no real disciples (Martel, Du Prat, Sorbière and Bernier cannot be considered as such) and that there was some dispute over the execution of his last wishes.14 It was Neuré who was supposed to write Gassendi’s biography for the Opera omnia; however Sorbière hurriedly did it—though not without emotion. Gassendi, perhaps, had too many friends, whose devotion often had disastrous consequences. In this case, the consequence was his monument being divided into three parts. For his legatee, Montmor, and his collaborators, La Poterie, François Henry, and Samuel Sorbière, the essential monument was the one Gassendi himself had designed before his death—his edition of the Opera omnia. However, others (J.A. Portner in particular) wanted to publish their contributions immediately.15 Whether they were motivated by the emotions caused by the death of their friend or by their own ambition is unclear. To this end, they found an ally—or perhaps an accomplice—in the publisher-librarian Edme Martin, who published four of these pieces in the months following Gassendi’s death.16 Some of his overzealous friends, notably Claude Quillet, even managed to have their contributions published several times.17 In preparing a new edition of the Institutio astronomica in 1656, the Dutch publisher Adriaan Vlacq added seven pieces written in Gassendi’s memory to the two (those by Portner and Quillet) already published by Martin.18 Later, Gassendi’s nephew— also named Pierre Gassendi—adopted these nine pieces into his own collection in memory of his uncle, adding about ten pieces composed by

24  Sylvie Taussig Gassendi’s friends and admirers in Digne, which had remained in manuscript form; these texts constitute the Grenoble bundle. In these various texts, he is characterized as a philosopher, an author, a man of God, an astrologer, an astronomer, a mathematician, a doctor, a provost, a professor, a theologian, and a sage, as makaritès (blessed), and even as a “dignosophist” (specialist of the town of Digne where he was from). Perrault’s account of Gassendi as a sage is, in fact, contradictory, as his contemporaries had insisted on “the philosopher” (who searches for knowledge) over “the sage” (who intervenes in public life). Hence the silence on his endeavors for the Church as a power, or his role with the Prince of Valois, to whom he explains European and national political events, and to whom he acts as an adviser on how to contain a revolt of the Provençals. In addition to his biographers’ testimonies, the Latin letters also shed more light on Gassendi’s life, such as his diet: he drank donkey’s milk and refused all meat to the point of constructing an epistolary argument to Van Helmont on the paradoxes, and ultimately uselessness, if not harmfulness, of creophagy.19 Gassendi’s portrait, then, is similar to that of Socrates; frugality and rejection of the desire for honor and power. Honor and power, by contrast, were two things sought for by those who, according to Gassendi’s account, indulge in astrology, which he considered a false, anthropomorphic, and self-interested ideology. Thus, the details that he chose to preserve in his Opera omnia substantiate his philosophical positions.

1.3 Gassendi’s Life and Work His biographers attribute to him a precocious genius.20 Born to a family of commoners in 1592 in Champtercier, Provence, Gassendi nevertheless had access to great, formative literature. He caught the attention of his bishop in 1601, who advised him to study. This delighted his mother but displeased his father. The latter died when Gassendi was still young, in 1611. Gassendi was not a prodigal son; he maintained ties with his country and his family. His training, which began in 1609 in Aix, with Father Fesaye, a Carmelite, took the form of a classical education; however, it was preceded by two years of autodidactism: he withdrew to his house to bring himself up to standard in Latin, theology, and Aristotle, becoming a teacher and director of the small college in Digne in 1611, and eventually a Doctor Theologiae in 1614. A dispute over his election as the canon was taken to trial which he won in Paris in 1615. Sorbière was the only one to maintain that Gassendi had been pushed into religious life on the advice of Peiresc, his friend and mentor, who was anxious to preserve his independence, and Gaultier, his master in astronomy. Gassendi was ordained a priest in 1616 and was appointed as a professor at the Collège Royal de Bourbon in Aix for six years. His teachings had a following far beyond his students—this included Peiresc whom he is likely to have met before.

The Life and Work of Pierre Gassendi  25 While this first part of his life was quite uneventful, the account of his childhood is noteworthy as both Christlike—born in the thatch and revealed by the stars (or revealing them)—and philosophical. As a youth, he was top of his class, though he withdrew to the mountains and read works not included in the curriculum (by authors such as Montaigne and Charron).21 By the age of 30, the time had come for him to think for himself, write for himself, and to dare to be himself. His apprenticeship was over, and he had already made two crucial acquaintances with Peiresc and Gaultier. The latter initiated him to astronomy. His astronomical journal begins in 1618, even before the first of the Latin letters, with the observation of the great comet. This period lasted only briefly, even though it was significant in his life. The Jesuits resumed control of the college in 1622 and Gassendi was evicted from Aix. However, he did not resist his eviction nor was he embittered by it. Instead, he attributed to it a meaning of which he himself was the master; Epicurean free voluptuousness against atomistic and social necessity. The next phase of his life, which lasted until 1629, was a period of redeployment, albeit under the auspices of Peiresc. He traveled twice to Grenoble (1623 and 1625) and twice to Paris (1624 and 1628), where he met Peiresc’s friends who eventually became his own (men who were often more mature); and he produced his first publications including the first volume of his Exercitationes paradoxicae, which was based on his critique of Aristotle during his tenure in Aix.22 Gassendi, Naudé, La Mothe le Vayer, and Diodati, Galileo’s Swiss banker, formed a group, dubbed “the Tetrad” by Naudé. The details of the group remain vague, and one might doubt it ever really existed as such; in any case, it produced nothing. The same cannot be said of Gassendi’s encounters in 1629, which was the next formative year of his life. Gassendi met François Luillier (Master of the Court of Accounts in Paris), with whom he had a close friendship that lasted over 20 years. Together, they drafted plans for two journeys, one to Flanders and Holland and the other to Constantinople. The first trip immediately materialized and included visits to Sedan, Charleville, Aachen, Liège, Louvain, Brussels, Mons, Valenciennes, Douai, Arras, Béthune, Saint-Omer, Calais, The Hague, Leiden, Amsterdam, Utrecht, Dordrecht, Bois-le-Duc, Brussels again, and Paris. It was on that journey that he met Beeckman and Van Helmont. Plans for the journey to Constantinople, on the other hand, which was to be with the Count of Marcheville, were never fulfilled. The year 1629 saw the unauthorized publication of the opuscule on the parhelia23 as well as the whole series of his letters upon his return from Flanders, when his work on Epicurus was sufficiently developed for him to discuss it publicly; he communicated its table of contents to Peiresc in a French letter of 1631.24 The year of 1629 was also one of self-assertion and intense and fruitful work for Gassendi. This led to the authorized publication of the Parhelia in 163025 and the catalog of

26  Sylvie Taussig the Arabic books of Golius in 1631,26 the book Against Fludd, written at the request of Mersenne whom he met at this time (the Epistolica exercitatio in the 1630 version or Examen philosophiae Roberti Fluddi medici according to the Opera omnia),27 and the definition of a position around the Christian Kabbalah with Jacques Gaffarel based on a pamphlet the latter published On the end of the world of a pseudo-rabbi.28 Indeed, in addition to Greek and Latin, of which he had a solid command, Gassendi was familiar with Hebrew and evinced an obvious interest in Jewish knowledge. This period, during which he increasingly engaged with scholars on an equal footing, was made possible by his observation and subsequent publication on the event that brought him fame as an astronomer: he was the first to see the passage of Mercury in front of the sun, which had been predicted by Kepler.29 He met Ismael Boulliau, Galileo’s disciple, and started exchanging letters with the latter, whom he supported at the time of his trial (1632). He also advised him, in addition to both moral and scientific recommendations, to peacefully accept the announcement of blindness in one of his eyes, and even to welcome it with interest, since this pathology would allow him to conduct new experiments.30 In 1634, Gassendi wrote a critique of Herbert of Cherbury’s De veritate at the request of Mersenne, Peiresc, and Diodati.31 This rather joyful period of maturity was marked by a return—albeit forced—to Provence in 1632 (under duress from the bishop), intense work on Epicurus (1634–1635), and increased collaboration with Peiresc, with whom he traveled through Provence. In 1635, with the help of the Capuchins, observations of the lunar eclipse were made at various points in the Mediterranean, which enabled the correction of longitudinal measurements and of the map of the Mediterranean. Gassendi also experimented on vision with dissections, expanded the map of the Moon with Peiresc and Mellan, and worked with Peiresc on the altitude of the sun—the resulting treatise he published under the title Solstialis altitudo Massiliæ, seu proportio gnomonis ad solstialem umbram observata Massiliæ, anno 1636 pro Wendelino voto. This fruitful period ended in 1637 with Peiresc’s death, which threw Gassendi into a period, if not of depression, then at least of retreat and illness. In this regard, the Latin letters are rather strange inasmuch as they contain almost no letters to Peiresc. Gassendi’s letters to Peiresc were published in French by Tamizey de Larroque in his collection of Peiresc’s correspondence but were excluded from the monument of the Opera omnia. The Latin letters resume in 1639 with a large set of letters to the Prince of Valois that monopolize Gassendi’s time as a letter writer; from 1639 to 1642 the Latin letters are essentially letters to Valois. However, Valois is not a replacement for Peiresc, to whom Gassendi writes a final farewell of sorts in the Life of Peiresc published in 1641. Instead, Louis de Valois is more a disciple than a peer. His status as an aristocrat might have suggested that there was some element of patronage in their

The Life and Work of Pierre Gassendi  27 association, but it does not appear that Gassendi depends on him financially, as he once refuses to accept a litter from him;32 he wants to be a coequal, not a servant. Furthermore, Valois’ position as the governor of Provence appointed by the king would have placed him at the opposite end of the political spectrum to Peiresc who was a parliamentarian. The relationship between Gassendi and Valois remains obscure, but the letters, whose answers are published separately in the Latin letters, along with the responses of all the other luminaries with whom Gassendi corresponded, are fascinating and have not yet been sufficiently explored. Did Gassendi, in the midst of a mid-life crisis or regret over the lost paradise, or secret garden, of Belgentier, Peiresc’s country house, feel compelled to reorient his career in a more political way within the Church and to participate in the assembly of clergymen, a very political assembly indeed? These years are marked by his efforts to be appointed as an agent of the clergy, his de facto appointment, and his journey to Paris for the assembly of Mantes (1641). This assembly prompted a crisis, even a rupture, between Cardinal Richelieu and the clergy. Under pressure from Richelieu, Gassendi was forced to resign in favor of one of the cardinal’s protégés. Sorbière, years after the cardinal’s death, devoted an entire page to the failed relationship between the two men.33 As to what caused the rift, this remains unknown to us. Was it initiated by Gaffarel, Richelieu’s librarian? Was it related to Gassendi’s ecclesiastical duties? In any event, Gassendi fails to become an agent of the clergy and even fails to obtain the reward that his successor owes him for his withdrawal. This sees him return to the refuge of his philosophical commitment and, through his correspondence with Valois, we discover Gassendi the professor, who teaches his correspondent an extended course in philosophy. Once this course is over, Gassendi reveals himself to be passionate about foreign and domestic politics; he was well informed on the Thirty Years’ War, the afflictions of the British Monarchy prior to the execution of King Charles I, and events of the pre-Fronde era in Provence. Gassendi reveals his interest in these things, in addition to both his classical and unclassical training, since the purpose of the correspondence is to teach Valois the Epicurean system, or rather the Gassendian interpretation thereof. The Parisian years (1641–1648) saw numerous publications, starting with his most significant scientific opuscules: in 1641–1642, he completed the two letters that had already been published in 1636 and 1640 of De apparente magnitudine solis humilis et sublimis (in total, four letters to Naudé, Liceti, Boulliau, and Chapelain) and two letters De motu impresso a motore translato. In 1643, he published the Novem stellæ circum Jovem visæ; in 1646, the De proportione qua gravia decidentia accelerantur, which combines three letters to Le Cazré, two written in 1645 and one in 1642, and he took part in Hevelius’ Selenography. This long stay in Paris was also marked by a controversy for which Gassendi would gain notoriety: his quarrel with Descartes. At the insistence

28  Sylvie Taussig of Mersenne, who invited him to contribute to the objections to the Metaphysical Meditations, Gassendi wrote the Fifth Objections.34 His text angered Descartes much more than those of the other respondents— Hobbes, for example (whom Gassendi met in 1641)—and Descartes countered with the Replies. Gassendi persisted in 1644 with the publication of the Disquisitio metaphysica, which, in his opinion, concluded the matter. In fact, he refused to resume the quarrel with Descartes following the publication of the Principles of Philosophy in 1644 and the two were eventually reconciled in 1647. Contentious relationships occupied much of Gassendi’s time. He also feuded with Jean-Baptiste Morin, who spoke out against the Copernicans. Stung to the core, Gassendi sent Gaultier the Apologia in J.B. Morin librum cui titulus Alæ telluris fractæ in 1643, promising not to publish it. However, Gassendi’s overzealous disciples Neuré and Barancy would do so on his behalf, publishing the Apologia in Lyon in 1649 against the author’s wishes. And, although Morin replied in 1650 with the astrological prediction of Gassendi’s death, Gassendi did not retaliate, and, instead, left it in the hands of his disciples. Indeed, Morin attacked the Animadversiones in a Dissertatio de atomis et vacuo, contra P. Gassendi philosophiam epicuream and Bernier replied with the Anatomia ridiculi muris. Ultimately, Morin had the last word and published a letter under the name of Vincent Panurge in which he denounced the impostures of Gassendi, Bernier, and Neuré (Vincentii Panurgi epistola de tribus impostoribus). He recommended that Bernier be arrested as a heretic. Morin’s attitude was very similar to that of Mersenne toward Fludd. For Gassendi, it was not an option that scholarly quarrels be brought into the political sphere. It is evident that, in these years, Italy was no longer the center of Gassendi’s philosophical life. He established contact with Poland (Hevelius), which Bernier was to visit, and wrote the letter that was the preface to Hobbes’ De cive in Sorbière’s 1649 translation. He met Hobbes and discovered that he and the Englishman were rather close in thought, so much so that after reading De corpore he wrote the following: “It is certainly a small book, as far as its weight is concerned, but it is full of pith, as far as I can tell.”35 In 1644, shortly after the cardinal’s death, Gassendi sent a letter to Caramuel de Lobkowitz on the significance of the ecumenical and national councils, which Lobkowitz published.36 Gassendi had always been plagued by poor health (he had permanent pain in his arm and foot since childhood), partly explaining, perhaps, his hesitation before accepting the chair of astronomy at the Collège Royal. Alphonse de Richelieu, the brother of the cardinal and Peiresc’s friend, finally convinced him to accept the position. He began teaching in 1645, and his lectures attracted large audiences with people from all walks of life. His inaugural speech was published several times.37

The Life and Work of Pierre Gassendi  29 Therein, he maintained a singular vision that was at once Galilean, Platonic, and Epicurean, showing that he had perceived the speculative dimension of the Democritean atoms, which had been somewhat obscured by the Aristotelian interpretation that he had long since rejected. Following on from the success of his teaching, he published his Institutio astronomica. These were immensely productive years for Gassendi. In 1647, against his wishes and much to his displeasure, Luillier published De vita et moribus Epicuri libri octo, Gassendi’s apology on Epicurus’ life and morals, a critical reinterpretation conceived as a prerequisite to his philosophy. In 1649, the three in-quarto volumes of Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii cum nova interpretatione et nota (Remarks on Book X of Diogenes Laertius with a new translation and notes) appeared in Lyon. This was an edition of Book X of Diogenes Laertius with a commentary organized according to the three parts of Hellenistic philosophy (i.e., canonic, physics, ethics). The second volume contains as an appendix the Philosophiæ Epicuri syntagma, an abridged manual to the three parts of Epicurean philosophy, which posits the fiction of Epicurus expressing himself in the first person and outlining his own philosophy. All around Gassendi, however, death reaped its harvest from among his associates: Gaultier died in 1647, Mersenne in 1648, Luillier in 1651, Alphonse de Richelieu in March 1653, Naudé in July 1653 (it is unlikely that Gassendi had an opportunity to see him before his death), and Louis de Valois in November 1653. Fortunately, he still had some friends, such as Jacques Valois, the Scottish astronomer he had met in Grenoble in 1623 and whom he would see again in 1653, and the Duc de Lesdiguières, whose gardener, Elzear Féronce, had made a strong impression on him by introducing him to heliocentrism. In the last years of his life, he received an invitation, which he declined, from Queen Christine of Sweden, but with whom he nevertheless entered into a high-level intellectual correspondence.38 This interest on the part of a sovereign confirms that he was now, beyond his person, a real authority, sought out by many, the most illustrious of whom was Saint-Évremond.39 Toward the end of his life, he had a new protector, Habert de Montmor, with whom he lived in Paris after his return from Provence in 1653. Montmor opened his home to former members of Mersenne’s informal academy by way of meetings that were equally informal, but eventually evolved into the future Montmor Academy in December 1657. Gassendi’s secretary, the faithful Antoine de La Poterie, to whom Gassendi’s will was generous and who wrote an account of his master’s life, played a very active role in these meetings, as did Sorbière, who described them as follows: That the aim of the Conferences will not be the vain exercise of the mind in useless subtleties; but that we will always aim for the clearest

30  Sylvie Taussig cognition of God’s works, and the advancement of the comforts of life, in the Arts and Sciences that will serve to establish them better.40 Gassendi also made a remarkable observation of the solar eclipse on 12 August 1654 in Montmor’s country house at Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis. He published extensively in 1654 and 1655, the last two years of his life: the De sestertiorum moneta…abacus (research that began with Peiresc), the Calendarium romanum, the Manuductio ad theoriam seu partem speculativam musicæ (Gassendi had a genuine interest in music and practiced the viola da gamba), the Notitia ecclesiæ diniensis, which reveal the extent of his research, and the lives of the astronomers (Lives of Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Peurbach and Regiomontanus) which, following the model of the Life of Peiresc, are all organized chronologically, year by year; all have a marked tendency toward exhaustiveness, and end with general reflections, which collectively constitute a portrait of the subject’s life. They have two objectives, factual relationship and exemplarity; a sort of mirror of the princes, adapted to the scholars.41 He was preoccupied with the task of compiling and revising the six volumes of his complete works. This represented a considerable amount of work, as can be seen from the remaining manuscripts;42 he did so only with his characteristic reluctance to publish his work, which he never considered finished. On this, he had written the following to Mersenne: One must approve of the initiative that a man who enjoys a good reputation and inspires no distrust takes in prefacing the works of a dead author with a eulogy; but what is to be thought, in your opinion, of those who, even while they are alive, take care of the publication and distribution of their works themselves, beg for hyperbolic praise, or at least put up with having it written almost on their foreheads? Or do they think that it will not be imputed to their vanity at all? that this endorsement they have begged for will not diminish the esteem of their works? that a discerning reader will not be convinced that these poets, swans or crows, have read or understood what they are commenting on, or will not know that men are just as illustrious who have no claim to the vain glory that is derived from an inscription of this kind?43 It may be that the posthumous edition of his great philosophical work is not the betrayal it is often said to be, although the text adopted in the Lyon edition includes many of the editor’s corrections to the manuscripts. Gassendi died at the hands of his doctors, including Guy Patin, at the Hôtel de Montmor in Paris and was buried in the Montmor family vault in the Church of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs. His eulogy was delivered in the Digne Cathedral by his successor, Nicolas Taxil, who insisted on the

The Life and Work of Pierre Gassendi  31 profound unity of the “Christian philosopher” (and, thus, set the stage for all future biographies—between Plutarch and the lives of saints) within the framework of a teleological conception, such that the evolution of a philosopher is marked by the seal of necessity. Gassendi, therefore, spent most of his life in a discreet manner, punctuated by the obligations of his priesthood—masses, preaching, confessions, and administration—and the intellectual work of reading and reflection, the almost daily observation of the night sky, and actual experiments, whether it be investigating the science of vacuums (in 1650 with Luillier, Chapelle—Luillier’s son—and Bernier, repeating the Puy de Dôme experiment) or the circulation of blood (he reads Harvey as early as 1628 and in Against Fludd produces his own reflection on the basis of an observation, supported by a dissection made by Payen in Aix in 1621 or 1622). This text was reproduced in 1640 in Leiden by the physician Johannes Walæus, perhaps unbeknownst to Gassendi, who was later able to witness better demonstrations with Pecquet, if not with Du Prat, in 1644. At this time, there were discussions about reprinting a previously published observation on the communication of the heart chambers through the septum, the De septo cordis pervio observatio. Opus physiologicum et anatomicum de intergritatis et corruptionis virginum notis, first published in Leiden in 1639. This phase is also characterized by obsessive work on his “system” which he had initiated, according to Bernier, in the 1620s.44 It is this intense and highly organized work that prompts his biographers to describe the real asceticism of his daily life, which is accurate and simultaneously contributes to his stature. He usually got up at three o’clock in the morning, sometimes at two, never later than four, and studied until eleven, unless someone came to distract him, which happened quite often, especially when he lived in Paris […]. At two or three o’clock in the afternoon, he went back to study until eight, then supping lightly, and going to bed between nine and ten […].45 This rigorous organization of his days is a constant that unifies his life: writing, reading, astronomical observation, walks,46 and conversations with friends or passers-by whenever he allowed himself to be disturbed. The absence of travel beyond France (apart from his journey to the Netherlands from 1628 to 1629) can be seen as consistent with Gassendi’s commitment to living in the present or, rather, not seeking out unnecessary things. In addition to his love of gardens, he claimed a limpid philosophical language, the possible difficulty of which will not be due to its technicality or speciality; void of any desire for obscurity conceived as window dressing, the language should not be seen as a means for one’s desire to hold on to the other. All these characteristics paint the picture of

32  Sylvie Taussig a life without brilliance, or in which the brilliance is as understated as possible. Finally, if this can undoubtedly be related to Epicurus’ injunction to live unnoticed, Gassendi’s birth condition must also be mentioned. The son of a commoner, raised in a village, and likely not fluent in French, his is an example of social advancement that was quite rare in his time, completely different from the life of Descartes. He surely had to struggle to transcend his commoner status. This undoubtedly explains his shyness punctuated by moments of boldness, his simultaneous humility and pride, and—even in his bonhomie—his feverish attachment to his independence, and his insistence on being treated as an equal. His status as a clergyman, perhaps, protected him from the precarious, even tragic, life of the intellectual, such as that of Neuré. Even though he possessed no nobility or considerable wealth and even though he did not occupy a high position in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, he managed to attain a coveted social status and was subsequently treated with a consideration completely unheard of for someone with his modest background. After 1645, as professor at the Collège Royal, he was also, in principle, the king’s adviser, and he enjoyed the privilege of committimus. Although it is said that his life was unadventurous, this was not necessarily by choice. On the contrary, it was the result of his dependence and apparent inferiority—his failure to rise to the highly political post of agent of the clergy, his failed parachuting into the Priory of Roumoules, and his ultimate failure to obtain the legacy of Peiresc. His capacity for renunciation was not entirely philosophical either: he displayed a penchant for pleading and it seems that he did not always show resilience in the face of misfortune, as evidenced by his depression following the death of Peiresc in 1637. As for his spiritual life, it has been largely unexplored. We know of his fidelity as a priest of the Counter-Reformation, of his concern for his flock, which is clearly expressed in Taxil’s funeral oration, of his involvement in the Church, and his interest in Church history (note the posthumous publication in 1656 of the Gallia christiana in provincias ecclesiasticas distributa, to which Gassendi contributes the list of the bishops of Digne), as well as the favorable stance he assumed on the cult of the saints (Maximim, etc.). However, his private life of faith is known only through the faithfulness of his practice, confession, and sacraments, which theologically define his union with Christ.

1.4 Gassendi’s Friends Gassendi’s friends were able to convey the characteristics of his person and philosophy quite well. In fact, for Gassendi, the friendly and moral life is the ultimate goal of philosophy, which is paradoxical, as he places morality at the end in the order of the exposition contained in the Syntagma philosophicum or Syntagma totius philosophiae. To the extent

The Life and Work of Pierre Gassendi  33 to which he gives primacy to morality, he would seem to be an atomist— not like Democritus who was primarily interested in “physics”—but in the manner of Epicurus and Lucretius. This is reflected in his biography. However, he said that he preferred truth to friends. While he became angry with Jean-Baptiste Morin, the astrologer, and probably with Gabriel Naudé as well, this was not the tenor of every relationship in which he came into a disagreement with the other person. For example, he would have had to get angry with Marin Mersenne if his words did not have such a great influence on the heart, mind, and soul of the Minim monk, whom he implored to make a threefold confession—intellectually, morally, and spiritually—during the latter’s conflict with Fludd. Here, we echo the sentiment of his biographers who emphasize the importance of his philosophical word, involving a threefold dimension of pedagogy, therapeutics, and exhortations. These three endeavors are also synthesized in a consolation letter to Valois after the death of his son, which put an end to his lineage. Thus, Gassendi had several circles of friends in a world in which the protests of friendship defined not only a sociality, but also a society (the Republic of Letters) and an ideal (humanist). However, we must distinguish close friends, such as the Provençals—Peiresc, the doctor Lautaret, Taxil, and Tornatoire, and, of course, Gaultier—and the Parisians, Luillier, Mersenne, and Sorbière, from acquaintances belonging to the “cosmopolitan” world that knows no bounds of politics, nation, or language, but is characterized by the same love of knowledge (this is the commercium litterarum described eloquently by H. Boots and F. Waquet).47 There is also a difference between close friendship and that between a master and his disciples and a friendship beyond social considerations, such as Gassendi’s friendship with the Prince of Valois and Queen Christine. In his correspondence with Valois and Queen Christine, as in that with scholars (astronomers, philologists, doctors, etc.) to whom he wrote in the codified framework of the Republic of Letters, he communicated as an equal and displayed a frankness and an irony that his biographers describe with a certain caution: For he was very prone to irony, so that if you wanted to hear little anecdotes likely to make you laugh, he would at once pay you countless in cash; but he would only tell them when he was with his familiars and people to whom he was linked by the closest ties.48

1.5 Elaborating an Œuvre Within Various Intellectual Networks Bernier goes immediately to the East following the death of his friend, and yet it is Bernier’s biography of Gassendi, written years later, that contains the finest remarks on Gassendi’s philosophy. Bernier speaks to us of his friend’s obsession with the system—the Syntagma is indeed a

34  Sylvie Taussig system—and the whole work published in the Opera omnia also makes a system. In fact, all the parts relate to one another, which is shown by the explicit cross-references in the Latin letters. The fact remains however that the work, the system, was not completed by its author, and its publication was obscured by unspeakable quarrels. Here, one is reminded of Gassendi’s reluctance to see his opuscules published—or any of his work for that matter. The Exercitationes, Parhelia, and the Life of Epicurus were all extorted from him by well-intentioned friends. Biographers contrast the ease of his speech with the difficulty of writing it down, which explains the sometimes labyrinthine nature of his Latin: each sentence attempts to say everything, provided that the synthesis is dynamic each time. One must always recapitulate everything to allow a new direction of thought. The one form of writing to which Gassendi readily agrees is the letter, which is an open-ended system calling for a response, as if the conversation were not finished and could not be fixed in a statement that would appear to be definitive. Similarly, many of his opuscules and works are written in the form of a letter, such as Against Fludd, Life of Epicurus, the scientific opuscules, and so on. The fact that Gassendi was often angered by his friends’ editing of his missives, and the extent to which they had to force his hand to extort his bon à tirer, must be interpreted as follows: On the one hand, the refusal to write is a kind of consequence of an absolute memory that includes the totality of what has been read; one has seen elements of truth in it that should be integrated. On the other hand, it is also less the refusal to constitute a word of authority than the feeling that it is impossible to constitute it; it is not that the truth does not exist but, rather, that one’s expression of it vanishes due to one’s inability to grasp it in its entirety. Without the whole, the parts become disconnected threads. Thus, I understand Gassendi’s obsession with inscribing his words in a chain of philosophers, so that all that precedes is implicitly contained—a path leading to the future. There is a cumulative knowledge that conjures an image of a palace of memory, like an accumulation of all these threads, but an accumulation that is always active: the palace does not end and, while arranging elements in rooms that are already well established and decorated, more rooms and walkways are added. The courage to know, sapere aude, a motto attributed to Gassendi, can thus designate the courage to continue to search when the fact “that nature has given so much scope to curiosity, and such narrow limits to knowledge”49 could lead to the renunciation of science. Gassendi’s life, devoted to this infinite pursuit of knowledge, allows us to describe the structuring of scientific research. The network of publishers, the privileges and political support, the dedication, the encomiastic rhetoric, the game of gift and counter-gift, all of it is part of the scholarly landscape, which is not confined to the realm of ideas. Moreover, an astronomer needs means—Galileo offered him his telescope50—and he

The Life and Work of Pierre Gassendi  35 needed patrons like Peiresc, Montmor, and Valois—while he refused President de Mesmes’ patronage. Gassendi’s “friendship” with the chancellor Pierre Séguier did not result in an official position; and neither did his attested friendship with Chapelain, the poet who was something of a rainmaker at the French Academy, into which Gassendi had no reason to enter since he wrote in Latin. The only text we have from him in French, if we except the letters to Luillier,51 was published anonymously in 1654, the Sentimens sur l’éclipse qui doit arriver le 12 du mois d’août prochain. It was written as a refutation of the falsehoods that had been published under the name of Dr Andreas. This text was noted by Vincent de Paul, and prompts the question of whether Gassendi was not, in fact, considering abandoning his work in Latin to work more directly on public opinion.52 In addition to his epistolary exchanges, he moved in circles that favored intellectual encounters, first with Peiresc (if one overlooks the Tetrad), then with Mersenne, and, finally, with Montmor. He therefore led a quintessentially French life that was simultaneously quite cosmopolitan with relationships, particularly epistolary ones, established throughout Europe beyond any consideration of sex, age, or religion. These include his friendships with Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Caramuel of Lobkowitz, Anna Maria van Schurman, Hobbes, Hevelius, and many more.

1.6 Conclusion Although Gassendi’s life was by no means spectacular, it was still productive, combining ecclesiastical, philosophical, philological, and experimental endeavors. It was not a solitary life, as the canon of Digne always lived and worked within a community of friends and colleagues, both in France and throughout Europe. His life was both active and contemplative, as the search for truth is itself part of the active life (as attested by the many observations and experiments he conducted). It is this courage to investigate, and the pleasure that comes from it and which is the epitome of human freedom, that constitutes the Gassendi paradox: unable to be satisfied with the skeptical position—and aware of the limitations of dogma— he conceives philosophical and scientific investigation as an asymptotic movement toward the truth that is, by its very definition, unattainable.

Acknowledgments Research for this chapter was conducted within the GASSENDI project funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-19-CE27-0004).

Notes 1 Mémoire de Gassendi, vies et célébrations écrites avant 1700, eds. Sylvie Taussig and Anthony Turner (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 389. 2 Sorbière borrowed this expression from Taxil: ibid., 134, 415.

36  Sylvie Taussig 3 Charles Perrault, Les Hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle avec leurs portraits au naturel (A Paris: Chez Antoine Dezallier, 1696), vol. 1, 63–64. 4 Jean-Baptiste Morin is one of them: see “Dénonciation de Jean-Baptiste Morin contre Bernier et Gassendi,” Corpus 20/21 (1992): 215–220. Gassendi also replied to Campanella’s suspicions about his religious orthodoxy and sincerity: OO VI, 54a-b. On Gassendi and libertinage, see René Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du xviie siècle (Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1943/Genève: Slatkine, 1983); Margaret J. Osler, “When Did Pierre Gassendi Become a Libertine?” in Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion, eds. John Brooke and Ian Mclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 169–192. 5 Heinz Wismann, Les Avatars du vide: Démocrite et les fondements de l’atomisme (Paris: Hermann, 2010). 6 OO VI. 7 Joseph Bougerel, Vie de Pierre Gassendi (Paris: Jacques Vincent, 1737). 8 “La Vie, actions & les mœurs…de Messire Pierre Gassendi…,” in Mémoire de Gassendi, 71–99. 9 Samuelis Sorberii praefatio, in qua De vita, et moribus Petri Gassendi disseritur, OO I, s.v. 10 “Au lecteur,” in Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi (Lyon: Anisson & Posuel, 1678), vol. 1, s.v. 11 Oraison funèbre pour Messire Pierre Gassendi… (Lyon: Barbier, 1656). 12 “Mémoire de La Poterie touchant la naissance, vie et mort de Monsieur Gassendy mon oncle” in Mémoire de Gassendi, 100–123. 13 Bibliothèque Municipale, Grenoble, MS 4139: see ibid., 179–358. The reason why the project did not succeed might have had something to do with La Poterie’s lack of fame or the social and geographical remoteness from the Republic of Letters of Gassendi’s nephew. 14 See Marie-Antoinette Fleury and Georges Bailhache, “Le testament, l’inventaire après décès, la sépulture et le monument funéraire de Gassendi,” in Actes du congrès du tricentenaire de Pierre Gassendi (4–7 août 1955), ed. Comité du tricentenaire de Gassendi (Paris: PUF, 1957), 19–68; Delphine Bellis, “Un document inédit sur le projet de publication des Opera omnia de Pierre Gassendi,” xviie siècle 71/1 (2019): 149–162. 15 Lessus mortualis illustri viro Petro Gassendo… (Ratisbonae: Formis Christophori Fischeri, 1655), in Mémoire de Gassendi, 262–285. 16 Those by Portner, Quillet, Balthasar de Vias, and Dupérier: see Mémoire de Gassendi, 204–211, 262–295, 330–357. 17 In obitu Petri Gassendi lugubre encomium (Parisiis: Ex Typographia Edmundi Martini, 1655), in Mémoire de Gassendi, 286–295. 18 This includes a letter by Sorbière to Jean Bertet, Adrien Valois’ “De obitu et laudibus Petri Gassendi…” and Henri Valois’ “Elegia in obitum P. Gassendi”: Institutio astronomica… (Hagae-Comitum: Apud Adrianum Vlacq, 1656), 312–334. 19 Gassendi to Van Helmont, 8 June 1629, OO VI, 19b–24a. 20 See Howard Jones, Pierre Gassendi 1592–1655: An Intellectual Biography (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1981). 21 OO VI, 2a. 22 See Paganini’s chapter in this volume. 23 Phaenomenum rarum et illustre, Romae observatum, 20 Martii, anno 1629… (Amstelodami: Apud Hesselum Gerardi, 1629). 24 TL, 250–252.

The Life and Work of Pierre Gassendi  37 25 Parhelia, sive soles quatuor, qui circa verum apparuerunt Romae, die XX. mensis martii, anno 1629 (Parisiis: Antonius Vitray, 1630). 26 Catalogus rarorum librorum quos ex Oriente nuper advexit et in publica bibliotheca inclytae Leydensis Academiae deposuit…Jacobus Golius (Parisiis: Antonius Vitray, 1630). 27 Epistolica exercitatio, in qua principia philosophiae Roberti Fluddi medici reteguntur… (Parisiis: Apud Sebastianum Cramoisy, 1630); OO III, 211– 268. See Mehl’s chapter in this volume. 28 Gassendi to Gaffarel, 8 March 1629, OO VI, 12a-14b. 29 Mercurius in sole visus et Venus invisa Parisiis anno 1631 (Parisiis: Sumptibus Sebastiani Cramoisy, 1632). 30 OO VI, 94a-b. 31 This work will only be published in the Opera omnia: OO III, 411–419. 32 OO VI, 293a-b. 33 Mémoire de Gassendi, 418–425. 34 See LoLordo’s chapter in this volume. 35 Quoted by Sorbière, praefatio, in qua De vita, et moribus Petri Gassendi disseritur, OO I, s.v., in Mémoire de Gassendi, 467. See Gianni Paganini, “Early Modern Epicureanism: Gassendi and Hobbes in Dialogue on Psychology, Ethics, and Politics,” in Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism, ed. Phillip Mitsis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 671–710. 36 OO VI, 191b-194b. 37 Oratio inauguralis habita in regio collegio die Novembris XXIII a Petro Gassendo… (Parisiis: Apud Ludovicum de Heuqueville, 1645), new ed. as an appendix to the Institutio astronomica (Parisiis: Apud Ludovicum de Heuqueville, 1647), 223–251 and in many other editions of this work; see also OO IV, 66–73. 38 OO VI, 317a-b, 321b-324a, 329b-330b, 331b-332b, 335a-337b. 39 Mémoire de Gassendi, 32. 40 Sorbière to Hobbes, 1 February 1658, in Lettres et Discours de M. de Sorbière sur diverses matieres curieuses (Paris: François Clousier, 1660), 633. 41 See Claus Zittel, “‘Copernicus Found a Treasure the True Value of Which He Did Not Know at All’: The Life of Copernicus by Gassendi,” in The Making of Copernicus: Early Modern Transformations of a Scientist and His Science, eds. Wolfgang Neuber, Thomas Rahn, and Claus Zittel (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 251–286. 42 Those manuscripts are kept in various libraries in Europe (London, Tours, Carpentras, Florence); see René Pintard, La Mothe le Vayer, Gassendi, Guy Patin: Études de bibliographie et de critique suivies de textes inédits de Guy Patin (Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1943); Carla Rita Palmerino, “Pierre Gassendi’s De philosophia Epicuri universe Rediscovered: New Perspectives on the Genesis of the Syntagma philosophicum,” Nuncius 14 (1999): 131–62; Bellis, “Un document inédit.” 43 Epistolica exercitatio, 4th part, chap. XVIII, 173–174; OO III, 265; Pierre Gassendi, Examen de la philosophie de Robert Fludd, ed. and trans. Sylvie Taussig (Paris: S.É.H.A./ Milano: Archè, 2016), 200–201. 44 “Au lecteur,” in Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi, in Mémoire de Gassendi, 514. 45 Ibid., 515. 46 “Mémoire de La Poterie…,” in ibid., 121. 47 Commercium litterarium: La communication dans la République des Lettres. Forms of Communication in the Republic of Letters, 1600–1750,

38  Sylvie Taussig eds. H. Bots and F. Waquet (Amsterdam-Maarssen: APA-Holland University Press, 1994). 48 Sorbière, praefatio, in qua De vita, et moribus Petri Gassendi disseritur, OO I, s.v. in Mémoire de Gassendi, 397. 49 Quoted by Saint-Évremond, “Jugements sur les sciences où peut s’appliquer un honnête homme,” in Œuvres en prose, vol. 2, ed. René Ternois, 4 vols. (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1965), 6. 50 OO VI, 92a. 51 Lettres familières à François Luillier pendant l’hiver 1632–1633, ed. Bernard Rochot (Paris: Vrin, 1944). 52 This attribution is sometimes questioned: see Jacques Halbronn, “Questions autour du texte sur l’éclipse de 1654 attribué à Gassendi,” in Gassendi et la modernité, ed. Sylvie Taussig (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 311–346.

Bibliography Manuscript Sources Grenoble, Bibliothèque Municipale: ­ MS 4139: documents on Gassendi’s genealogy and biography of Pierre Gassendi by La Poterie. Printed Sources Bellis, Delphine. “Un document inédit sur le projet de publication des Opera omnia de Pierre Gassendi,” xviie siècle 71/1 (2019): 149–162. Bernier, François. Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi. Lyon: Anisson & Posuel, 1678. Bots, Hans and Francoise Waquet, eds. Commercium litterarium: La communication dans la République des Lettres. Forms of Communication in the Republic of Letters, 1600–1750. Amsterdam-Maarssen: APA-Holland University Press, 1994. Bougerel, Joseph. Vie de Pierre Gassendi. Paris: Imprimerie de Jacques Vincent, 1737. Fleury, Marie-Antoinette and Georges Bailhache. “Le testament, l’inventaire après décès, la sépulture et le monument funéraire de Gassendi.” In Actes du congrès du tricentenaire de Pierre Gassendi (4–7 août 1955), edited by Comité du tricentenaire de Gassendi, 19–68. Paris: PUF, 1957. Gassendi, Pierre. Catalogus rarorum librorum quos ex Oriente nuper advexit et in publica bibliotheca inclytae Leydensis Academiae deposuit…Jacobus Golius. Parisiis: Antonius Vitray, 1630. Gassendi, Pierre. Epistolica exercitatio, in qua principia philosophiae Roberti Fluddi medici reteguntur… Parisiis: Apud Sebastianum Cramoisy, 1630. Gassendi, Pierre. Examen de la philosophie de Robert Fludd. Edited and translated by Sylvie Taussig. Paris: S.É.H.A./ Milano: Archè, 2016. Gassendi, Pierre. Institutio astronomica juxta hypotheses tam veterum quam Copernici & Tychonis… Hagae-Comitum: Apud Adrianum Vlacq, 1656. Gassendi, Pierre. Lettres familières à François Luillier pendant l’hiver 1632–1633. Edited by Bernard Rochot. Paris: J. Vrin, 1944.

The Life and Work of Pierre Gassendi  39 Gassendi, Pierre. Mercurius in sole visus, et Venus invisa, anno 1631. Pro voto et admonitione Keppleri… Parisiis: Sumptibus Sebastiani Cramoisy, 1632. Gassendi, Pierre. Opera omnia in sex tomos divisa. Lugduni: Sumptibus Laurentii Anisson, & Ioan. Bapt. Devenet, 1658 (abridged OO). Gassendi, Pierre. Oratio inauguralis habita in regio collegio die Novembris XXIII a Petro Gassendo... Parisiis: Apud Ludovicum de Heuqueville, 1645. Gassendi, Pierre. Parhelia, sive soles quatuor, qui circa verum apparuerunt Romae, die XX. mensis martii, anno 1629… Parisiis: Antonius Vitray, 1630. Gassendi, Pierre. Phaenomenum rarum, et illustre, Romae observatum, 20 Martii, anno 1629… Amstelodami: Apud Hesselum Gerardi, 1629. Halbronn, Jacques. “Questions autour du texte sur l’éclipse de 1654 attribué à Gassendi.” In Gassendi et la modernité, edited by Sylvie Taussig, 311–346. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Jones, Howard. Pierre Gassendi 1592–1655: An Intellectual Biography. Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1981. Morin, Jean-Baptiste. “Dénonciation de Jean-Baptiste Morin contre Bernier et Gassendi,” Corpus 20/21 (1992): 215–220. Osler, Margaret J. “When Did Pierre Gassendi Become a Libertine?” In Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion, edited by John Brooke and Ian McLean, 169–192. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Paganini, Gianni. “Early Modern Epicureanism: Gassendi and Hobbes in Dialogue on Psychology, Ethics, and Politics.” In Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism, edited by Phillip Mitsis, 671–710. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Palmerino, Carla Rita. “Pierre Gassendi’s De philosophia Epicuri universe Rediscovered: New Perspectives on the Genesis of the Syntagma philosophicum,” Nuncius 14 (1999): 131–162. Peiresc, Claude Nicolas Fabri de. Lettres de Peiresc publiées par Philippe Tamizey de Larroque, vol. IV. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1893 (abridged TL). Perrault, Charles. Les Hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle avec leurs portraits au naturel. A Paris: Chez Antoine Dezallier, 1696. Pintard, René. La Mothe le Vayer, Gassendi, Guy Patin: Études de bibliographie et de critique suivies de textes inédits de Guy Patin. Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1943. Pintard, René. Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du xviie siècle, 2 vols. Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1943/Genève: Slatkine, 1983. Portner, Johann Albrecht. Lessus mortualis illustri viro Petro Gassendo. Ratisbonae: Formis Christophori Fischeri, 1655. Q[uillet], C[laude]. In obitu Petri Gassendi lugubre encomium. Parisiis: Ex Typographia Edmundi Martini, 1655. Saint-Évremond, Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis de. Œuvres en prose, ed. René Ternois, 4 vols. Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1965. Sorbière, Samuel. Lettres et Discours sur diverses matieres curieuses. Paris: François Clousier, 1660. Taussig, Sylvie and Anthony Turner, eds. Mémoire de Gassendi, vies et célébrations écrites avant 1700. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Taxil, Nicolas. Oraison funèbre pour Messire Pierre Gassendi. Lyon: Barbier, 1656. Wismann, Heinz. Les Avatars du vide. Paris: Hermann, 2010.

40  Sylvie Taussig Zittel, Claus. “‘Copernicus Found a Treasure the True Value of Which He Did Not Know at All’: The Life of Copernicus by Gassendi.” In The Making of Copernicus: Early Modern Transformations of a Scientist and His Science, edited by Wolfgang Neuber, Thomas Rahn, and Claus Zittel, 251–286. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

2 Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos An Intellectual Biography Daniel Garber 2.1 Introduction In late August 1624, a new book appeared in Grenoble, attacking the Aristotelian philosophy: Exercitationum paradoxicarum adversus Aristoteleos libri septem [Seven books of Paradoxical Exercises against the Aristotelians].1 Though its title page announced seven books, the volume contained only the first book, a general attack on Aristotelian doctrine. On the title page, the author was identified as “Petrus Gassendus, doctor of theology and canon of the cathedral of Digne.” Gassendi had held the chair of Philosophy at the University of Aix since 1616, and had only recently vacated it when the university was put under the control of the Jesuits.2 Only 32 years old at that time, Gassendi had friends and admirers in his region, but was not yet known more widely throughout the intellectual world. Gassendi was by no means the first to challenge the Aristotelian philosophy, still then very much established in the schools, nor would he be the last.3 What is remarkable, though, is that this was the first publication by a philosopher who was to become one of the important figures and one of the most prolific writers of the age. Gassendi’s fame, however, was based not on this particular book, nor on his attacks on Aristotle. Instead, he would achieve fame as an advocate of Epicurus and his philosophy, as an opponent of Descartes, as an astronomer and supporter of Galileo, and as a humanist. What is perhaps most interesting about the Exercita­ tiones is the fact that he wrote it at all, and that, as a young teacher in a traditional university, he had planned and announced publicly such an extensive critique of Aristotelianism. There are at least two things at issue here. On the one hand there is the book and its contents, the arguments that Gassendi offers. And then there is the life of the book itself, its conception and birth, how it came to be written, and then the way in which it lived in the world alongside Gassendi’s career. Complicating matters further is the fact that there are at least three separate books under consideration: the volume that Gassendi published in 1624, with an introduction and Book I; the volume DOI: 10.4324/9781315521732-4

42  Daniel Garber as it appeared only after his death in the Opera omnia, an introduction and Books I and II; and the full project as Gassendi initially conceived it, a work comprising seven books, five of which existed only in Gassendi’s mind and possibly in his notes, but of which nothing identifiable remains, outside of their description in Gassendi’s 1624 preface.

2.2 Gassendi’s Project to Refute Aristotelianism in 1624 The Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos published in 1624 opens with a long preface. Before giving the plan of the project, Gassendi explains its title, word for word. The project is called “Exercitationes,” that is, “Exercises,” because “in this way I might exercise my character [animus] and my intelligence [ingenium].”4 These exercises are paradoxical insofar as they “contain paradoxes or opinions surpassing the comprehension of common men,” by which he means “the common run of philosophers, whose minds are so low that, like common men, they call barbaric anything that goes against the opinions they have become set in.”5 As for the third component part of the title, Gassendi emphasizes that the Exercitationes are against the Aristotelians, not against Aristotle.6 After this initial explanation, Gassendi sets out the plan of the full work he was proposing to write. As I noted above, the title page promises seven books. Book I, the only book that Gassendi published in the 1624 text, and the only one which he was to publish in his lifetime, included general considerations against the Aristotelians. “In it,” Gassendi claimed, “I argue against the way of philosophizing that obtains among them and I scold them at some length in the name of philosophical freedom, which they have trampled down.”7 Book II was an attack on Aristotelian logic, including attacks “against universals, categories, and Aristotelian propositions and following that debate Aristotle’s concepts of knowledge and proof.” It ends with a defense of Pyrrhonic skepticism, and Sanchez’s maxim that nothing is known (“nihil scitur”).8 Generally presumed to be roughly contemporary with Book I,9 it remained unpublished until it appeared for the first time in the posthumous Opera omnia of 1658. The 1624 preface then gives brief descriptions of the five books of the anti-Aristotelian project that were never published and seem never to have been written. Book III is a projected critique of the general part of Aristotelian physics, that is, the primary elements of motion, place, space, void, and time. Book IV will deal with simple bodies (“de corpore sim­ plici”). In addition to continuing the discussion of the Aristotelian elements, Gassendi proposes to discuss the celestial bodies, among which he includes the Earth; interestingly, in this way the young Gassendi, a man of the Catholic Church, publicly avows his sympathy for the Copernican cosmology. In Book V he proposes to take up mixed bodies, in which he includes both comets and living bodies. Gassendi tells the reader that in this book, he attributes a soul to semen, restores reason to animals, and

Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos  43 argues that there is no distinction between reason and the imagination. Book VI is intended to be about metaphysics. He proposes to begin by attacking “its well-known principles and those famous properties of Being: oneness, truth, and goodness.” Regarding separated substances (souls) and God, Gassendi claims that whatever we know “is attributed solely to orthodox faith. For I show clearly how vain are the arguments with which men usually philosophize about separate substances according to the natural light of reason.” And finally, prefiguring Book VII about moral philosophy, Gassendi writes the following: It hardly requires a lengthy recapitulation. In one word it teaches Epicurus’ doctrine of pleasure by showing in what way the greatest good consists in pleasure and how the reward of human deeds and virtues is based upon this principle. Especially interesting here is Gassendi’s first expression of sympathy for the Epicurean philosophy to which he will turn his attention only a few years later.10 In this way, the young Canon of Digne sets out a plan for a comprehensive attack on Aristotelian philosophy, from logic to natural philosophy, to metaphysics to ethics. This is the ideal form of the book that the young Gassendi had intended to write. But it will be useful to say something more about the actual book that Gassendi wrote, both as it originally appeared in 1624 with Book I, and as it would appear in Gassendi’s Opera omnia, when it included for the first time Book II as well.11 Book I, In doctrinum Aristoteleorum universe (“Against the Aristo­ telians in General”) contains eight exercitationes. The attacks in this book are, as Gassendi promises, quite general, and go from attacks on the practices of the Aristotelian scholastic academy and pedagogy, to criticisms specifically of Aristotle and Aristotelian philosophy (notwithstanding his insistence that the book was not against Aristotle, as such). Lib. I Ex. 1 is a series of articles that collectively argue that “the partisans of Aristotle have turned real Philosophy into sophism.”12 What seems to concern Gassendi most of all is the fact that they have turned philosophy away from the search after truth, and toward mere argument and disputation (Lib. I Ex. 1 art. 3).13 As a consequence, the Aristotelians have rejected all of the serious authors from the schools, including Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Pliny, and Plutarch (Lib. I Ex. 1 art. 5).14 They have also “rejected those parts of Philosophy which are not contentious, such as mathematics” (Lib. I Ex. 1 art. 6).15 Furthermore, “everything that they do is filled with an astonishing barbarity of language” which “in the end makes their whole Philosophy mere word play [philologia]” (Lib. I Ex. 1 arts. 13–14).16 In Lib. I Ex. 2, Gassendi turns to the issue of the freedom of philosophizing (libertas philosophandi). The Aristotelians, Gassendi claims, have shamed themselves by completely submitting themselves to Aristotle

44  Daniel Garber (Lib. I Ex. 2 arts. 1–4).17 The Aristotelians “trust for everything in Aristotle alone” and “disparage knowing anything but what he [i.e., Aristotle] had seen.” As a result, “they have no desire to cut the bond of the tyranny of Aristotle” (Lib. I Ex. 2 arts. 9–11).18 In religion, Gassendi admits, submission is appropriate. “But in that which touches the nature of things and depends on philosophical speculation, how unworthy it is for a philosopher to submit his mind in this way to the authority of this or that man!” (Lib. I Ex. 2 art. 5).19 The rest of Book I then contains criticisms specifically directed not at scholastic intellectual culture, nor at the Aristotelians, but more specifically at Aristotle himself. In Lib. I Ex. 3, Gassendi argues that “there are no reasons why we should prefer the Aristotelian sects.”20 He argues that it is “not his religion that makes Aristotle recommendable” (Lib. I Ex. 3 art. 1);21 nor is it the purity of his morals or his intelligence (Lib. I Ex. 3 arts. 2–3).22 Nor is the praise given him by other philosophers sufficient to justify the preference afforded to him (Lib. I Ex. 3 arts. 5–10).23 Gassendi ends this exercitatio by citing philosophers—both older, such as Lanctantius, Tertullian, Irenaeus, St. Justin Martyr, and others—as well as more recent philosophers, such as Gregory of Rimini, Durandus, and Roger Bacon, who didn’t follow Aristotle (Lib. I Ex. 3 arts. 14–15).24 Indeed, Gassendi claims in Lib. I Ex. 4, that we cannot even determine what exactly Aristotle thought: we do not know if any of the books attributed to Aristotle are even really his (Lib. I Ex. 4 arts. 1, 3).25 Furthermore, those books that remain to us are full of so many errors and copyists’ mistakes that we can’t figure out what they are saying (Lib. I Ex. 4 arts. 4–5).26 And finally, “we must admit that even if everything were from Aristotle, there remains however incertitude that derives from his halting style and ambiguity” (Lib. I Ex. 4 art. 6).27 The remaining Exercitationes in Book I deal with the “numerous insufficiencies” in Aristotle’s writings (Lib. I Ex. 5), as well as the numerous superfluities (Lib. I Ex. 6), the “innumerable failings” (Lib. I Ex. 7), and the “innumerable contradictions” in Aristotle (Lib. I Ex. 8). In each of these exercitationes, Gassendi goes, text by text, through a sequence of his supposed writings, showing the relevant deficiencies in each. Such is the book in the form that Gassendi published it in 1624, a rather modest effort, the work of a young professor out to show the world what he could do. But the young Gassendi had ambitions for something grander, a full seven books. One supposes that Gassendi was intending to publish the rest in quick succession, and that the volume published in 1624 was intended to be just the first of many that would start to appear soon afterwards. But for the rest of Gassendi’s lifetime, this was the entire text of the Exercitationes that was available to the curious reader. Of the other six books, only one seems to have been written, the second book, on the dialectic of the Aristotelians. Indeed, it was almost

Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos  45 certainly complete in August 1624, at the moment when Book I was published, or shortly thereafter.28 And after Gassendi’s death, when Book II was published together with Book I in the Opera omnia, it became a part of the project that the public knew. Book II, on the “Dialectic of the Aristotelians” is divided into six exer­ citationes. The first of the exercitationes addresses the question of dialectic in general, arguing that “dialectics are neither necessary nor useful” (Lib. II Ex. 1).29 In particular, Gassendi argues that dialectic “is of no use in distinguishing truth from falsehood,” “nor can it show what either follows or doesn’t follow from anything.” In brief, he argues, “the whole of dialectic is nothing but a muddled heap of useless things” (Lib. II Ex. 1 arts. 5–6, 8).30 Gassendi begins with critiques of particular parts of Aristotelian dialectic. In Lib. II Ex. 2, Gassendi attacks the doctrine of universals and predicables in some detail. He argues that “the many disputes over the knowledge of universals are in vain, for they are no more than what grammarians call common nouns” (Lib.II Ex. 2 art. 3).31 Indeed, Gassendi argues that there are no universals, strictly speaking: “in fact mind recognizes in things nothing but the particular” (Lib. II Ex. 2 art. 4).32 In Lib. II Ex. 3 Gassendi gives a comparable critique of the Aristotelian ten categories, and in Lib. II Ex. 4, he attacks the Aristotelian account of propositions.33 Lib. II Ex. 5 and 6 continue the examination of Aristotelian dialectic. There, Gassendi argues that “demonstration, as it is commonly defined [i.e., by the Aristotelians], does not exist” (Lib. II Ex. 5)34 and that “no knowledge [scientia] exists, especially no Aristotelian knowledge” (Lib. II Ex. 6).35 But while these topics are, indeed, connected with Aristotelian dialectic, they also go beyond; in Gassendi’s treatment, they introduce into the discussion skeptical themes, issues which were very important to the young Gassendi. Gassendi’s exposition and defense of skepticism begins in Lib. II Ex. 5 art. 1, with the denial that there can be any demonstrations such as Aristotle wants. Gassendi begins by reminding us that, for Aristotle, “demonstration is a syllogism which proceeds from principles, or propositions that are universal, first, immediate, etc.” But where, for Aristotle, do these principles come from? Gassendi’s answer is that these principles come from the senses: “sensation is the ground of the entire building, insofar as all of these principles rest on sensation.” But if “Aristotelian demonstration rests on the senses, and the senses are deceptive and uncertain, one wonders what could be the certainty of demonstration, and consequently of knowledge [scientia], which follows from it?”36 There follows a brief discussion of the infirmities of the senses in Lib. II Ex. 5 art. 1, and more lengthy attacks on Aristotelian accounts of definition (art. 2), genus and difference (art. 3–4), universal propositions (art. 5), the necessity of using syllogistic form (art. 6), and the notions of a priori and a posteriori (art. 7).37

46  Daniel Garber But in Lib. II Ex. 6, Gassendi comes back to the skeptical theme that he began discussing in Lib. II Ex. 5, that all we can know is appearances: […] we cannot know what anything is like according to itself or to its own nature, but only how it appears to some men or to others […]. Men do not know the inner nature of things, or their so-called differences. If they really knew these, then they would have genuine knowledge and would encounter the truth of reality […].” 38 (Lib. II Ex. 6 art. 6) This is all of the knowledge that we can have: […] it may well be that the basis for knowledge does exist, but for a knowledge of experience and, I might say, of appearances; for our intellect knows or learns through its experience of numerous appearances […]. But the intellect does not know anything in Aristotelian fashion, nor does there exist any demonstration as Aristotle describes it. 39 (Lib. II Ex. 6 art. 7) Lib. II Ex. 6 ends in art. 8 with a full-throated defense of Pyrrhonism as a way of life. Gassendi addresses the complaint that “the Pyrrhonists oppose both the common life and the common sense”; the claim that they cannot speak with the common person, nor live like others (Lib. II Ex. 6 art. 8).40 Gassendi rejects this completely: I respond that no conduct less contradicts common life than that of the Pyrrhonists. For […] they in no way eliminate the appearances of things, in whose pursuit or flight life consists [of]. (Lib. II Ex. 6 art. 8)41 The non-Pyrrhonist may think that they are pursuing something other than appearances. But the implication is that they are not. Here ends Book II, as Gassendi left it in 1624 or 1625. The text as it appears in its first publication—in the 1658 posthumous Opera omnia— ends with a series of six stars, and there is reason to believe that Gassendi left it at least somewhat unfinished. The text itself is followed by a brief paragraph, inserted by the editor, probably Gassendi’s secretary, Antoine de La Poterie, explaining why Gassendi withheld publication of Book II during his lifetime.42 We will return to this question later. With this, we have a brief survey of the book itself, or rather perhaps, the three books that share the title of Exercitationes paradoxicae adver­ sus Aristoteleos: the book as it could be read by Gassendi’s contemporaries before his death; the book as it existed, at least partly in manuscript form during Gassendi’s life, and which could be read after his death in the Opera omnia; and the full project in seven books that Gassendi conceived but never finished.

Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos  47

2.3 The Exercitationes: From Conception to Birth In the previous section, we discussed the text of the Exercitationes. At this point I would like to begin to put the text into the context of Gassendi’s career, examine how it was originally conceived, and its reception in Gassendi’s world and in the larger world around him. In 1616 or 1617, Gassendi assumed the professorship in philosophy at Aix, where he stayed until 1622.43 As a professor at Aix, Gassendi was expected to lecture on Aristotle and the Aristotelian philosophy, as would have been the expectation at virtually every other university in Europe. But from an early age, Gassendi had formed and harbored a strong dislike for scholastic Aristotelian philosophy. He writes in the preface of the Exercitationes: […] I remember clearly that when I was indoctrinated in Peripatetic philosophy as a young man, it did not appeal to me in the slightest, I who had decided to devote myself to philosophy because during my course of study in humanities I had fixed this eulogy of Cicero’s in my mind, “Philosophy can never be sufficiently praised: the man who obeys her counsels may live all the days of his life without vexation.” It seemed quite clear to me that this could not be expected of the philosophy taught in the Schools. Once I was on my own and began to examine the whole matter more deeply, I soon became aware how vain a discipline it was and how useless in the pursuit of happiness.44 Given what we read in the portions of the Exercitationes that he was to publish, it is not difficult to infer that Gassendi’s dissatisfaction stemmed not only from the lack of peace of mind afforded by studying the Aristotelian philosophy of the schools. As we saw in our account of Books I and II, Gassendi was unhappy with the way in which the philosophy of the schools focused on skills in disputation, rather than on seeking truth. He objected to the way in which the narrow focus on Aristotle and Aristotelian philosophy excluded the consideration of virtually every other important historical figure. Aristotelians, Gassendi argued, submitted themselves to the authority of Aristotle, an attitude unworthy of a true philosopher. Gassendi’s deep affinity with ancient skepticism, moreover, clashed with the dogmatism of the Aristotelians. In the preface to the Exercitationes, he discusses his approbation for the ancient skeptics: “of all the opinions, none ever pleased me so much as the akatalêpsia [unknowability of things] extolled by the Academics and Pyrrhonists.”45 While Gassendi certainly opposed the Aristotelians because he thought that they were wrong, he also opposed their dogmatism.

48  Daniel Garber These views led Gassendi to supplement his Aix lectures in Aristotelian philosophy with lectures against Aristotelian philosophy: The outcome of all this was that when I [taught] philosophy, particularly Aristotle’s, […] I always made it a point that my auditors should be able to defend Aristotle well; but as a kind of appendix to the course I also expounded those opinions which would totally undercut Aristotelian dogmas […]. In this way my auditors were warned not to make rash pronouncements; for they saw that there is no proposition or opinion so thoroughly accepted or so attractive that its opposite cannot be shown equally probable, or even, in most cases, more probable.46 These lectures for his students seem to have been given in a public forum and were attended by some of the people in Gassendi’s intellectual community. Addressing Joseph Gaultier in the preface, Gassendi wrote: […] ever since my paradoxes were debated in the most famous assemblies of all Provence, at which you were present, several people who approved of these trifles of mine began to take steps to have my public pronunciations put down in writing.47 This suggests that at least some of Gassendi’s anti-Aristotelian lectures were public events. The Exercitationes were intended as a publication of those lectures, albeit in a rethought and reorganized configuration. Gassendi claimed that his friends and admirers clamored for him to publish the lectures: “Requests came from all sides that I make an effort to have this work of my youth printed so that it could be more easily available and more widely distributed.”48 One suspects that there was a certain amount of exaggeration here, but even so, it is likely that Gassendi got at least some encouragement and little, if any, opposition. Claiming that the original lectures were given ex tempore (“largely from memory”), Gassendi undertook “a complete revision of the work.”49 The process of actually writing the book seems to have started while Gassendi was still teaching at Aix. In a letter to Henri du Faur de Pibrac, in an appendix dated 10 June 1622, Gassendi notes: For the rest, I am arranging my Paradoxes this year into a semblance of order […]. I no longer cover up the errors, contradictions, tautologies, and extraneous subjects that abound in Aristotle. I now dare to shake up the accepted opinions quite vigorously.50 His work on the book seems to have continued into 1624, until shortly before its publication later in the same year. Though one suspects that

Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos  49 much of the material for Books III–VII will have already taken shape in his lectures, and that he may have even had notes for these projected books, work on the Exercitationes seems to have stopped after the completion of Book II, if indeed Book II was complete. Before going on to discuss the publication of the Exercitationes, we should pause for a moment and consider the intellectual sources of Gassendi’s anti-Aristotelian project. Gassendi’s project here is both antiAristotelian and skeptical. In fact, the two are closely intertwined: he opposed Aristotle, and especially the kind of Aristotelianism that he finds in the university, largely because of its dogmatism and his own skeptical anti-dogmatism. Neither of these attitudes originated with Gassendi.51 There is a long tradition of Renaissance anti-Aristotelianism, and a significant skeptical tradition as well. Gassendi self-consciously drew upon both. In a letter of 8 April 1621, he thanks du Faur de Pibrac for having sent him a book of the skeptic Pierre Charron, which he “devoured […] avidly.”52 In this letter he mentions the names of some of the other authors he has been reading—Montaigne, Lipsius, Seneca, and Cicero, among others. In the preface to the Exercitationes he restates his admiration for Charron, but adds other names as well: Reading Vives and my dear Charron roused my spirits and dispelled all my timidity; they taught me that there was nothing wrong in supposing that this sect [i.e., the Aristotelians] was not necessarily correct in all matters just because most men approved of it. My strength grew greater as I read Ramus and [Gianfrancesco Pico della] Mirandola.53 Another possible influence here is Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, to whose Discussionum peripateticarum Gassendi’s Exercitationes is sometimes compared.54 As I mentioned earlier, Gassendi was by no means the first to criticize Aristotle and Aristotelianism; despite the fact that Aristotelian philosophy was the standard philosophy in schools during the Renaissance and early modern period, there was a lively strand of anti-Aristotelianism that animated the entire period, and of which Gassendi was no doubt aware. This is true for the history of skepticism as well. Charles Schmitt offers a generous assessment of Gassendi’s particular contribution. He argues that […] the Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos […] sums up the various threads of the rising disenchantment with Aristotle that had been growing in the course of the past two centuries.55 Though he doesn’t express it in this way, Schmitt is essentially praising Gassendi’s book not for any original contributions to the discussion, but for being an astute summary of where this disenchantment with Aristotle

50  Daniel Garber stood at that time. I’m not sure that Gassendi’s Exercitationes would have been given as much attention as it has received had it not been written by Gassendi, who went on to do many other things, and whose mature program, as I shall argue, was animated by this juvenile work. But as a book written by Gassendi, and intertwined with his later work, the Exercitationes went on to have an interesting life and reception.

2.4 To Grenoble, Paris, and Back Gassendi left his post in Aix in 1622, when the Jesuits took over teaching at the university. He moved to Digne, where, as a priest, he was involved with ecclesiastical matters. But at the same time, he was working on ordering the notes from his lectures against Aristotelianism and preparing them for publication. In late 1623, he reports that […] our canons urged me against my better wishes to make this expedition to Grenoble on business of the Church and the Chapter. My friends from Digne thought that it would be convenient for me to finish the whole task [i.e., the drafting of the Exercitationes] here during my moments of leisure; and so they put my composition in my luggage […].56 Gassendi arrived in Grenoble on 28 November and set to work, under the watchful eyes of friends: “I had to obey and was not permitted to dally any longer.”57 The preface to the Exercitationes was signed on 25 February 1624, and the book was probably sent to the printers shortly thereafter.58 The only concession they [i.e., Gassendi’s friends] granted me is that I might publish only this First Book. I readily persuaded them that it was only right before trying out the empty air as Daedalus had that I should condition myself with a short ascent, in the way another Icaromenippus had.59 In this, his friends may have had no choice: it is possible that Book II wasn’t yet quite finished and ready for the press. The printing of Book I was complete at the end of August. On 20 September, Gassendi left Grenoble, first for Digne, from where he traveled to Paris, arriving on 15 October. Here he was met with a situation quite different from that which he had left behind in Provence, Aix, and Grenoble. All indications are that the young Gassendi felt perfectly safe about his philosophical orientation in Provence. In lecturing against Aristotle, the accepted authority in the schools, he bragged a bit to du Faur de Pibrac about daring to “shake up accepted opinions quite vigorously.”60

Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos  51 But even so, he never seemed to worry about displeasing the Church or shocking his friends; Gassendi expressed no real unease either about giving the lectures while teaching at Aix or publishing them after he left. Something of the open and relaxed atmosphere in Provence can be gleaned from Gassendi’s comments on his close friend and mentor, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc. Gassendi had known Peiresc since at least 1616,61 and over the years they had developed a very close bond. When Peiresc died, Gassendi devoted roughly three years of his life to writing a biography.62 What is particularly striking is his picture of Peiresc’s intellectual temperament. Gassendi was not blind to the shortcomings of his friend’s career.63 But, at the same time, his admiration for Peiresc’s critical openmindedness and rejection of dogmatism shines through. One imagines that his account of Peiresc and Peiresc’s intellectual virtues is very close to the way Gassendi must have viewed his community of humanistic inquiry in Provence. He wrote: He [i.e., Peiresc] was verily, displeased with that Doctrine of Nature, which is commonly taught in the Schools, as being too obscure and imaginary, built more upon tricks of Wit, than experiments of Nature. […] [I]f [a discussant] were very stiffly opinionated, and addicted either to the Aristotelean or any other Sect, he would leave them to their own wisdom, and never contest with them, about any thing; but if they were such, which for Love of Truth would lay aside prejudice, & had rather gently to hear, then stubbornly contradict; then would he pour forth such discourses, as they could not but receive with pleasure and applause.64 It must have come as an enormous shock to Gassendi when he arrived in Paris, where he will have been confronted with quite a different atmosphere. The years that precede the young Gassendi’s trip to Paris are filled with strife and conflict over matters religious in the French capital. There were several instances of people being brought to trial, and in some cases burned at the stake for the supposed dangers of their opinions. One case often cited by contemporaries was that of Julius Caesar Vanini, condemned first in Paris, then burned as an atheist in Toulouse in 1619.65 Two years later, in December 1621, there was another infamous execution, this time in Paris, of a 33-year-old man named Jean Fontanier, charged with spreading heresy and atheism.66 Another celebrated attempt to suppress heterodoxy in this period was the famous trial of the poet Théophile de Viau, a trial that was in progress when Gassendi arrived in Paris in October 1624.67 Another sign of the nervousness of the times was seen in the Rosicrucian scare of 1623. Though now believed to have been a student prank, posters announcing the arrival in Paris from Protestant

52  Daniel Garber Germany of members of this mysterious and secret alchemical sect produced much anxiety and generated a considerable reaction.68 Then, in late August 1624, just before Gassendi’s arrival in Paris, a group of three young scholars—Antoine Villon, a teacher at the University of Paris, Jean Bitaud, a student, and Etienne de Clave, “Physician and Chemist”— announced a public disputation in which they promised to refute the key premises of Aristotelian natural philosophy. On street corners all over the Quartier Latin, they posted a list of 14 theses that they intended to defend, announcing the time and venue where the disputation would take place. The three assembled eight or nine hundred people at their chosen site, only to have the event closed down by the authorities before it could even begin. By 4 September, the Parlement of Paris had ordered them to leave the city, never to return.69 The atmospheres in Paris and Provence, therefore, couldn’t have been more different.70 Gassendi did not stay in Paris for very long. He left for Provence in June 1625, less than a year after his arrival, although, of course, he was to return to Paris a number of times later in life. If Gassendi had intended to publish Book II of the Exercitationes, his stay in Paris would seem to coincide with the project being put on hold. When Book II was finally published many years later in the posthumous Opera omnia in 1658, Gassendi’s editors offered the following short paragraph at the very end of text of Book II, by way of explanation: If you wish to know, dear reader, why this Exercitatio had not been brought to fruition, or why the five other Books which the preface lead you to hope for did not follow, learn that the author, advised by his friends that not a few Peripateticians were enraged on account of the publication of Book I, warned also that the same subject, or almost, had been treated early by Francesco Patrizi [da Cherso] in his Peripatetic Disquisitions, a work he had learned about for the first time. He thus did not want to pursue any further either the completion of the second book, and left it aside as it is here, without having written even a line of the others, leaving it to fight with the worms and the moths.71 Judged on its own, the supposed overlap with Patrizi is unlikely to have had much of a bearing on why Gassendi withheld publication of Book II in 1624–1625. First of all, it isn’t clear that he had first learned about the Patrizi text at that time; there is no mention of it in any of the texts from that period.72 Furthermore, even if he may only have first become acquainted with Patrizi in those years, he certainly knew many other Renaissance skeptics and anti-Aristotelians; familiarity with their work, or any qualms about being seen to plunder their ideas for his own purposes, didn’t prevent him from announcing his full project in the preface of Exercitationes or from publishing Book I.

Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos  53 On the other hand, it isn’t unreasonable to suggest that Gassendi was being cautious in not wanting to get into trouble with the Aristotelian authorities by continuing to publish his attack on Aristotle and the Aristotelians. This seems to be the message of a letter that Gassendi wrote to Wilhelm Schickard on 27 August 1630, more than five years after coming to Paris with his new book and anti-Aristotelian program. Schickard had asked him about the state of the remaining books of the Exercitationes. Gassendi replied that that he was moving slowly because of the “tempora et mores.” He goes on to imply that even in 1630, six years after the original publication of Book I, the circumstances were not right to continue the publication. Referring to the 1624 publication of Book I and its preface, Gassendi tells Schickard that “the forerunner [of the rest of the Exercitationes], which was published without the usual approbation, almost excited a disaster.”73 This does suggest that during his visit to Paris in 1624–1625, Gassendi came to believe that it might not be the proper moment to continue publishing the series of books that he had announced in his preface. In exercising this caution, though, perhaps Gassendi was being overcautious. I suspect that it was something of an exaggeration to claim, as the editor of the Opera omnia did in the final note, that “not a few Peripateticians were enraged on account of the publication of Book I”74 in 1624, or that Gassendi had narrowly averted a disaster at that time, as he suggested to Schickard. There is no evidence that Gassendi got into any trouble at all for publishing the Exercitationes, certainly not during the period immediately following the publication of the volume.75 So far as I am aware, in Paris in that period, the only public rebuke of Gassendi for his anti-Aristotelian views happened in 1628 and came from the popular—but somewhat eccentric—professor at the University of Paris, Jean-Cécile Frey. Like Gassendi in Aix, Frey gave lectures outside of the curriculum for the entertainment of students. In one such set of lectures, given in 1628, the Cribrum philosophorum, Frey castigated a wide variety of figures for departing in the smallest ways from the philosophy of Aristotle, including, the three young disputants of August 1624. While Gassendi was treated briefly in a number of chapters, there is no reason to think that Frey took any special interest in Gassendi’s objections. Nor is there any reason to think that anyone in 1628 took special note of Frey’s lectures, which were not published until 1646 in a collection of his lectures, long after his death in 1631.76 But this raises another question: why didn’t the Exercitationes get the same negative attention that, say, the three young scholars—Villon, de Clave, and Bitaud—had gotten a few months before Gassendi arrived in Paris? The disputation that they had announced was stopped before it could be held, their 14 theses sent to the Faculty of Theology for examination, and the three of them banished from Paris, at least temporarily. In addition, the three were subject to much unfavorable public discussion.

54  Daniel Garber There was an article about their disputation and its consequences in the Mercure François,77 and a fiery pamphlet against them published in late 1624 by Jean-Baptiste Morin, Réfutation des theses erronées d’Anthoine Villon … & Estienne de Claues ….78 And Marin Mersenne wrote extensively against the three disputants in his La Vérité des sciences (1625).79 Nothing like this happened to Gassendi and his Exercitationes. We can speculate as to the reasons why Gassendi didn’t get the attention that the three disputants did. In the case of the official authorities, they were concerned with a large public event and its ramifications; an obscure book by an unknown author published in Grenoble and probably difficult to get in Paris was probably not of much concern to them, if they knew about it at all. Morin was already beginning to be known in Paris (and this intervention would help him become better known still), so a bold statement about a very public event would certainly have gotten public attention. Indeed, when the Mercure François referred to the disputation as one of the notable events of 1624, in addition to the theses and the court documents, it included a long summary of Morin’s pamphlet.80 As for why Morin didn’t write against the Exercitationes as sharply as he did against the disputation, there is no evidence that he had seen the Exercitationes then, though, as we shall see, he does write against Gassendi’s book many years later. And even if he had seen the Exercitationes, for someone interested in advancing his career (as Morin was), it might not have had the same attraction as attacking the three disputants would have had. But with Mersenne, it was a different story. One supposes that he had seen the Exercitationes shortly after Gassendi arrived in Paris, and that he and Gassendi had discussed the issues raised in the Exercitationes, and the issues that Mersenne was thinking about in connection with the three disputants as he was writing his La Vérité. La Vérité was aimed directly against those who reject Aristotle and those who advance skepticism, which exactly describes what Gassendi was trying to do in the Exercitationes. There certainly would have been room in Mersenne’s new book to insert a brief discussion of Gassendi’s book, or, at least, to indicate his name and the new publication. But he didn’t. Why? This also has some bearing on the question as to why Gassendi didn’t publish Book II of the Exercitatio in 1625 or shortly thereafter. Lynn Joy has suggested that the main reason why Gassendi decided to pause or abandon his anti-Aristotelian and skeptical program in 1624–1625 was because he had met Mersenne, and either didn’t want to offend him, or had become convinced that his own project was misguided.81 Now, it is true that Mersenne’s target in La Vérité des sciences was, exactly, skeptics and those who reject Aristotle and Aristotelian philosophy, and that the two books of Gassendi’s Exercitationes seemed to represent precisely the things that Mersenne would have opposed. And one could imagine that the young Gassendi could well have found Mersenne, only slightly older

Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos  55 than him, very intimidating. But there doesn’t seem to be any reason to think that Mersenne reacted strongly against Gassendi and his philosophical program at that time, certainly not to the extent to which he reacted against the three disputants of August 1624. Again, why? At the time of Gassendi’s arrival in Paris in 1624, Mersenne was best known for his theological writings, and for his attacks on atheists and libertines, on those who rejected Aristotle, Aristotelianism, and those who criticized the Catholic Church. Most notable was his Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim (1623).82 It was a massive commentary on the opening six chapters of the book of Genesis. But it was also a strong attack on atheists and free-thinkers. The first edition, for example, contained a colophon against atheism so strident that it had to be replaced in subsequent editions with something milder.83 This was followed in 1624 with another defense of Catholic orthodoxy, L’impiété des Déistes, Athées, et Libertins de ce temps… (1624),84 and then in 1625 by La Vérité des sciences. In La Vérité, Mersenne discusses a number of those who have rejected Aristotle or supported skepticism, including Patrizi, Basson, Gorlaeus, Bodin, Charpentier, Hill, Pyrrho, and the Pyrrhonians.85 The three young disputants of 1624 are discussed in the work at some length. Their theses are discussed and refuted in detail, and Aristotle is defended.86 Mersenne writes that “Aristotle is an eagle in philosophy, and the others,” that is Aristotle’s critics, “are like chicks, who wish to fly before they have wings.”87 But Gassendi is never mentioned. To understand why, we might look to the difference between the way in which the three disputants attacked Aristotle and Aristotelianism, and the way in which Gassendi presented his own attack. The three disputants attacked publicly and aggressively: they posted their theses widely and called for a public meeting. Their meeting attracted a very large audience anticipating a spectacle. Furthermore, the whole event was modeled on an academic disputation, the likes of which normally went on within university walls. There was a “president,” the professor Villon, and a student, Bitaud, who was given a series of theses to defend against objections from the audience. (De Clave, an alchemist, was there to do experiments to illustrate and support the theses.) But the event differed from all other disputations in one crucial sense: it was outside the walls, and outside the control of the university. As such, it was considered a direct challenge to the university. In his pamphlet, Morin wrote that the disputants had presented “a public challenge to all the schools, sects, and great minds” of Paris.88 He was right. Furthermore, Morin argued that in attacking Aristotle, the three disputants meant to attack religion: […] almost all heresies have been departures from the philosophy of Aristotle, and have either denied it or perverted it or understood it badly.89

56  Daniel Garber Mersenne read attacks on Aristotle—such as those made by the three disputants—specifically as attacks on the Catholic Church. In the 1623 Quaestiones celeberrimae, he wrote: These idlers [i.e., those who write against Aristotle] try to persuade the world that Catholics […] are in the highest ignorance of philosophy; or that Catholics do not want to admit opinions that are true or probable, but instead pressure Christian souls, as if by ancient tyrannical persuasion, to accept false or less true opinions. […] But this is completely false. If indeed there are any to whom truth has ever been a friend, it is most friendly to Catholics […].90 I think that Mersenne (and many others who opposed the three disputants) saw the event in August 1624 in this way: an attack on the authority of the university, on the Church itself, and on the true faith. But Gassendi’s attack on Aristotelianism was rather different. Gassendi’s project started in Aix as lectures within the university, intended to break the dogmatic hold of the Aristotelian doctrines that students were being taught. His intention was to free the minds of his students, not necessarily to challenge the authority of the university. This was the spirit of the book that Gassendi brought to Paris. Nor could the book be interpreted as an attack on the Catholic Church. In the preface to the Exercitationes, Gassendi emphasized his faith and his loyalty to the Catholic Church: Whatever the case may be, whether I maintain something dogmatically, or put something to the test in the manner of the skeptics […], I always commit myself and all my goods to the judgment of the Church, One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman, whose child I am, and for whose faith I am ready to give my life and my blood.91 This, I think, was an important consideration for Mersenne. And when he met Gassendi in Paris, Mersenne was no doubt impressed with his genuine piety and commitment to the Catholic Church. In his brief memoirs of Gassendi, Antoine de La Poterie, his personal secretary, summarized Gassendi’s manner in a few words: “His piety was without pretense; his life humble, innocent, beneficent; his manners mild, kind, agreeable.”92 Even if he opposed Aristotle, Gassendi was not on a campaign to overturn the institutions of society. By contrast, Mersenne suspected the atheists (and the three disputants) of waging a campaign of this nature. Gassendi did, of course, oppose Aristotle and Aristotelianism, and one can imagine that he and Mersenne had some serious discussions about that. But at the same time, one should not overestimate Mersenne’s commitment to Aristotle. Even though he supported Aristotle, Mersenne emphasized that he did not accept everything Aristotle said. Though he

Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos  57 strongly favored Aristotle, he did so only, he claimed, because Aristotle favored the truth. Mersenne writes: You must know that we don’t approve of Aristotle’s doctrine in all of its parts, and that we don’t embrace his philosophy because it is Aristotle’s, but because we don’t find any philosophy more true, any which is more well-ordered, nor which is more general or more universal.93 From his Christian-philosophy perspective, Mersenne then goes on to detail page after page of errors he finds in Aristotle’s philosophy.94 Aristotle may be the eagle in philosophy—the best we have—but he is far from infallible. In this way, although he disagreed with Gassendi over Aristotle, he shared Gassendi’s commitment to truth above an allegiance with any one sect, one of the animating principles of the Exercitationes. As for skepticism, Mersenne was certainly against the Pyrrhonian skepticism that Gassendi espoused in Book II of the Exercitationes. But even so, Mersenne’s position was, ironically, not so distant from Gassendi’s skepticism. Mersenne’s strategy in La Vérité was to represent the certainty of mathematics as the place where skepticism must ultimately end: “Now I would like to make you see that mathematics are very certain sciences, very true, in which the suspension [of belief that the Pyrrhonists seek] has no place.”95 While Gassendi was a skeptic, at least during those years, the version of skepticism for which he argued in Exercitationes was, in a way, perfectly consistent with Mersenne’s anti-skeptical position. Though as a Pyrrhonist, Gassendi argued that we can only be certain of appearances, he argued in Book II of the Exercitationes that mathematics was concerned with appearances and was thus certain: “[…] whatever certainty and evidence there is in mathematics is related to appearances, and in no way related to genuine causes and the natures of things.”96 Gassendi and Mersenne could thus occupy a certain common ground without Gassendi having to give up skeptical principles. Gassendi and Mersenne also agreed in their devotion to the mathematical sciences: observational astronomy, music, and the theory of motion. Though Gassendi seems to have been given a friendly reception in Paris, there was still reason for caution: the wider intellectual climate was fairly hostile to heterodoxy. When Gassendi left Paris for Grenoble in June 1625, whatever plans he might have had to publish Book II of the Exercitationes—not to mention of writing the remaining books of the project that he had announced in the preface of his 1624 publication— had been set aside. But, at the same time, he had by no means abandoned the project.

58  Daniel Garber

2.5 The Exercitationes from 1625 to 1642: From a Project Postponed to a Project Abandoned In the years following the publication of the Book I of the Exercitationes, the book appears in a number of guises in Gassendi’s correspondence. Even before leaving Paris in 1625, Gassendi had sent the mathematician and professor of mathematics at Leiden, Willebrord Snellius, a copy of his Exercitationes.97 This was followed by two responses from Snellius,98 and thus began an exchange of letters between the two men, mainly about astronomical measurements and units of weights and measures. But there is an interesting comment added to the end of Gassendi’s reply to these letters on 14 August 1625. After some remarks on some observations on a comet, and an allusion to the physical explanations that he thinks explain those observations, Gassendi writes: “These are trifles and a matter too long for me to be able to summarize it in the present letter, not to mention the fact that I have reserved a place for them in my Exercitationes.”99 Gassendi’s remarks on comets never did appear in the Exercitationes. But it is interesting that at that moment he was still planning to publish them, not only Book II, but also Book V, presumably, where comets were to be treated, according to the plan he published in the 1624 preface. At that moment, at least, the full Exercitationes project appears still to have been alive. In the years following the publication of Book I, Gassendi seems to have turned more of his attention to Epicurus. In the 1624 preface to the Exercitationes, Epicurus had already been contemplated as a focus for Gassendi’s treatment of moral philosophy, as evidenced in his sketch of Book VII of the projected full Exercitationes. But in the years immediately following, he turns more and more to Epicurus. The first sign of a serious interest in Epicurus is generally agreed to be a letter that Gassendi sent to Peiresc on 25 April 1626, roughly a year after returning from his stay in Paris.100 That letter shows a serious interest in Epicurus, and the negative way in which he is treated in the literature. Two years later, it is clear that Gassendi is working seriously on Epicurus. In a letter to Erycius Puteanus, dated 9 April 1628, he begins by praising Puteanus for his eloge to Epicurus and his portrait of the philosopher. He also tells his correspondent that he has prepared “a great apology” for Epicurus. Clearly, Gassendi is deeply engaged in his Epicurean project now. But most interestingly, Gassendi says that he is planning to “dedicate an entire volume to his [i.e., Epicurus’] doctrine with the idea of joining it to my volume of Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos, of which I have already submitted to the public the plan and the first book.” He also tells Puteanus that he is “delighted that you have also applied yourself to bringing to light such noble material.”101 Gassendi reiterates these plans in a letter to Jacques Gaffarel,

Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos  59 dated 8 March 1629. After a brief discussion of his apology for Epicurus, then in progress, he writes: You know how many years already my studies have been interrupted by a host of different affairs and trips. But God will bring them to an end when he decides. I will then satisfy both my friends’s wishes and mine as well, and add my work on Epicurus to the end of my Exercitationes against the Aristotelians, after having published that which remains of them.102 Again, the project to defend Epicurus seems to have been in progress and very much a part of the Exercitationes program from 1624. The letter discussed above, to Schickard on 27 August 1630, suggests that Gassendi still felt that the time wasn’t right for publication. But it did suggest that Gassendi still thought that the project was very much alive. Indeed, it had evolved to contain not only the attack on Aristotle and Aristotelianism and the defense of skepticism, but also to incorporate a new positive project, the defense of Epicurus. What is especially interesting here is that that new project—the apology for Epicurus—was first conceived as a part of the Exercitationes project. That is to say that, throughout the 1620s, the Exercitationes project seems to be the general framework into which he is fitting his whole philosophical program, including the apology for Epicurus and the exposition of his philosophy. But it is at this point that we lose any trace of the Exercitationes project. We know that throughout the 1630s, Gassendi continued to work on his Epicurean project. In a letter to Peiresc from 28 April 1631, Gassendi presents a rather complete outline of the project, including sections both on Epicurus’ life and on his doctrines.103 It is clear that the Epicurean project is in progress, but there is no mention of the Exercitationes. The next mention of the Exercitationes project is in a letter to Samuel Sorbière on 27 September 1642, more than ten years after Gassendi discussed the Exercitationes with Schickard. Sorbière had sent Gassendi two letters earlier that year in which he proposed a new publication of the latter’s earlier Exercitationes.104 Referring to them as “trifles” (“nugae meae”), Gassendi dismissed the possibility of reprinting the Exercitationes, and doesn’t even mention the still unpublished Book II: “The foretaste of my Exercitationes paradoxicae are not worth enough to see the light of day a second time.”105 At this point, I think that we can infer that the Epicurean project, once closely linked to the earlier Exercitationes project, has become a separate project and taken on an independent identity of its own. And the Exercitationes project, the project that once seemed designed to unify his philosophical program has been set aside as a project of his youth.

60  Daniel Garber

2.6 The Exercitationes in Gassendi’s Last Years Though it was by no means the only thing that Gassendi was working on, the Epicurean project that began in the mid-1620s occupied most of Gassendi’s attention from the 1630s until the end of his life. It resulted in a number of important publications, including the De vita et moribus Epicuri libri octo (1647), the Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii (1649), and finally the Syntagma philosophicum, published after Gassendi’s death in his Opera omnia (1658). Even though now separated from the Exercitationes project of Gassendi’s youth, one can see in their structure the broad outline of the seven-book Exercitationes project outlined in the preface to the Exercitationes: logic, followed by physics, followed by moral philosophy.106 The Exercitationes was now separated from the Epicurean project, seemingly considered as something left over from Gassendi’s youth, and no longer a live project. But even so, the book does resurface from time to time in Gassendi’s last years. In 1649, the same year that Gassendi published his Animadversiones, an edition of the Exercitationes was published. It was an almost exact reprint of the 1624 printing, with the same introduction as the original version and only Book I of the seven planned books.107 The most striking difference is on the title page. In 1624, the title was The Seven Books of Paradoxical Exercises against the Aristotelians; but in 1649 it was just Paradoxical Exercises against the Aristotelians, a difference that is also reflected in the title of the preface. (The preface itself is unchanged, and still lists brief descriptions of the seven projected books.) There is no apparent connection with the Animadversiones, which were published by Barbier in Lyon, while the Exercitationes were published by Ludovicus Elzevir in Amsterdam. Nor is there any reason to believe that Gassendi himself had anything to do with this edition. There is no mention of it in any of Gassendi’s extant papers, and since it doesn’t contain the unpublished Book II, there is nothing in the volume that couldn’t have been taken directly from the earlier edition. Perhaps Sorbière had finally found a way of accomplishing the reprint that he had wanted to produce in 1642, helped along with Gassendi’s general popularity and the attention that he would have had at that moment because of the publication of the Animadversiones.108 In the years immediately following, the Exercitationes also entered into the quarrel between Gassendi and Jean-Baptiste Morin, a quarrel that involved a number of Gassendi’s friends and supporters.109 Morin and Gassendi may have known one another from when both were young men: they both studied at the University of Aix at roughly the same time, though with different teachers. They may also have become reacquainted in 1624–1625. When Gassendi came to Paris with his newly printed Exercitationes, he found Morin there, leading the charge against the three disputants of August 1624. Morin, always quarrelsome, held views that

Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos  61 were very different from Gassendi’s: he was a strong supporter of Aristotle and Aristotelianism, and an opponent of Copernicanism. A long dispute began in 1642 with the publication of Gassendi’s Copernican and Galilean De motu impresso a motore tranlsato epistolae duae (1642), followed shortly afterward by Morin’s answer, Alae Telluris fractae… Adversus clarissimi viri Petri Gassendi (1643).110 A pamphlet war ensued involving not only Morin and Gassendi but their larger circle, and involving not only motion and Copernicanism but Morin’s astrology and Gassendi’s Epicureanism, not to mention a significant share of ad homi­ nem attacks. The 1640s is filled with barrages of attacks and counterattacks, but let us skip over them and move to what will be an interesting event for our history of Gassendi and the Exercitationes. In 1650, Morin published a pamphlet which aimed to refute Gassendi’s Epicureanism, Dissertatio …de atomis et vacuo contra Petri Gassendi philosophiam Epicuream [Dissertation on atoms and vacuum against the Epicurean philosophy of Pierre Gassendi] (1650).111 François Bernier, a friend of Gassendi’s, who would eventually write the seven-volume Abrégé of Gassendi’s philosophy, responded on Gassendi’s behalf with Anatomia riduculi muris… (1651) [The Anatomy of the Ridiculous Mouse].112 Of course Morin responded, this time with the Defensio suae dissertationis de atomis et vacuo… [Defense of his dissertation on atoms and vacuum…] (1651).113 Bernier replied in turn with another pamphlet, Favilla ridiculi muris (1653) [The Ashes of the Ridiculous Mouse].114 The dispute would continue a bit further, and Morin even attempted to draw in Cardinal Mazarin. The argument, which had lasted for more than a decade, petered out by 1653 or 1654, but I would like to focus on the exchanges between 1651 and 1653, which involved Gassendi’s 1624 Exercitationes in a very interesting way. As part of his general attack against everything connected with Gassendi, in the Defensio (1651) Morin brought up Gassendi’s Exercitationes. Morin focused on Gassendi’s claim that the works that we have of Aristotle’s were not really by Aristotle himself, and on his lectures against Aristotle after having taught his students about Aristotle’s doctrine.115 As a strong supporter of Aristotle’s, Morin was outraged: “Gassendi is vain, arrogant, malevolent, slanderous and unfriendly to Aristotle.”116 In his Favilla (1653), Bernier attempted to answer these criticisms directly.117 But in addition, he added as an appendix to the Favilla a short book by the Paris theologian, Jean de Launoy, De varia Aristotelis in academia parisiensi fortuna … liber.118 Indeed, in his preface to the Favilla, Bernier told the reader that he had delayed the publication of this response to Morin’s Defensio, waiting for Launoy to complete his text; he indicates that Launoy was aware of Morin’s attack on Gassendi’s Exercitationes in his Defensio, implying that this was, at least in part, the genesis of Launoy’s De varia. While it isn’t at all clear that Launoy wrote his essay specifically as a defense of Gassendi’s

62  Daniel Garber Exercitationes, Bernier clearly believed that if it were published together with his Favilla, “Gassendi’s cause would be advanced in no small way.”119 De varia charts the fate of Aristotelianism in Paris, recording both the heights of its popularity and its lowest points. The latter include the condemnations of 1209 and 1231, but taking the story through the centuries, Launoy leads his reader to the battle between Ramus and the Aristotelians in the sixteenth century, the endorsement of Aristotle in the statutes of the Faculty of Arts in 1601, and ends with the battle over Aristotelianism with the disputation of 1624, which gets a full treatment. In Launoy’s history, Gassendi’s Exercitationes shares a chapter with Ramus, coming just before the final chapter on the Paris disputation of 1624. There Launoy gives a summary of Gassendi’s 1624 volume, listing the eight exercitationes that had been published in Book I, and summaries of the six remaining books that Gassendi had announced.120 (Like Morin, Launoy didn’t have access to Book II of the Exercitationes.) The point of Launoy’s treatise seems to have been that the Aristotelian philosophy had had quite a varied history in Paris, with both adherents and critics, within officialdom and outside. Within the context of the De varia, Launoy related the Exercitationes specifically to the judgment against Ramus discussed immediately before; he preceded his discussion of Gassendi with the remark that “Pierre Gassendi makes us see positively that Ramus’ cause was not so unjust.”121 That is to say, the fact that Gassendi’s book wasn’t condemned suggests that it wasn’t altogether fair to condemn Ramus’ work. But Bernier’s use of Launoy’s historical essay seems to have been rather different. Launoy’s concluding chapter begins by comparing the first episode, the condemnation of Aristotle in Paris in 1209 with the final “fortune” at the end of these Aristotelian mixed fortunes, that is to say, the condemnation of the three disputants of 1624 for rejecting Aristotle. Launoy remarks: If someone combines the last fortune of Aristotle with the first, he will find something by which he can be greatly astonished at the inconstancy of human affairs. In the first fortune, it is forbidden to read Aristotle, while in the last, it is recommended. In the first, the works of Aristotle are burned, while in the last, they are vindicated from all dishonor.122 I strongly suspect that Bernier was less interested in vindicating Ramus than in showing the varied attitudes toward Aristotle over the history of the previous hundreds of years as a way to protect Gassendi’s attacks on Aristotelianism from Morin’s criticism. In particular, he seems to have thought that by showing that Aristotle and his philosophy had been controversial since their first introduction into the University of Paris he would take away some of the sting from Morin’s complaints about

Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos  63 Gassendi’s criticisms of Aristotle and his departure from Aristotelian orthodoxy. While we have no documents that directly attest to it, it would seem highly likely that Gassendi had seen Morin’s reference to his Exercitationes in the 1651 Defensio. It is also highly likely that he would have seen Bernier’s response to Morin, and that he would have known and approved of Bernier’s use of Launoy in defense of his Exercitationes. By this time, therefore, Gassendi’s attack on Aristotle and Aristotelianism—once at the center of his philosophical program—had, with his tacit consent, become just another episode in the long history of the reception of Aristotle in France, taking its place alongside Ramus, the three disputants of 1624, and many others. And now we come to the very last episode of the life of the Exercitationes. While Gassendi had successfully resisted having Book II of the Exercitationes published—not to mention any of the other books of Exercitationes that he had initially projected in the preface of the 1624 publication—with the help of a group of his friends in 1654, he began to think about the publication of an Opera omnia, a collection of his writings, published and unpublished. He was thinking about details as varied as what to include, how to organize it, how many volumes it was to encompass, where it was to be published, and by whom. At the time, Gassendi was in Paris, where he had been since May 1653, and where he was to remain until his death on 25 October 1655. Gassendi had not been in good health for some years, but at this point his health had further deteriorated. His closest friends, moreover, were dying one by one: François Luillier in February 1652, Gabriel Naudé in July 1653, Louis Emanuel de Valois in November 1653.123 By that time, as a major figure in the European intellectual world, Gassendi had many options for publishers. As part of the negotiations with potential publishers, one thing Gassendi asked for in exchange for the rights to publish his Opera omnia were copies of Church Fathers and Councils; this suggests that he thought that he would live to see the project through to completion.124 But, at the same time, it must have occurred to him that his Opera omnia might not appear until after his death. Some time, probably between February and July 1654, Gassendi gave Samuel Sorbière a memo, discussing the publication of his Opera.125 This included a detailed listing of the works he wanted included, and how he wanted the volumes organized. Gassendi was still working furiously to complete his Epicurean project; unsatisfied with the publication of the Animadversiones in 1649, he wanted to redo his exposition of the Epicurean philosophy. This was to be the Syntagma philosophicum, in the end unfinished at his death, but completed by his friends. Gassendi wanted this to appear as volumes 1 through 4 of the set. Volume 5 was to contain other philosophical works; volume 6 his astronomical works; and volume 7 his humanistic writings, as well as other miscellaneous

64  Daniel Garber texts. Tucked into his instructions for volume 5 was one line: “adversus Aristoteleos libri priores duo” [“the first two books against the Aristotelians”].126 Gassendi had asked to republish his Exercitationes, something that he had refused to do just over ten years earlier, when Sorbière had suggested a new edition of the 1624 original. And more than that, he asked to publish it together with Book II. At the end of his life, when he had already abandoned the book as a serious statement of his views, and when it had attained the status of a kind of historical document, Gassendi finally approved the republication of the Exercitationes for the first time together with Book II, written at roughly the same time as the part published in 1624 but held back for more than 30 years. None of Gassendi’s texts explain why he decided to publish the more complete version of the Exercitationes in his Opera omnia. As discussed above, at the very end of the text as published in the Opera omnia there was a brief paragraph, probably by Gassendi’s secretary Antoine de La Poterie, explaining that, some 30 years earlier, Gassendi had decided not to publish Book II of the Exercitationes or finish the remaining five books after discovering the overlap between his Exercitationes and Patrizi’s Discussionum peripateticarum. This isn’t plausible as an explanation for why he withheld Book II in 1624, and it is even less plausible as an explanation for why he withheld it from publication in later years. As I have argued above, after a certain point, the Exercitationes project just became irrelevant to his philosophical activities: from at least 1642 onwards, the book seemed to its author unworthy of republication. Unwilling as he was to entertain the idea of reissuing Book I as it had originally been published in 1624, the addition of Book II, already drafted, was completely out of the question, as was any possibility of finishing the remaining five books. But a mystery still remains. If Gassendi felt that the book was unworthy of republication in 1642, why would he think differently about its inclusion in the Opera omnia? If one thought that the posthumous Opera omnia was simply assembled by Gassendi’s friends, or if one thought that the contents were in part determined by a publisher who wanted to cash in on Gassendi’s fame, there would be nothing mysterious. But we know that Gassendi himself had asked for the Exercitationes, both Books I and II, to be published in the Opera omnia. Why? In the end, I wonder if the defense of the Exercitationes the year before by Bernier and Launoy may have convinced Gassendi that at this moment the tempora et mores had evolved to the point where it was appropriate to republish the work he had published in 1624 and add the second book that had been kept in his trunk for so long. In a certain way, the more open-minded culture from which the young Gassendi had benefited in Provence, had 30 years later established itself even in Paris, in part through his influence. Aristotelianism was still dominant in many places and would be so for some years to come. But something had changed.

Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos  65 It seems significant that Jean-Baptiste Morin, who had published an influential pamphlet against the unfortunate three disputants in 1624, had been transformed from a mouthpiece of Paris officialdom into the “ridiculous mouse” of Bernier’s description. Perhaps the appearance of his Exercitationes in the exchange between Morin and Bernier, and in Launoy’s history, convinced Gassendi that the work was still relevant to current discussions. Ironically, though, it was only at the end of his life, after Gassendi had already abandoned the Exercitationes as a serious statement of his views, and when it had attained the status of a kind of historical document, that Gassendi finally felt comfortable publishing the full text of Books I and II, no longer the central organizing piece of his philosophical program, but a curiosity from his youth, now a part of the history of the debates over Aristotelianism, now tucked into a volume of miscellaneous writings. What was published in 1658 was just a fragment of the book that the 32-year-old Gassendi had promised in 1624, a reminder of where he had started, a path begun but, in the end, a path not taken.

Notes 1 Pierre Gassendi, Exercitationum paradoxicarum adversus Aristoteleos libri septem (Gratianopoli: Ex Typographia Petri Verderii Typog. Regij, 1624). Below we will discuss the later editions of the text. References to the Exercitationes will be to the edition published in OO III. The best Latin text is the one edited by Bernard Rochot in Pierre Gassendi, Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre les Aristotéliciens, ed. and trans. [French] Bernard Rochot (Paris: J. Vrin, 1959) [hereafter: Rochot, Dissertations]. Since Rochot gives references, in the margins, to the text in OO III, I won’t refer to it separately. Some portions of the Exercitationes have been translated into English in Pierre Gassendi, The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi, trans. Craig Brush (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972) [hereafter: Brush, Selected Works]. When available, I will cite Brush’s translations as well as the Latin. All other translations are my own. 2 See Bernard Rochot, Les Travaux de Gassendi sur Épicure et sur l’atomisme, 1619–1658 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1944), 2; Howard Jones, Pierre Gassendi, 1592– 1655: An Intellectual Biography (Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1981), 12–14. 3 For some histories of controversies over Aristotle and Aristotelianism in the medieval, Renaissance, and early modern period, see, for example, Craig Martin, Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) and Eva Del Soldato, Early Modern Aristotle: On the Making and Unmaking of Authority (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). Later in this essay we shall examine one of the first such histories, Jean de Launoy, De varia Aristotelis in academia Parisiensi fortuna…liber (Lutetiae Parisiorum: Typis Edmundi Martini, 1653). 4 OO III, 101; Brush, Selected Works, 22. 5 OO III, 101; Brush, Selected Works, 23. 6 Ibid. 7 OO III, 102; Brush, Selected Works, 24. 8 Ibid.

66  Daniel Garber 9 For evidence in favor of this hypothesis, see Rochot, Dissertations, xii–xiii; idem, Les Travaux, 19–20. 10 For brief descriptions of these books, see OO III, 102; Brush, Selected Works, 24–25. 11 References to the Exercitationes are given by “Lib.” followed by the book number in upper-case Roman, followed by “Ex.” and the number of the exer­ citatio in Arabic, followed by “art.” and the subsection (article) in Arabic. So: “Lib. I Ex. 3 art. 5” means Exercitationes, Book I, Exercitatio III, article v. 12 OO III, 105a. 13 OO III, 106a–106b. 14 OO III, 106b–107a. 15 OO III, 107a. 16 OO III, 110a–111a. 17 OO III, 111a–112b. 18 OO III, 114a–115a. 19 OO III, 112b. 20 OO III, 116a. 21 Ibid. 22 OO III, 116b–117a. 23 OO III, 117b–119b. 24 OO III, 120b–121a. 25 OO III, 121a–b, 121b–122a. 26 OO III, 122a–122b. 27 OO III, 122b–123a. 28 On the case for this, see the references cited above in note 9. But below we will consider the possibility that—even in the version in which it was finally published in the posthumous OO—Book II was not yet finished. 29 OO III, 149a; Brush, Selected Works, 30. 30 OO III, 151b–154b, 155b–156a; partial translation in Brush, Selected Works, 38–42. Quotations at OO III, 151b; Brush, Selected Works, 38; and OO III, 155b. 31 OO III, 158b; Brush, Selected Works, 42. 32 OO III, 159b–160a. 33 OO III, 165a–182a. 34 OO III, 182a; Brush, Selected Works, 68. 35 OO III, 191b; Brush, Selected Works, 85. 36 OO III, 182a. 37 OO III, 182b–191b. 38 OO III, 203a; Brush, Selected Works, 96–97. 39 OO III, 206b; Brush, Selected Works, 104. 40 OO III, 209a–209b. 41 Ibid. 42 The manuscript of Book II seems to have been discovered by Bernard Rochot in the early 1950s and is reported in Rochot, “Manuscrits inconnus de Gassendi,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 144 (1954): 400–401. Rochot reports that the final paragraph of Book II of the Exercitationes (OO III, 210b: “Circa id vero…”) is in an ink different to that of the preceding text, and that the six stars at the end of that paragraph are probably additions made later still; see Rochot, Dissertations, xi–xiii and 518 n. 119. In these texts, Rochot presents reasons to believe that Book II was not fully complete at the time it was abandoned. 43 See Rochot, Les Travaux, 2; Jones, Gassendi, 12–13. On Gassendi as a teacher of Aristotelian philosophy, see Jean-Robert Armogathe, “L’enseignement de

Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos  67 Pierre Gassendi au Collège Royal d’Aix-en-Provence et la tradition philosophique des Grands Carmes,” in Gassendi et l’Europe, 1592–1792, ed. Sylvia Murr (Paris: J. Vrin, 1997), 9–20. Armogathe bases his account of Gassendi as a teacher on an analysis of what Gassendi was taught as a student by Père Philibert Fezaye. But Charles Barneaud, writing in 1881, reports having had in his hands a transcript made by a student of Gassendi’s Aristotelian lectures given in 1619 at Aix; see Charles Barneaud, “Études sur Gassendi,” Nouvelles annales de philosophie catholique 3 (1881): 23–34, esp. 25. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate the transcript or verify Barneaud’s attribution of the manuscript or its continued existence. But given the pedagogical practices of the period, where students routinely transcribed their professor’s lectures word for word, it is quite possible that at one time such transcripts of Gassendi’s lectures once existed, and may still exist in some archives; see, for example, Ann Blair, “Student Manuscripts and the Textbook,” in Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe, eds. Emidio Campi, Simone de Angelis, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony T. Grafton (Genève: Droz, 2008), 39–73. 44 OO III, 99; Brush, Selected Works, 18. 45 OO III, 99; Brush, Selected Works, 19. 46 OO III, 100; Brush, Selected Works, 19. One wonders how common it was for a university professor to lecture both on Aristotle and against Aristotle in the classroom. Below, we will refer to Jean-Cécile Frey, who gave extracurricular lectures to his students, though they weren’t anti-Aristotelian. There was also Antoine Villon, also discussed below, a teacher at the University of Paris whose public anti-Aristotelian disputation got him into serious trouble. I suspect that he may have given his students anti-Aristotelian lectures on the side. One wonders if there were others as well. 47 OO III, 98; Brush, Selected Works, 16. 48 Ibid. 49 OO III, 99; Brush, Selected Works, 17. 50 OO VI, 2b; Brush Selected Works, 8. 51 On the Renaissance tradition in anti-Aristotelianism, see the studies cited in note 3. On the history and importance of skepticism in the period, see the classic study, Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 20033). 52 OO VI 1b; Brush, Selected Works, 5. Brush identifies the book as Discours crestiens de la divinité, création, rédemption et octaves du Sainct Sacrement (Paris: P. Bertault, 1604), while Rochot, Les Travaux, 2–3 identifies it as De la sagesse (A Bourdeaus: Simon Millanges, 1601). 53 OO III, 99; Brush, Selected Works, 18. The importance of Charron for the Exercitationes is emphasized by José Maia Neto, Academic Skepticism in Seventeenth-Century French Philosophy: The Charronian Legacy 1601–1662 (Cham: Springer, 2014), chapter 3. 54 The final note in the posthumously published Book II of the Exercitationes makes reference to Patrizi, presumably the Discussionum peripateticarum (Basileae: ad Perneam Lecythum, 1581), with the claim that it was his discovery of Patrizi, after drafting Exercitationes Lib. II, that caused Gassendi to abandon the plan to finish and publish the full work; see OO III, 210. But the question of when exactly Gassendi first read Patrizi is controversial; see Rochot, Dissertationes, x–xii; idem, Les Travaux, 19–20. 55 Charles Schmitt, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1469–1533) and his Critique of Aristotle (Dordrecht: Springer, 1967), 176. After noting elements of Charron, Vives, Ramus, and Patrizi in the Exercitationes, Schmitt goes on

68  Daniel Garber to argue for a close connection between Gassendi’s Exercitationes and Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s critique of Aristotle. 56 OO III, 99; Brush, Selected Works, 17. 57 Ibid. 58 On the trip to Grenoble and the publication of the Exercitationes, see Rochot, Les Travaux, 6–7. 59 OO III, 99; Brush, Selected Works, 17–18. 60 OO III, 2b; Brush, Selected Works, 8. 61 J. Bougerel, Vie de Pierre Gassendi (Paris: Jacques Vincent, 1737), 8–9. On Peiresc, see especially Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 62 The biography of Peiresc occupied Gassendi from 1637 to 1639; it appeared in print in 1641. On Gassendi and the biography of Peiresc, see Lynn Sumida Joy, Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chapter 3, esp. 51–64. 63 This is emphasized in Joy, Gassendi the Atomist, 57–61. 64 OO V, 343a–343b; translation from Pierre Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility, Being the Life of the Renowned Nicolaus Claudius Fabricius, Lord of Peiresk, Senator of the Parliament at Aix, trans. William Rand (London: J. Streater for Humphrey Moseley, 1657), 207–208. 65 On Vanini, see Émile Namer, Documents sur la vie de Jules-César Vanini de Taurisano (Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1965); idem, La Vie et l’œuvre de J.C. Vanini, Prince des Libertins, mort à Toulouse sur le bûcher en 1619 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1980); and John S. Spink, French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 28–42. 66 On Fontanier, see Frédéric Lachèvre, Mélanges (Paris: Champion, 1920), 60–81, and François Garasse, La Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps (Paris: Sébastien Chappelet, 1623), 147–153. 67 On Théophile and his trial, see Antoine Adam, Théophile de Viau et la libre pensée française en 1620 (Genève: Slatkine, 19662); Frédéric Lachèvre, Le Procès du poète Théophile de Viau, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1909); and Spink, French Free-Thought, 42–45. 68 On this incident and the Rosicrucian movement more generally, see Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London–Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), chapter 8. For a more recent treatment, see Didier Kahn, “The Rosicrucian Hoax in France,” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, eds. William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 235–344. Kahn discusses the very convincing evidence that the posters appeared as part of a student prank, on pp. 244–252. 69 See Daniel Garber, “Defending Aristotle/Defending Society in Early 17th Century Paris,” in Wissensideale und Wissenskulturen in der frühen Neuzeit (Ideals and Culture of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe), eds. Claus Zittel and Wolfgang Detel (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2002), 135–160. Despite their exile, there is good reason to think that at least de Clave and Villon returned to Paris at later dates. 70 Rochot, Les Travaux, 9–13; Bernard Rochot, “La vie, le caractère et la formation intellectuelle,” in Pierre Gassendi: Sa vie et son œuvre 1592–1655, ed. Centre International de Synthèse (Paris: Albin Michel, 1955), 9–58, esp. 9–13. 71 OO III, 210. 72 See Rochot, Dissertationes, x–xii; Rochot, Les Travaux, 19–20; Joy, Gassendi the Atomist, 240 n. 32. 73 Wilhelm Schickard, 27 August 1630, OO VI, 35b.

Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos  69 74 OO III, 210. 75 See the remarks in Rochot, Vie, 23–24. 76 The Cribrum philosophorum was published in Jean-Cécile Frey, Opuscula varia nusquam edita (Parisiis: Apud Petrum David, 1646), 29–89. At the end of the text is printed: “Excipiebat Antonius Morand Donomarensis 1628.” Presumably Morand, a student who attended the lectures, assembled the text from his notes. On Frey, see Ann Blair, “The Teaching of Natural Philosophy in Early Seventeenth-Century Paris: The Case of Jean-Cécile Frey,” History of Universities 12 (1993): 95–158. 77 “Arrest de la Cour contre Villon, Bitault & de Claves, pour avoir composé, publié & voulu disputer des theses contre la doctrine d’Aristote,” Mercure François, ou, L’histoire de nostre temps 10 (1625): 504–512. 78 Jean-Baptiste Morin, Réfutation des theses erronées d’Anthoine Villon … et Estienne de Claves (A Paris: Chez l’Autheur, 1624). 79 Marin Mersenne, La Vérité des sciences (A Paris: Chez Toussainct du Bray, 1625), 78–82. 80 At that moment the Mercure François had just come under the editorship of François Leclerc du Tremblay (better known as “Père Joseph”), an intimate of Cardinal Richelieu (who himself had just taken power), and had a quasigovernmental status; see Henri-Jean Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et société à Paris au 17e siècle (1581–1701) (Genève: Droz, 1969), 274–275. In that respect, it was a semi-governmental organ. It was thus significant that it included an account of the event, and offered an extensive summary of Morin’s pamphlet. 81 Joy, Gassendi the Atomist, 33–35. 82 Marin Mersenne, Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim (Lutetiae Parisiorum: Sumptibus Sebastiani Cramoisy, 1623). 83 For more detailed accounts of the text of the colophon and its history, see CM I, 121–122. 84 Marin Mersenne, L’Impieté des deistes, athées, et libertins de ce temps (A Paris: Chez Pierre Billaine, 1624). 85 Mersenne, La Vérité, 109, 130. 86 Ibid., 78–84. 87 Ibid., 109–110. 88 Morin, Réfutation, 6. 89 Ibid., Ded. letter, 4. (The Dedicatory Letter is paginated separately from the body of the pamphlet.) 90 Quaestiones celeberrimae, Ad Lectorem, unpaginated. 91 OO III, 101; Brush, Selected Works, 21. 92 Antoine de La Poterie, “Mémoires touchant la naissance, vie et mœurs de Gassendi,” Revue des questions historiques 22 (1877): 213–40, esp. 240; cf. 234–236. 93 Mersenne, La Vérité, 109. 94 Ibid., 119–126. 95 Ibid., 225–226. 96 OO III 209a; Brush, Selected Works, 107. 97 Gassendi to Snellius, 15 February 1625, OO VI, 3a. 98 There were letters from Snellius to Gassendi on 2 May 1625 (OO VI, 391a–393a) and 20 July 1625 (OO VI, 393a–393b). 99 Gassendi to Snellius, 14 August 1625, OO VI, 10a. 100 Gassendi to Peiresc, 25 April 1626, TL, 179–180; see Rochot, Les Travaux, 30; and Jones, Gassendi, 25. 101 Gassendi to Erycius Puteanus, 9 April 1628, OO VI, 11b.

70  Daniel Garber 102 Gassendi to Jacques Gaffarel, 8 March 1629, OO VI, 15b. 103 TL, 250–252. For the chronology of the development of Gassendi’s Epicurean project, see Olivier René Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), xxix–xxx. 104 Sorbière to Gassendi, 8 June 1642 (OO VI, 447a) and 25 August 1642 (OO VI, 447b). Sorbière didn’t mention including Book II of the Exercitationes, still at that moment unpublished. 105 Gassendi to Samuel Sorbière, 27 September 1642, OO VI, 155b. 106 Antonia LoLordo compares the structure of the final Syntagma with the outline that Gassendi gave of his Exercitationes project in the preface to Book I; see Antonia LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 36–37. Note though that in Book VI of the original plan, Gassendi lists metaphysics, which is missing from the Syntagma plan. It should be observed, however, that the order that Gassendi followed both in the plan for the Exercitationes and in the Syntagma was quite generally conceived of as the way to organize philosophy in the period, so the apparent correspondence may not be especially significant. 107 Pierre Gassendi, Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos… (Amstelodami: Apud Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1649). 108 Gassendi was evidently very much in demand as an author at this point in his career, and there were many publishers eager to have the privilege of publishing his work. In addition, Sorbière seems to have been a rather forceful advocate for Gassendi with publishers. On this, see Delphine Bellis, “Un document inédit sur le projet de publication des Opera omnia de Pierre Gassendi,” xviie siècle 71 (2019): 149–162, esp. 154–155. 109 For a useful account of the complicated details of the quarrel that we are about to discuss, see Monette Martinet, “Chronique des relations orageuses de Gassendi et de ses satellites avec Jean-Baptiste Morin,” Corpus 20/21 (1992): 47–64. 110 Pierre Gassendi, De motu impresso a motore translato. Epistulae duae (Parisiis: Apud Ludovicum de Heuqueville, 1642); Jean-Baptiste Morin, Alae Telluris fractae…Adversus clarissimi viri Petri Gassendi … libellum de motu impresso, à motore translato … (Parisiis: Sumptibus Authoris, 1643). 111 Jean-Baptiste Morin, Dissertatio …de atomis et vacuo contra Petri Gassendi philosophiam Epicuream (Parisiis: Apud authorem, 1650). 112 François Bernier, Anatomia riduculi muris, hoc est Dissertatiunculae I.B. Morini Astrologi adversus expositam à P. Gassendo Epicuri philosophiam (Parisiis: Apud Michaelem Soly, 1651). The reference here is to Horace, Ars poetica, line 139: “Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus,” [the mountains will be in labor, and only a ridiculous mouse will be born]. 113 Jean-Baptiste Morin, Defensio suae dissertationis de atomis et vacuo adversus Petri Gassendi philosophiam Epicuream… (Parisiis: Apud authorem, 1651). 114 François Bernier, Favilla riduculi muris, hoc est Dissertatiunculae ridicule defensae à Ioan. Baptist. Morino Astrologo adversus expositam à P. Gassendo Epicuri philosophiam (Lutetiae: E Typographia Edmundi Martini, 1653). 115 Morin, Defensio, 16. The passages that Morin quotes for his commentary are from the preface to the Exercitationes (OO III, 100–101). In addition, in Defensio, 17, Morin also quotes the endorsement of the skeptical maxim “nihil sciri” in the outline Gassendi gives of Book II in the preface to the Exercitationes (OO III, 102; Brush, Selected Works, 24). Morin, of course, didn’t have access to Book II of the Exercitationes.

Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos  71 116 Morin, Defensio, 16. 117 Bernier, Favilla, 27–30. 118 Launoy, De varia Aristotelis. The De varia was announced on the title page of the Favilla, and then appended to the end of the Favilla, with its own title page and separate pagination. The De varia was also published by itself in 1653, by the same publisher that had printed it in combination with the Favilla. These two printings have the same text, though the text published separately had been reset and so has a different pagination. However, it isn’t altogether clear which was published first. Citations will be to the pagination in the version published with the Favilla. The De varia has a long history of separate publication, in which many changes were introduced into the text. On Launoy and the history of the De varia, see Piaia, Gregorio, “The Histories of Philosophy in France in the Age of Descartes,” in Models of the History of Philosophy, vol. II: From the Cartesian Age to Brucker, eds. Gregorio Piaia and Giovanni Santinello (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 3–91, esp. 15–21. For some interesting details of the way the De varia was revised in the years immediately following Gassendi’s death, see Rochot, Les Travaux, 12–15. 119 Bernier, Favilla, letter to the reader, unpaginated. 120 Launoy, De varia, 60–62. 121 Ibid., 66. 122 Launoy, De varia, 70. 123 See Jones, Gassendi, 73–75. 124 See Bellis, “Un document inédit,” 154–155, 160. 125 The document is transcribed in ibid., 159–161. On the dating, see ibid., 154. 126 Ibid., 161.

Bibliography Adam, Antoine. Théophile de Viau et la libre pensée française en 1620. Genève: Slatkine, 19662. Armogathe, Jean-Robert. “L’enseignement de Pierre Gassendi au Collège Royal d’Aix-en-Provence et la tradition philosophique des Grands Carmes.” In Gassendi et l’Europe, edited by Sylvia Murr, 9–20. Paris: Vrin, 1997. “Arrest de la Cour contre Villon, Bitault & de Claves, pour avoir composé, publié & voulu disputer des theses contre la doctrine d’Aristote,” Mercure François, ou, L’histoire de nostre temps 10 (1625): 503–512. Barneaud, Charles. “Études sur Gassendi,” Nouvelles annales de philosophie catholique 3 (1881): 23–34. Bellis, Delphine. “Un document inédit sur le projet de publication des Opera omnia de Pierre Gassendi,” xviie siècle 71/1 (2019): 149–162. Bernier, François. Anatomia riduculi muris, hoc est Dissertatiunculae I.B. Morini Astrologi adversus expositam à P. Gassendo Epicuri philosophiam. Parisiis: Apud Michaelem Soly, 1651. Bernier, François. Favilla ridiculi muris, hoc est Dissertatiunculae ridiculae defen­ sae a Joan. Baptist. Morino, Astrologo, adversus expositam a Petro Gassendo Epicuri philosophiam. Lutetiae: E Typographia Edmundi Martini, 1653. Blair, Ann. “Student Manuscripts and the Textbook.” In Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe, edited by Emidio Campi, Simone de Angelis, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony T. Grafton, 39–73. Genève: Droz, 2008.

72  Daniel Garber Blair, Ann. “The Teaching of Natural Philosophy in Early Seventeenth-Century Paris: The Case of Jean-Cécile Frey,” History of Universities 12 (1993): 95–158. Bloch, Olivier René. La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971. Bougerel, Joseph. Vie de Pierre Gassendi. Paris: Imprimerie de Jacques Vincent, 1737. Charron, Pierre. De la sagesse. A Bourdeaus: Simon Millanges, 1601. Charron, Pierre. Discours crestiens de la divinité, création, rédemption et octaves du Sainct Sacrement. Paris: P. Bertault, 1604. Del Soldato, Eva. Early Modern Aristotle: On the Making and Unmaking of Authority. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Frey, Jean-Cécile. Opuscula varia nusquam edita. Parisiis: Apud Petrum David, 1646. Garasse, François. La Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps. Paris: Sébastien Chappelet, 1623. Garber, Daniel. “Defending Aristotle/Defending Society in Early 17th Century Paris.” In Wissensideale und Wissenskulturen in der frühen Neuzeit (Ideals and Culture of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe), edited by Claus Zittel and Wolfgang Detel, 135–160. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2002. Gassendi, Pierre. Apologia in Jo. Bap. Morini librum, cui titulus Alae Telluris fractae. Epistola IV De motu impresso a motore translato. Una cum tribus Galilaei Epistolis de conciliatione Scripturae S. cum systemate Telluris mobilis. Lugduni: Apud Guillelmum Barbier, 1649. Gassendi, Pierre. Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre les Aristotéliciens. Edited and translated by Bernard Rochot. Paris: J. Vrin, 1959. Gassendi, Pierre. Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos. In quibus praecipua totius Peripateticae doctrinae fundamenta excutiuntur… Amstelodami: Apud Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1649. Gassendi, Pierre. Exercitationum paradoxicarum adversus Aristoteleos libri sep­ tem… Gratianopoli: Ex Typographia Petri Verderii Typog. Regij, 1624. Gassendi, Pierre. Opera omnia in sex tomos divisa. Lugduni: Sumptibus Laurentii Anisson, & Ioan. Bapt. Devenet, 1658 (abridged OO). Gassendi, Pierre. The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility, Being the Life of the Renowned Nicolaus Claudius Fabricius, Lord of Peiresk, Senator of the Parliament at Aix. Translated by William Rand. London: J. Streater for Humphrey Moseley, 1657. Gassendi, Pierre. The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi. Translated by Craig B. Brush. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972. Jones, Howard. Pierre Gassendi 1592–1655: An Intellectual Biography. Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1981. Joy, Lynn Sumida. Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Kahn, Didier. “The Rosicrucian Hoax in France.” In Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, edited by William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton, 235–344. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Lachèvre, Frédéric. Le Procès du poète Théophile de Viau, 2 vols. Paris: Champion, 1909. Lachèvre, Frédéric. Mélanges. Paris: Champion, 1920.

Gassendi’s Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus Aristoteleos  73 Launoy, Jean de. De varia Aristotelis in academia parisiensi fortuna … liber. Lutetiae Parisiorum: Typis Edmundi Martini, 1653. LoLordo, Antonia. Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Maia Neto, José R. Academic Skepticism in Seventeenth-Century French Philosophy: The Charronian Legacy, 1601–1662. Cham: Springer, 2014. Martin, Craig. Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Martin, Henri-Jean. Livre, pouvoirs et société à Paris au 17e siècle (1581–1701). Genève: Droz, 1969. Martinet, Monette. “Chronique des relations orageuses de Gassendi et de ses satellites avec Jean-Baptiste Morin,” Corpus 20/21 (1992): 47–64. Mersenne, Marin. Correspondance du Père Marin Mersenne, 18 vols. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1932–1988 (abridged CM). Mersenne, Marin. La Vérité des sciences. A Paris: Chez Toussainct du Bray, 1625. Mersenne, Marin. L’Impiété des deistes, athées, et libertins de ce temps. A Paris: Chez Pierre Billaine, 1624. Mersenne, Marin. Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim. Lutetiae Parisiorum: Sumptibus Sebastiani Cramoisy, 1623. Miller, Peter N. Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Morin, Jean-Baptiste. Alae Telluris fractae…Adversus clarissimi viri Petri Gassendi … libellum de motu impresso, à motore translato… Parisiis: Sumptibus authoris, 1643. Morin, Jean-Baptiste. Defensio suae dissertationis de atomis et vacuo adversus Petri Gassendi philosophiam Epicuream, contra Francisci Bernieri Andegavi Anatomiam ridiculis muris. Parisiis: Apud authorem, 1651. Morin, Jean-Baptiste. Dissertatio …de atomis, et vacuo contra Petri Gassendi philosophiam Epicuream. Parisiis: Apud authorem, 1650. Morin, Jean-Baptiste. Réfutation des theses erronées d’Anthoine Villon … et Estienne de Claves. A Paris: Chez l’Autheur, 1624. Murr, Sylvia, ed. Gassendi et l’Europe, 1592–1792. Paris: Vrin, 1997. Namer, Émile. Documents sur la vie de Jules-César Vanini de Taurisano. Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1965. Namer, Émile. La Vie et l’œuvre de J.C. Vanini, Prince des Libertins, mort à Toulouse sur le bûcher en 1619. Paris: J. Vrin, 1980. Patrizi, Francesco. Discussionum peripateticarum Tomi IV... Basileae: ad Perneam Lecythum, 1581. Peiresc, Claude Nicolas Fabri de. Lettres de Peiresc publiées par Philippe Tamizey de Laroque, vol. IV. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1893 (abridged TL). Piaia, Gregorio. “The Histories of Philosophy in France in the Age of Descartes.” In Models of the History of Philosophy, vol. II: From the Cartesian Age to Brucker, edited by Gregorio Piaia and Giovanni Santinello, 3–91. Dordrecht: Springer, 2011. Popkin, Richard H. The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle, revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 20033. Poterie, Antoine de. “Mémoires touchant la naissance, vie et mœurs de Gassendi,” Revue des questions historiques 22 (1877): 213–240.

74  Daniel Garber Rochot, Bernard. “La vie, le caractère et la formation intellectuelle.” In Pierre Gassendi: Sa vie et son œuvre 1592–1655, edited by Centre International de Synthèse, 9–58. Paris: Albin Michel, 1955. Rochot, Bernard. Les Travaux de Gassendi sur Épicure et sur l’atomisme 1619– 1658. Paris: Vrin, 1944. Rochot, Bernard. “Manuscrits inconnus de Gassendi,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 144 (1954): 400–401. Schmitt, Charles. Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1469–1533) and his Critique of Aristotle. Dordrecht: Springer, 1967. Spink, John S. French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire. London: Athlone, 1960/New York: Greenwood Press, 1969. Yates, Frances A. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London–Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972, 1978, 1986.

3 Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism Gianni Paganini

3.1 Introduction: Ancient and Modern Skepticism—Gassendi’s New Context Although early modern skeptics heavily relied on the texts of Sextus Empiricus, which were edited and translated into Latin for the first time by Gentian Hervet in 1562 and by Henri Estienne in 1569, the context in which they were reading these works was very different to that of the Greek authors, such as Sextus, or of Romans, like Cicero. In the religious field, the moderns had to cope with a dogmatic faith like Christianity rather than with a civic, mythical and traditional religion like the ancient one; in the philosophical field, instead of opposing dogmatic Hellenistic systems, notably Epicureanism and Stoicism, they were confronted with Scholasticism or new kinds of metaphysics, such as those of Campanella and Descartes. Finally, early modern skeptics were confronted with the dogmatism of the new science. These three major innovations contributed to reshaping early modern skepticism and had a direct impact on Gassendi’s thought.1 A distinguishing feature of early modern skepticism was the tendency to join forces with empiricism. While Sextus had warned against mingling skepticism with seemingly similar doctrines, in the final part of his Apologie de Raimond Sebond, Montaigne emphasized, by contrast, the special kinship: in metaphysics, between skepticism and Heraclitism, both of which supported some sort of universal mobilism; and in epistemology, between skepticism and empiricism.2 In the Apology, Montaigne used the French term fantaisie as the equivalent not of the Aristotelian notion of phantasia (i.e., the faculty of imagination), but rather of the Stoic phantasia, meaning “sensible representation.” Henri Estienne used the same word to render in Latin the Greek phainomenon, the word that Sextus had used to mean “appearance.”3 This created a close link, starting from the vocabulary, between skepticism and empiricism. As we shall see, these two trends are tightly interwoven in Gassendi’s thought. Furthermore, empiricism, along with skepticism, became a barrier erected

DOI: 10.4324/9781315521732-5

76  Gianni Paganini by the moderns against Scholastic metaphysics and Aristotle’s dominion, treated as an intellectual tyranny. Ancient skepticism, in its various forms, represented an autonomous position with its own objective. Whether it positively professed akatalep­ sia (“nihil sciri”)—as did a part of the membership of the new Academy (Arcesilaus)—or opened to a probabilistic assessment of opiniones (Carneades), or recommended instead endless investigation (zetesis), like Pyrrho and Sextus, each skeptical faction believed themselves to be the non plus ultra of epistemological investigation, not to be overcome by, or confused with, any other philosophical stance. The moderns, by contrast, displayed a freer attitude, drawing from various skeptical positions and sometimes also from non-skeptical doctrines. For them, skepticism was often the preliminary stage of a wider strategy aimed at going beyond the mere suspension of judgment (epokhé). Accordingly, they picked up arguments from both Pyrrhonian and neo-academic sources, practicing a kind of eclecticism inside and outside the purview of skepticism.4 In this context, Gassendi stood out as an eclectic thinker that borrowed from Epicureanism the supplement of empiricism necessary to solve the puzzles raised by skepticism and, conversely, used skeptical doubts both to oppose any form of metaphysical dogmatism (Aristotelian and Cartesian) and to test the solidity of his own philosophical and scientific stance. Skeptical arguments therefore functioned in different ways for Gassendi, depending on the different contexts and the aims he was pursuing, and according to the different phases of his intellectual evolution. It is thus necessary to distinguish between different functions and meanings of early modern skepticism, being a more complex position than ancient skepticism. There is first a critical and limiting aspect, which defines the range within which certain knowledge is attainable. This aspect has a dual function: a destructive aspect, against dogmatism that claims to overcome the boundaries of phenomena; and a constructive aspect, toward a knowledge that remains within the limits set by ordinary and scientific experience defined with various terms (apparentia, phaenomena, experimenta etc.).5 Then there is a corrective function related to metaphysics, although Gassendi on this point remains somewhat ambiguous.6 On the one hand, he declares that inner nature, or essence, or substance (on this point his vocabulary is floating) remains unknowable and is therefore subject to doubt; on the other hand, especially in his later work, he tends to replace the notion of “inner nature” or essence by the atomic structure, which should account for sensible qualities as the old metaphysics of substances accounted for the accidents. In this latter case, the essential nature becomes accessible, at least in terms of hypotheses and probability, which makes it possible to build a physics of body. Even so, however, skepticism cannot be completely dismissed, as the atomic structure is not directly accessible to the senses: few of the effects

Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism  77 deriving from the atomic structure can be verified. In this connection, Gassendi turns to the method of hypotheses and the use of signs, which cannot yield full certainty but only a greater or lesser probability. Instead of the akatalepsia and epokhé which he praises in the Exercitationes, the philosophy he recommends in the Syntagma philosophicum classifies the various levels of doubt and certainty, from the direct and indubitable evidence of the sensible appearances, through probability and likelihood, up to the inaccessibility of the deep structure of bodies. Thus Gassendi, throughout his works, drew not only on Pyrrhonism but also on Academic skepticism.7 Early modern skepticism also entailed theological consequences. Gassendi tries to articulate faith and reason according to the “limiting” or critical aspect of skepticism. For him, doubt is the typical human condition distinguishing creatures from the creator: only the latter can penetrate the inner essences or substances of the things because he has built them. In this connection, Gassendi appropriates the model of the “craftsman’s (or maker’s) knowledge,” endorsed also by authors such as Sanches and Mersenne; according to the model, knowing a thing is tantamount to knowing how to build it. In this perspective, as Amos Funkenstein observed, knowledge of “essences” pertains just to God who made things, whereas men have “perfect” knowledge only of the “artificial objects” whose plan is “in our minds.”8 This model has a double effect: on the one hand, it encapsulates a warning addressed to homunciones (“little men”) to be humble before their divine master; on the other hand, the model allows a relative autonomy to mechanisms, which can be entirely known in their laws and working when they are created or recreated by the technique of a human maker. Moreover, Gassendi often speaks of “Nature” as the subject of its own operations, even if it is intended that it be ultimately subordinated to God. After all, Gassendi was not entirely a skeptic, and even when he shared some skeptical trends or arguments, he did so aiming at idiosyncratic goals that went beyond pure skepticism.9 He very often combined skepticism, in its different variants, with other philosophical motifs, first of all empiricism and Epicureanism. On the other hand, reflection on skepticism, either pro or con, ran through all the major phases of his work, from the polemic against Aristotelianism to the ‘resurrection’ of Epicureanism, passing through the objections to Descartes and the scientific and astronomical studies. Saul Fisher was hence right in claiming that “we best understand Gassendi’s theory of empirical knowledge as an attempt to resolve skeptical worries.”10

3.2 Gassendi and Late Renaissance Skepticism In order to study the impact of skepticism on Gassendi’s thought, one must distinguish between the different stages of his work. The Exercitationes

78  Gianni Paganini paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos is representative of the first phase. Gassendi wrote them between 1620 and 1624, but only the first book (1624) was published while he was alive. Most probably, he declined to publish the complete Exercitationes out of fear of the uproar created by his attacks on Aristotle, as this was a period in which the Sorbonne defended the truth of Scholastic metaphysics as the foundations of knowledge against the anti-Aristotelian and atomistic theses supported by Jean Bitaud, Étienne de Clave and Antoine Villon. It is also possible, as Lynn Joy has suggested, that Gassendi was impressed by the ‘scientific’ project expounded by Mersenne in La vérité des sciences, published in 1625.11 In reality, the polemical target of the Exercitationes is not so much Aristotle himself, but rather the Aristotelians, whom Gassendi blames for having suppressed the libertas philosophandi. Gassendi borrows elements from the humanistic and Renaissance polemic against dogmatism. Combining in an eclectic way different skeptical trends, he praises not only the ancient “Academic and Pyrrhonian akatalêpsia”12 but also the modern protagonists of the anti-Scholastic movement, like Erasmus, Vives, Pierre de la Ramée, Gianfrancesco Pico (Giovanni Pico’s nephew and author of Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium, the first comprehensive work based on Sextus Empiricus’ writings), and Charron.13 Sanches is not mentioned but he was likely to have been another important reference, even though Gassendi was opposed to his excessive epistemological pessimism. The second book of the Exercitationes, left unpublished until 1658, is a sustained attack on the Aristotelian logic to which Gassendi referred as “dialectica,” and it culminates in Exercitatio VI, where the author devotes all his energies to demolishing the Aristotelian conception of science (episteme). This section draws extensively on knowledge of ancient and modern skeptical topics and arguments. It is not by chance that this exer­ citatio, beginning with the title “There is no science and especially no Aristotelian science” (Quod nulla sit scientia, et maxime Aristotelea), reechoes Sanches’ polemical work (Quod nihil scitur), yet adding a qualification that better depicts Gassendi’s goal.14 The author’s attack is not on science or knowledge in general, like the general attack of Sanches, but is specifically directed against the Aristotelian notion of science. Therefore, the fulcrum of the argument is an attempt to refute the deductive and syllogistic paradigm of demonstration. Gassendi, however, is more careful than his Renaissance predecessors to distinguish between two different conceptions of science.15 The second conception will be addressed in the next section; according to the first, science is “certain and evident knowledge of the object, gained through the notion of necessary cause or in a demonstrative way.”16 This definition, which is typically Aristotelian, suffers from the difficulties already illustrated by Sanches and Campanella, who followed the nominalists by casting doubt on the reality of universals and the possibility of attaining them by induction, and also on

Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism  79 essentialistic ontology, with its divisions in categories, genres, and species. Gassendi detects a “petitio principii” affecting the validity of syllogism, since the truth of a particular conclusion must be already included in the universal premise (‘Socrates is mortal’ must be already known when one states that ‘all men are mortal’). In his Adversus logicos, Sextus Empiricus had already addressed the crucial question “If a demonstration exists,”17 answering in the negative, as does Gassendi centuries later in Exercitatio II, v: “That demonstration, such as it is commonly depicted, does not exist.”18 However, there are scarce traces of Sextus’ attacks in this exercitatio, except from some references to the error of “dialleles” (circular argument) and to the illegitimacy of “hypotheses.” Basically, Gassendi’s criticism of syllogism is much more akin to that of Sanches, consisting in showing the impossibility of any “scientific” demonstration, in the dogmatic and Aristotelian sense of this term.

3.3 Appearance and Opinion: Gassendi’s Eclectic Skepticism The alternative conception of “science” proposed in the Exercitationes is less ambitious than the Aristotelian episteme and more adequate to the real possibilities of human knowledge, grounded in experience. Gassendi actually proposes “an experimental and appearance-relative knowledge,”19 where the word “experimental” mostly refers to the prescientific meaning of this term, that is, the ordinary sensible experience and not any laboratory technique. Thus, it is an investigation that programmatically rests on the level of observable phenomena, giving up any pretense of grasping the essence or nature of objects in themselves. This exercitatio is a digest of ancient and modern doubts. As in the first five of the tropes compiled by Aenesidemus and attributed to “the elder skeptics,”20 Gassendi stresses the varieties of empirical appearances according to differences of subject (man or animal), temperaments, situations, positions, etc. In this connection, he also introduces a modern theme, the issue of the “perfect temperament” of the knower: “let us imagine a man who has a perfect temperament, the most apt to perceive true and natural qualities of all things: do you believe that the issue can be resolved this way?”21 We can consider the “perfect temperament” as a “pattern of normality” that might differentiate between various sensations and tell which should be the “normal,” and therefore true sensation. Sanches had already evoked this argument but objected that this “perfection” would be practically impossible to attain, and especially to maintain, considering the perpetual instability and variability of humors affecting human life.22 Even conceding the possibility of a “perfect temperament,” Gassendi’s objection goes further; like Montaigne, he considered the status of any empirical perception to be quite separate from the nature of what is perceived:

80  Gianni Paganini From all this it follows that we must consider the properties or qualities, which we attributed to objects, not to be inherent in things by nature, but rather to refer to them extrinsically, by virtue of their action on us.23 Therefore, every appearance is the result of the mixed interplay between subject and object, both in perpetual change; no perception is a faithful copy of reality, nor is it a pure representation of the object, even in the improbable case of a supposed “perfect temperament.” All appearances, even contradictory ones, are supported by their own reasons just as they have their own reality at the time they occur.24 Of course, mind and reasoning could distinguish between various sensible appearances, yet it is clear that understanding is also based on these empirical data: Gassendi affirms that “every information” (notitia) must be brought back to senses, as to a “supreme court” (tribunal supremum).25 The consequence is that this ground is unsteady and that this instability affects all operations of reason. In recognition of these limitations on human knowledge, to Gassendi only an alternative model of knowledge seems viable and useful. His view is given a succinct expression in the title of the sixth section: “It is possible to know only how one thing appears to another.”26 Gassendi, however, does not hesitate to call this kind of phenomenal knowledge “science,”27 stressing the fact that appearances can be collected, compared with one another, and corrected, according to the “historical” (i.e., descriptive) model of observational astronomy, even while giving up the search for causes and therefore without any pretense of demonstration. Of course, this “science” is bound by the epistemologically weak status of phaenomena—such that, as he says, it is almost impossible to distinguish between “science” and “opinion.”28 Apparently, the word “opinion” is taken from the neo-academic vocabulary, especially that of Carneades. The latter, by contrast with the Stoics, conceded that the wise may hold “opinions,” as long as they are not dogmatically taken as a criterion of truth, but are considered open to revision at any moment. Dealing in opinions, the wise should remain aware of their fallibility. In Gassendi there is also an important shift from the practical to the epistemic meaning of “opinio,” even though the episteme allowed by the Exercitationes is only a weak science, bounded to contingent appearances. While Carneades attributed to the “persuasive opinion” (pithanon) mainly the practical function of discerning between doxai in ordinary life, Gassendi, by contrast, somehow raises the epistemic value of “opinion,” linking, as he often does, the latter to “science” or “knowledge.” Furthermore, drawing on Cicero, who had translated pithanon by proba­ bile or verisimile, he claims that, due to the weakness of the human intellect, we can state only “probable conjectures.”29 All this opens the way to a more ratiocinative status of opinio, or to a practice of rational inference

Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism  81 starting from sensible appearances and developing into “opinions.” This much is communicated in the inchoative or prospective aspect because the author of the Exercitationes does not expound the complex and detailed theory of degrees of probability that Carneades had formulated and Sextus had reported,30 although it would have been pertinent to a probabilistic approach to knowledge. Despite all these narrow qualifications of ‘science,’ the outcome of the Exercitationes was not the ‘desperation’ identified in the case of Sanches. Gassendi instead offers an explicit reappraisal of the realm of ‘appearances’ as rich enough to nourish our appetite of knowledge: Those that wish to philosophize do not fall into desperation because they see that the great philosophers recognize that one cannot know anything: I refer to the deep nature of things, about which they profess themselves ignorant, while from another point of view they know a lot, because of the knowable things, almost nothing is hidden to them.31 According to Gassendi, none of these skeptical restrictions are compatible with recognizing the progressive and cumulative character of empirical knowledge. Whether one says “certain science” or “certain opinion,” “weak science” or “weak opinion,” does not matter.32 What matters, he affirms, are not words but that we all agree that “one cannot know of what kind a thing is in itself or by its nature, but only as it appears to these or those persons.”33 What is constant, at least in the Exercitationes, is that skeptical phenomenalism, probabilism, and empiricism are tightly connected, restraining the field of ‘knowledge’ or ‘opinion’ to objects of direct experience. Science cannot reach beyond the domain of sensible appearances, even though the notion of ‘opinion’ is wider and more flexible than that of “phainomenon.”34

3.4 An Apology for Skepticism In the Exercitationes, Gassendi also makes an apology for the skeptics. Even though they seem to frustrate the natural desire for knowledge taught by Aristotle, “they are not unjust towards nature, when they declare not to know anything,” if knowledge is taken to mean the perfect Aristotelian scire.35 From the point of view of skeptical orthodoxy, Gassendi here blurs the lines that divide the different philosophical families. He does not hesitate to appropriate the neo-academic label ‘nihil sciri’ [that nothing is known] that a true Pyrrhonian would have rejected as a kind of negative dogmatism;36 what is more, he often joins together Academics, Pyrrhonians, and even Epicureans, establishing a bridge between true skepticism, probabilism, and empiricism. In his later works, he will be perfectly able to distinguish Pyrrhonism from

82  Gianni Paganini Academic philosophy.37 This eclecticism in relying on different forms of skepticism is partly due to Gassendi’s advocacy of the “freedom to philosophize,” and partly to the fact that Pyrrhonists and Neo-Academicians, especially Arcesilaus, converged on the goal of epokhé [suspension of judgment].38 The redefinition of the targets of human knowledge goes hand in hand with Gassendi’s reinterpretation of human nature and its ambitions. Just as the unnatural desires must be relinquished, so too the ambition to know “the intrinsic natures and necessary causes” should also be dismissed. For Gassendi, this is “a kind of knowledge due to the angelic nature, even to the divine one, and not surely to us, simple men.”39 In reshaping anthropology, he produces a triple effect: first, by distinguishing between human and divine knowledge, he displays religious humility; secondly, he discards the Scholastic ideal, with its science of essences, as an unrestrained ambition; and finally, he rehabilitates a more modest ideal of knowledge of effects and sensible qualities. It is also noteworthy that Book II of the Exercitationes ends with an apologia for the “Pyrrhonists” against the accusation of incoherence at not being able to live according to skepticism: an old accusation, reported by Diogenes Laërtius, that Gassendi rejects. For Gassendi, as for Sextus before him, it is enough to follow appearances, customs, and natural affections.40 Even if it is a powerful weapon against abstract metaphysics, skepticism risks jeopardizing some relevant aspects of the new science, challenging the status of mathematics, hypotheses, generalizations, and other theoretical ingredients of physical laws. In short, from the perspective of the Exercitationes, all the elements of the scientific enterprise that cannot be directly verified go beyond the limit of phenomena within which fruitful and effective knowledge is possible. Accordingly, the concluding section of Exercitatio VI reviews the main sciences (physics, metaphysics, jurisprudence, ethics, medicine), reducing them to a record or collection of observations, recipes, and conjectures, without any hope of reaching real causal explanations. In metaphysics, Gassendi makes an exception for everything that the orthodox faith renders certain. Even mathematics (geometry and arithmetic) are to be understood as the inspection of figures and numbers as they “appear” to our consideration; they do not reveal the “true causes or natures of intrinsic things.”41 In conclusion, the positive significance of what Gassendi calls “veritas apparentialis” (“truth of the appearances”) or knowledge “experimen­ taliter solum vel secundum apparentiam” is the result of the empiricist turn imparted to skeptical phenomenalism in the French milieu.42 For a supporter of the new science such as Gassendi, however, this narrow limitation was a price that needed to be paid. In the Exercitationes, not only was the search for the real causes of appearances discarded, but also the mathematical laws43 were reduced to imaginative elaborations drawn from empirical perceptions.44

Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism  83

3.5 Limiting Knowledge and Practicing Science—The “Craftsman’s Science” Book I of the Exercitationes was published in 1624, in a context marked by the revival of discussions around skepticism. In that same year, Campanella had already completed Book I of his Metaphysica, which discusses 14 major skeptical dubitationes. This text remained unpublished until 1658, however, due to the censorship imposed by the Inquisition. Mersenne read it in manuscript form and plagiarized large sections for his dialogue on skepticism: La vérité des sciences ou contre les sceptiques ou pyrrhoniens, published in 1625.45 Of the other books that should have made up the whole text of the Exercitationes, we have only a detailed outline: in Book III, Gassendi intended to attack Aristotle’s physics, to refute his doctrine of motion, time and space, and to prove the existence of a vacuum. Book IV aimed to criticize ancient astronomy, showing the possibility of the motion of Earth and of the infinity of the world; in Book V, the author intended to deal with meteors, living beings, and the soul; in Book VI, he wanted to investigate metaphysics, distinguishing between the doctrines of faith, such as God and separate substances, and philosophy; finally, in Book VII, dealing with morality, he meant to rehabilitate Epicurus’ doctrine of voluptas (pleasure).46 In the meantime, Gassendi became involved in astronomical and physical investigations that led him to defend Galileo’s demonstration of the movement of the Earth;47 he also studied the circulation of blood, vision, and optics, and undertook some experiments related to the existence of the void. In this way, the skeptic had direct experience of positive science in a manner that eschewed much in the way of skeptical dogmatism. In the same year, 1625, Gassendi came into epistolary contact with Galileo to whom he declared full support and admiration.48 After Galileo’s condemnation in 1633, however, Gassendi fell back to claiming that Tycho Brahe’s system was more likely to be the correct formulation, partly for the obvious opportunistic reasons and partly owing to the incertitude that still surrounded the Copernican hypothesis.49 All these scientific experiences changed Gassendi’s perspective, even though he remained interested in skeptical paradoxes. Firstly, as for example in the Epistolica exercitatio in qua principia Roberti Fluddi medici reteguntur … (1630), he criticized pseudo-evidence and pseudo-sciences, comparing these, like Mersenne and Naudé, to the magical and cabalistic culture, imbued with Platonism and occultism, which would culminate in the mysterious conspiracy of the Rosicrucians.50 To oppose these dubious speculations, Gassendi recommended a constant recourse to experience and nature. Using Galileo’s famous metaphor, he urged his readers to look at the “book of nature,” instead of searching for mysterious connections between macro- and microcosms: “You have to read the book of nature, if you want to learn something certain.”51

84  Gianni Paganini Skeptical elements are also found in the Epistola ad librum D. Edoardi Herberti Angli De veritate (written in 1634). Herbert of Cherbury’s work, De veritate, was centered on the idea (of Stoic origin) of “common notions,” innate and universal. Against this idea of a “consensus gentium” around these fundamental truths, Gassendi reiterated the value of “historical or experimental” knowledge, which testifies instead to the existence of wide contrasts and variety in all fields of opinions.52 As mentioned above, Gassendi also reaffirmed the limitations that often affect human knowledge, emphasizing one topic that characterized the mechanistic model of the universe: the principle of knowledge of the craftsman. Of natural “objects,” man only learns of accidents, effects, the “surface” or “appearance,” whereas the intimate structure of the thing is left unknown.53 Besides stressing the greater epistemological accessibility of artificial objects in comparison with the natural ones (another thesis which reverses the Aristotelian privileging of nature over technique), this principle of “craftsman’s knowledge” had a major impact on modern science, not only limiting its object but also promoting the method of synthesis and resolution. The principle, on the one hand, reappraised the value of technical and artificial knowledge—contributing to redeeming the social figure of the artisan—and justified the birth of the modern laboratory as a perfect place for discovery and experimentation; on the other hand, the same principle marked the gap between the creatures and the divine creator.54 This is another theme that was absent in ancient skepticism, but which became crucial in the Christian context with the idea of creation. The distinction also made it easier to emphasize the (relative) autonomy of “natural” knowledge: what transcends experience and pertains to man’s supernatural goal is the object of faith. “[F]or the natural man’s state,” insists Gassendi, “just the knowledge of the external qualities that fall under the senses is enough.”55

3.6 Use and Abuse of Skepticism: Gassendi vs. Descartes When, in 1641, Gassendi published his Dubitationes on Descartes’ Meditations (Objectiones quintae), which were then further developed into the fuller Disquisitio metaphysica (1644), he had already begun the study of Epicurus’ life and philosophy (“De vita et doctrina Epicuri”). His primary goal in De vita et moribus Epicuri libri VIII, (published in 1647 but written in 1633–1634) was to ensure the philosopher’s rehabilitation. Gassendi then applied himself to work on the Epicurean doctrine, a task that occupied him for the rest of his life, that is to say from 1633 up until his death. The results of this extensive research were published first as a comment to Book X of Diogenes Laërtius, entirely devoted to Epicurus (Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii, 1649), and then as a standalone treatise, which remained, however, in a fragmentary state until reassembled and published posthumously by his

Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism  85 disciples in Gassendi’s Opera omnia, under the title Syntagma philo­ sophicum, 1658. In his examination of Descartes’ Meditationes, Gassendi found the Cartesian conception of epistemology, metaphysics, and even theology far removed from the empiricism he had derived from his Epicurean readings.56 The Cartesian approach to skepticism (especially in Meditations I and II) was also very different from that of Gassendi. If we compare the two thinkers on this point, we can see that Gassendi differed with Descartes on several points, namely: (1) the method (‘natural’ or ‘artificial’) of doubt; (2) its results; (3) its scope; (4) the value of the cogito; (5) the aporias into which the Cartesian construction falls; (6) the idea of truth; and (7) the purposes at which the doubt can be aimed. Let’s analyze these points one by one. As far as the method is concerned, Gassendi believed that the intellectual process outlined in the Meditationes is characterized by a sudden transition from one phase of unlimited and unjustified doubt to another of dogmatic certainties. Gassendi instead supported a more cautious and limited application of doubt. In fact, Cartesian skepticism is driven by the ambition to free oneself from even the slightest chance of error, including all possible mistakes. As noted by Edwin Curley,57 the meditator conducts some sort of thought experiment, questioning all acquired beliefs in their entirety. This bias led Descartes—this is one of Gassendi’s main reproaches—not only to suspend judgment (as in the skeptical epokhé), but also to equate the uncertain with the false.58 Gassendi does not share Descartes’ aim of grounding unquestionable certainty on metaphysical foundations. From the point of view of someone who, like Descartes, is looking for absolute certainty, the uncertain and the false can be treated equally, as they are both unable to secure evidence. Yet, this precautionary approach, taken to the extreme, extends fallibilism not only to any particular knowledge but also to all human faculties. In a Cartesian perspective, the mere possibility of being mistaken, and not only the fact of being wrong, is enough to motivate skeptical doubt, no matter whether the occasions of error denounced by Descartes are real (as in the case of the errors of the sense), only possible (as with dreams), quite unlikely (as with the evil genius), or even metaphysically impossible (as with the hypothesis of a God deceiver). Thus, Descartes demolishes the whole world of certainties, empirical and rational certainties alike, including mathematics. In opposing Descartes, Gassendi has three major objections: (1) the Cartesian method is artificial (“recurrere ad machinam”) and counterintuitive; (2) equating what is questionable with what is false amounts to a kind of negative dogmatism; (3) universalizing doubt eventually makes its practice impossible. This last point is important to Gassendi: the equivalence of error and doubt cannot be indefinitely generalized, under penalty of losing meaning, since the false, in order to be recognized as such, needs to be compared at least with an instantiation of truth.59 Instead of eliminating all beliefs, as advocated by Descartes, Gassendi suggests practicing a finer

86  Gianni Paganini discernment, because even the act of doubting requires motivation and cannot be decided a priori: One only thing I do not quite understand, and that is why you did not prefer, with all simplicity and in a few words, to feel as uncertain about all the things you had known hitherto, so as to put them aside those which you would recognize to be true, instead of adopting an all new prejudice, considering everything false, instead of stripping yourself of an old one.60 Ultimately, Descartes’ methodical and hyperbolic doubt looks to Gassendi like a prejudice of a new sort, a sort of dogmatic skepticism, oxymoronic though this description may seem. As for the results of the methodical doubt, they do not stand up to scrutiny in the judgment of Gassendi, who maintained that Descartes did not resolve the issues posed by ancient skepticism. The main point regards the criterium veritatis, and especially the criterion of evidence (clear and distinct knowledge); according to Gassendi, this criterion turns out to require another criterion to be validated, and the succeeding criterion still another, and so on ad infinitum. For Descartes, certainty and evidence coincide, while for a skeptic like Gassendi they are distinct, at least in principle, because evidence might be only subjective. For this reason, he keeps asking from his opponent a method that directs and warns us when we deceive ourselves or not, every time we think we perceive something in a clear and distinct way.61 The four rules stated in the Discours de la méthode seem to be either trivial or inadequate to protect us from pseudo-evidence, which is often induced by prejudices. Evidence which, to the observer, might seem to be clear and distinct is not necessarily so. Gassendi, therefore, concludes his examination on a note of disappointment: “We are still waiting for this art or method,” as the observance of Descartes’ rules proved to be compatible with frequent and recognized occasions of error.62 From the skeptical standpoint, the failure of the Cartesian method opens the way to the more “speculative” tropes and in particular to the so-called Agrippa’s trilemma that compelled dogmatists to resort to three alternatives, all rationally unacceptable in the search for proof: infinite regress, circularity, and unjustified premises.63 A remarkable point of dissent concerns the scope of doubt, and in particular whether it should be extended (as in Descartes) to the point of jeopardizing the general assumption of external realism that had never really been questioned by the ancient skeptics. The ancients had criticized the validity of the ‘criteria’ proposed by various ‘dogmatic’ philosophers,

Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism  87 without however casting doubt upon the objective existence of the world and of one’s own body. Gassendi challenges the ‘seriousness’ and the viability of Descartes’ total doubt, contrasting it to common-sense realism. In this, he supports a ‘classical’ and pre-Cartesian application of skepticism, which raised doubts on the adequacy of appearances as compared to things, but not on their existence “outside of us” (ektos): thus, he endorses an essential skepticism (regarding qualities or essences), not an existential one. Gassendi’s critique is explicit on this point: It seems that you not only question that some ideas proceed from existing things outside of us, but also that you doubt the existence of things outside us […] If, therefore, you do not even believe that there is a land, a sky and the stars, why do you walk on earth? Why do you raise your eyes to contemplate the sun? Why do you approach the fire to feel the heat? […] Of course, these things may indeed be said or subtly invented, but it does not take much to be disillusioned; moreover, as you cannot seriously doubt about the existence of these things and you know very well that they are something existing outside of you, let us treat things seriously and in good faith, and get accustomed to speak of things as they really are.64 If it is true, as Burnyeat put it, that in Descartes’ Meditationes the traditional arguments of skepticism support a doubt much more radical than the ancient one,65 Gassendi by contrast appears to be closer to the classical model. A basic dualism between ‘things’ and ‘appearances’ lies behind the phenomenalist skepticism of the author of the Fifth Objections, who thinks to solve the puzzle by assuming as the internal object of knowledge not the truth of the ‘thing,’ but just its appearance. This principle of certainty applies to sensitive phenomena that are susceptible to control and correction, by comparing one appearance with another, without any need to traverse the horizon of the experience. In the same way, Gassendi deals with mathematical truths that he considers to consist in a particular type of ‘appearance’ of an imaginative nature. Thus, he opens the way to the skeptical–empiricist interpretation of mathematics, which held great sway in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from Bayle to Hume.66 Gassendi does not dispute the truth of the cogito, ergo sum, but rather deems it an obvious and trivial evidence, devoid of foundational importance. In fact, according to the Fifth Objections, what one should put in doubt is not the existence of the thinking subject, but the possibility of knowing “its intrinsic nature as a pure thought, that is, its substance in the metaphysical sense, as the underlying entity supporting attributes and accidents of the thing.” Compared to the Cartesian innovation, which identified the res with its constituent attributes (in the case of mind, thought), Gassendi sticks to the more traditional distinction between substance, on the one hand, and attributes and qualities, on the other.

88  Gianni Paganini Therefore, he raises skeptical doubts about the possibility of knowing the essence of the mind.67 Subjected to this criticism, the cogito no longer opens the way to a chain of metaphysical truths but remains within the range of immediate phenomenal evidence or manifest appearances. Gassendi also resumes consideration of the aporias deriving from the more ‘speculative’ tropes of ancient skepticism, especially the famous Agrippa’s trilemma. We have already mentioned the aporia regarding infinite regress. Another fallacy is represented by the circular reasoning (dialleles) identified by Sextus Empiricus.68 Gassendi makes an original use of dialleles, applying it to the Cartesian theme of the divine warrant of knowledge, which had never been contemplated by ancient skeptics. In reference to the famous “circle problem” in the Meditations, Gassendi, like other critics, states that there is a circle in affirming that God exists because we have a clear and distinct idea of its existence, and in founding on God the criterion of clarity and distinction.69 Another vicious circularity can arise from the use of a retrospective divine guarantee ‘downstream’ of cogito. Descartes claims to need this warrant in order to ensure the truth of his knowledge of the outside world and the certainty of his memory of the past, while his critics trace the need for this theological endorsement also ‘upstream’ of cogito, with the result of involving their opponent in another ‘circle.’ Despite Descartes’ protests, Gassendi’s objection has some relevance insofar as he thinks that the cogito, ergo sum is not an immediate evidence, as Descartes thought, but the result of a deductive inference of a syllogistic type, starting from a major premise, such as “everything that thinks exists,” and ending with the conclusion: “therefore I exist.” With this ‘syllogistic’ interpretation, Gassendi reintroduces the charge of ‘circularity.’ In fact, in order to be valid, any syllogism implies that the truth value of premises be preserved over time, because their immediate evidence would of course have expired at the time of the conclusive inference. For this reason, divine guarantee turns out to be necessary before the cogito, whereas it should logically come next to it, the cogito being the first truth, as Descartes argues. Therefore, Gassendi infers that a “circular reasoning” (dialleles) is established between the two propositions (cogito, ergo sum and God is the warrant of any truth).70 Furthe­ rmore, if the cogito, ergo sum depends on prior knowledge (such as “all that thinks exists”), it is not an intuitive evidence but an empirical generalization to which one can apply the same objections already raised in the Exercita­ tiones against induction and knowledge of universals. In conclusion, with his inferential reconstruction of the cogito, Gassendi denies to it the character of an unquestionable foundation.71 The dispute also involves the theoretical justification of Descartes’ program, that is, the concept of truth and its definition. Gassendi opposes a

Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism  89 different notion to the idea of truth as correspondence between true ideas and reality. Even though he does not seriously question the existence of the external world (“it is not possible that you seriously doubt about the existence of these things”), Gassendi does not share the idea of truth as adequacy between knowing and being, which is excluded by his phenomenalistic approach. The author of the Dubitationes prefers to settle more modestly the question at the level of the “truth of phenomena.” This is the only level at which truth survives the challenge of doubt, unlike the inaccessible knowledge of substances. Even conceding to Descartes his hyperbolic argument, the outcome would be far removed from that presented in the Meditations: So, although we may think that we are of such nature that we can be wrong even in things that seem the most true ones [e.g., in the Cartesian hypothesis of the deceiving God], we know, however, that by nature we can know the truth […] and even though we have reason to be wary of truth of all our other knowledge, at least we could not doubt of this, namely that all things appear to us such as they appear, and that it is impossible that it is not true that they appear to us like that.72 Against metaphysical dogmatism, Gassendi relies on the notion of phenomenon as ‘natural affection’ or pathos, according to the warning addressed by Sextus not to mistake the predicate ‘appears’ (phainetai) for the assertive ‘is’ (esti). Gassendi aims at goals different from those of Descartes, as the former interprets skepticism as a kind of empiricist phenomenalism and not as a preamble to a new metaphysics. This leads him to sharply distinguish between phenomena and noumena. By this latter word, Gassendi means only “what is conceived by the mind”; this is Sextus’ definition, to which the modern philosopher adds a clarification addressed against the metaphysical level of knowledge: “as are the so-called natures, the internal and next causes and the properties of these same things.”73 Therefore, unlike Sextus who did not make any substantial difference between them, Gassendi favors the “phenomena” of experience over those of purely intellectual knowledge. Descartes’ cogitations are for Gassendi noumena (devoid of certainty).74 The invitation “not to denigrate skeptics” and to appreciate instead their cautious “natural search” goes hand in hand with the hostility to the idea of pure mens, hostility repaid by Descartes who disqualifies Gassendi’s sensualism, nicknaming him “caro” (flesh).

3.7 Reassessing the Theory of Signs Gassendi started writing the Syntagma philosophicum in 1636. Although it was published only posthumously in 1658, the contents were largely

90  Gianni Paganini anticipated in the Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii (1649). Gassendi revisited the issue of skepticism and outlined a path leading beyond the minimal solution of “scientia apparentialis,” so as to draw a true “Physics,” the title of what constitutes the bulk of the Syntagma. The link between practicing a new science and overcoming skepticism is particularly evident in the “Logic” that opens the Syntagma philosophicum.75 The “Institutio logica,” which concerns propositions, syllogism, and method, is preceded by two books, “On the origin and variety of logic”76 and “On the goal of logic.”77 In the former, Gassendi outlines a history of logic, from its origins, through the classic period (Zeno, the Megarians, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicurus) and the Middle Ages (in reality, only Llull is mentioned), until the moderns (Pierre de la Ramée, Bacon, Descartes). The second book is particularly relevant. There, after mentioning different theories on the criteria of truth (sense and intellect, separately or in combination), Gassendi studies “those that eliminate truth criteria”78 (Gorgias, the neo-academicians like Carneades and Arcesilaus, Cicero, Pyrrho, and Sextus), dealing in particular with the “ways of skeptical epokhé about truth and its criteria.”79 In this connection, he offers an extensive exposition of the modes of Aenesidemus and Agrippa, followed by their refutation. The title of chapter VI is already explicit about the shift contained in the Syntagma: “That something can be known by means of some sign, and this can be judged by means of a criterion.”80 This chapter outlines what Gassendi calls “a middle way between skeptics and dogmatists.”81 Against the former, he denies that “one knows nothing and that there is no appropriate criterion to judge”; against the latter, he denies that they know everything they claim to know, claiming to have a criterion of judgment. For him, now, knowledge is basically a fact from which to start: Most of the things questioned by the skeptics can be known in truth; therefore, there must be some known truth and a criterion suitable to judge.82 Even after this shift to empiricism, skepticism still keeps the great merit of pointing out the crucial issue: how is it possible and legitimate to pass from the level of manifest and sensible evidence to what is not directly perceptible, which ancient skeptics called adela (“hidden things”), opposed to phainomena? As we have seen, Gassendi did not cast doubt on the “veritas apparen­ tialis” as such, but here he starts to investigate the truth “that lies hidden beneath the surface.” This comes down, first of all, to wondering whether there is a ‘sign’ of hidden truths, and then a ‘criterion’ apt to grasp the sign, and “to judge according to it the truth or the thing of which it is a sign.”83 Reflections about the logical instrument of ‘sign’ (semeion)84 therefore become crucial.

Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism  91 After recalling the different classifications of ‘signs’ given by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, Gassendi focuses on that of Sextus, which revolves around the difference between ‘commemorative’ (upomnestika) and ‘indicative’ (endeiktika) signs. The former signs refer to a thing “temporarily hidden,” which can be experienced at a later time; for example, people say that smoke is the sign of fire, although this is not currently visible, but it will be so later. “Indicative” signs, on the other hand, relate to a thing that is “hidden by nature” and not only temporarily.85 For instance, from sweat we infer the existence of invisible pores and from observable actions that of the soul, although neither can ever be perceived. The same is true of the void, that—according to Epicurus’ doctrine—cannot be perceived, even though its existence is necessary in order to make motion possible. Therefore, motion is the “indicative sign” of void. This theory of ‘signs’ combines empirical observation (the sign must be perceived) and rational inference, because, starting from signs, the mind “can come to acquire knowledge of something that is hidden and not perceived by sense.” The theory, therefore, uses two standards, sense and intellect, allowing ratiocinative inferences to go beyond perceptual data.86 It is at this point that Gassendi definitely departs from Pyrrhonist skepticism, opening at the same time the way to a kind of empiricism which is not restricted to direct experience. In fact, Sextus Empiricus confined the range of valid inference only to “commemorative signs.” These signs are based on the memory of past experience, keeping track of the causal association between pairs of events that are both observable, even while one of them is not currently observed. Rejecting “indicative” signs, Sextus excluded the possibility of reaching knowledge of things that are “hidden by nature.” This special kind of sign postulates the existence of causes or conditions that cannot be directly experienced starting from observable effects. On this very point, Gassendi’s stance is different from the Pyrrhonist one. Unlike the ancient skeptics that drew a sharp line between “things concealed by nature” and “things momentarily concealed,” Gassendi considered that a shrewd use of rational inferences like those derived from signs allows us to move from phainomena to adela (unknown things, including those “by nature”), from sensible appearances to their latent causes. Some other examples provided by Gassendi are especially significant, as they are based on the fact that new sciences and scientific instruments can make accessible what was previously invisible. The “Logic” of the Syntagma philosophicum mentions the example of the mite, whose existence became visible through the microscope, after an indicative “sign” (the track of its movement) joined to the reasoning that had already suggested its presence. Democritus had conjectured the stellar nature of the Milky Way which was later confirmed by the telescope. The different positions of Venus, before and behind the sun, can be inferred from the

92  Gianni Paganini observation of its phases, while they are experimentally confirmed thanks to the telescope. Finally, the movement of the Earth was discovered by Copernicus using as a ‘sign’ changes in the apparent size of Mars.87 Besides revealing the superiority of the moderns over the ancients,88 all these examples demonstrate how realities “occult (adela) by nature” in Sextus’ consideration, become knowable through the ‘signs’ detected by scientific observation. This means, for Gassendi, that the boundary between ‘hidden’ and ‘manifest’ is not fixed once and for all, as the ancient skeptics thought, but is continually shifting with the progress of knowledge and technology. In reality, Epicurean atomism can only partially be construed by Gassendi as a result of perceptible ‘signs.’ If void is ‘indicated’ by the sensible experience of motion, the same does not apply to the whole theory of atoms, which requires a more complex and ratiocinative inference. Let us have a look at the crucial Book III of the Syntagma philo­ sophicum, where Gassendi deals with the “material principle or the first matter of things”89 showing that it is represented by atoms.90 In this book, competing with many other ancient and modern theories,91 atomism turns out to be a better explanation of the properties of matter for two reasons. The first can be considered as a default argument, because, after a careful examination of the other doctrines, atomism proves not to incur any of the difficulties affecting the other philosophies.92 The consequences of the atomic theory are confirmed or at least not invalidated by the observed phenomena; as James Allen has described it, the basic tenets of Epicureanism “are proved true because their contradictories are contested by the phenomena.”93 The second and more important reason is that atoms are the only entities apt to play the role of material principle, for which Gassendi is looking94: they enable one to account for transmutations, compositions, and dissolutions without falling into unacceptable inconveniencies, like annihilation (Gassendi recalls the famous axiom: “cum natura nihil ex nihilo faciat, redigatve in nihilum”), resolution ad infinitum, and reduction to mathematical points devoid of any size, therefore inapt to make up real bodies.95 Furthermore, the atomic theory fits the general mechanistic framework to which Gassendi subscribes. This can be roughly brought back to three basic principles: that nothing can act at a distance, that every effect requires a cause (in physics, a material cause), that everything is made with motion.96 LoLordo, who has detailed these principles, has also remarked that Gassendi’s big picture of the world (in terms of space, time, and atomic motion) is “put forth with much greater certainty than any explanation of particular phenomena,” whereas more detailed speculations about the fine texture of bodies “are intended to make a corpuscularian explanation imaginable, without carrying out any great commitment to truth or completeness.”97 Nor does the theory of signs, even in the broader version put forth in Syntagma, make up for the lack of sensible evidence, as

Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism  93 happens in the example of the void,98 because most signs involve competing explanations, according to the “multiple method,” or the “possible method,” as Epicurus calls it.99 According to Fisher, Gassendi’s appeals to indirect evidence for an atomistic matter theory can be conceived in terms of a “most likely hypothesis,” partially confirmed by indicative signs, including those afforded by microscopic observations. All things considered, Fisher portrays Gassendi’s “grand strategy” or “long argument” in defense of atomism as an “inference to the best explanation” that can successfully challenge different theories, showing their inconsistencies and/or incompatibilities with phenomena, and at the same time better and more widely accounting for perceptual data.100 Basically, atomism is elected as the best theory because of its “explanatory power” and not because of its inferential structure.101

3.8 Skeptical Modes, Suppositions, and the Matter Theory Gassendi is perfectly aware of the merely probable nature of this kind of hypotheses. In the same Book III of the Physics of the Syntagma philo­ sophicum, after stating the advantages of atomism over the competing theories, and before dealing with “properties, size and figure of atoms,” he presents his achievement as follows: “Having made the existence of atoms somehow probable, we now have to investigate what their properties are.”102 Afterwards, when it is about “weight and motion of atoms,” he stresses that the epistemological status of these detailed explanations is even weaker, taking into account our ignorance of the causes that act at the micro-level: it is possible to a certain extent to account for various qualities of aggregates or compounded things starting from the principles we have assumed; about these latter, however, we can only say that this one is this way, the other another way, by the necessity of their nature, as we ignore the true cause by which they are so. In reality, we ask in vain about this cause, otherwise we must proceed to infinity.103 As “true causes” are unknown, we are not in the realm of “necessity,” but only in that of the “possible.” In the last chapter, in which “it seems that we can admit atoms as the material principle of things or the first matter,” Gassendi shows how Epicureanism must be corrected to fit with Christianity. In physics, these amendments boil down to the following: atoms were created by God, in a finite number, their inner motion still derived from God, at the moment of creation. In the follow up, theological considerations and physical hypotheses join together to show how the world could be supposed to have been arranged so as to reach the current state. All this, Gassendi

94  Gianni Paganini says, can only be conjectured (“supponi potest”). Supposedly, God drew corpuscles out of a mass of matter; supposedly, He gave atoms inner motion to make up aggregations; supposedly, He formed “seeds of things” from selections of atoms, to start the entire sequence of generations; finally, it is enough to suppose that generation has started in this way, to imagine that it will continue indefinitely, as atoms and motion continually provide the matter of generation. It is only at the end of this list of “suppositions” that Gassendi states the main thesis of his atomic theory: “atoms are such that everything comes from them, and neither from everything else or one from another,” which means that they really are “the material principle” which gives the title to Book III.104 In other contexts, Gassendi uses the word “hypothesis” with the meaning of a “probable excogitation useful to make calculations,” for example, when he discusses the astronomical system of the world (“de mundo dis­ serentes systema”).105 Elsewhere, he uses the word “likelihood” (verisi­ militudo). Thus, he defends Galileo against the Aristotelian Le Cazre who blamed him for assuming a non-demonstrated postulate (hypothesis) in his study of the accelerated motion of heavy bodies. Gassendi’s argument specifically refers to the peculiarity of physics. Whereas in “pure mathematics” neither “likelihood” (verisimilitudo) nor “supposition” (suspicio) but only “evidence” is acceptable, in “physics and mixed mathematics” one can be “happy” with just “verisimilitude,” because of the “obscurity” of the human mind. This is the reason why we can admit “postulates,” provided that they are “likely.”106 The atomic theory and in particular the hypotheses regarding the fine structures of sense organs can account for many of the skeptical puzzles about perceptual mistakes. Gassendi can thus respond to Aenesidemus’ modes.107 Especially relevant are the first four modes, regarding the differences between humans and animals, or between different men, or of the same man at different times and conditions. In response, Gassendi aims to overcome the skeptical status of the subjective pathe and objectifying appearances, searching for their causes. In this way, also perception can be the “partaker of science”: Two things can be ascertained and proved as true. One is the cause that is the same in the thing or object, the other is the different disposition of the faculties receiving the effect.108 The Syntagma philosophicum thus inaugurates the modern trend of empiricism that joins together the study of perceptions and the investigation of their physiology. These considerations apply to heat, taste, smell, color, sound, namely the ‘secondary qualities,’ as well as to the visual data concerning size, location, shape, movement—the so-called ‘primary’ qualities. Thanks to an elaborate reconstruction of the physiology of perception (in particular, vision and optical phenomena), Gassendi can now

Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism  95 account for the ‘necessity’ of these various appearances, independently of their variety: we can say that the object is actually in one way, while the various appearances have the necessary reason of their existence in those faculties in which they are produced.109 The chapters on sense organs show that these reasons are to be sought mainly at four different levels: the fine structure (atomic structure) of the perceived thing; the transmission of motion in which even light results; the medium conveying motion; the corpuscular texture of sense organs. These very same factors (particles and motion through the medium and nerves) can account for a whole host of psychological events and faculties, apart from immaterial intellect.110 Similar considerations regard the other skeptical modes (location, distance, mixture, constitution, quantity, rarity, and frequency). Not even these modes prevent that things actually be of a certain nature and provoke these or those appearances in one or the other subject by some physical necessity.111 All the appearances can be investigated in a scientific way, as in the famous example of the tower that seems round from afar, while at close quarters it appears squared.112 ‘Appearances’ are now labeled as ‘qualities of things’: they can be compared and corrected with each other, and their relationship with the internal structure of the objects can also be investigated up to a certain extent. This global reconsideration of skepticism affects also the more ‘speculative’ modes, especially Agrippa’s trilemma. The focus is again on demonstration, as in the Exercitationes, but the conclusion is very different. There is a demonstration, Gassendi says, but not of the Aristotelian type, or one that requires a preliminary and rigorous examination of the sign, the criterion and the like; there is at least a demonstration of the kind that in general all well[-]willing, wise and intelligent men would be ready to accept as satisfactory reason, and which one might not be contrary to but by sophistical spirit.113 Skeptical aporias, like regressus ad infinitum and dialleles, are dismissed as contrived: “you have to stop at that demonstration, without either regressing to infinity, or fearing the circular reasoning.” Returning to the example of skin pores, Gassendi affirms now that the sign is evident by the experience of sweat, which would be impossible without pores, while

96  Gianni Paganini the demonstration is “evident by itself,” being made of propositions “per se notae.”114 It is basically the function of understanding that Gassendi evokes here and that seems to no longer be questionable, when rightly used. Of course, the skeptic might object, asking: which intellect, given the wide variety of available opinions that are brought about by different ways of using the understanding? This question might open the way to a regression, in the quest for validation criteria, because also the understanding and its use should be validated and so on, potentially ad infinitum. Yet in the Syntagma, Gassendi claims that regression must stop somewhere, looking at that intellect which, all things considered, brings a proof that cannot be reasonably contradicted, as it is the case with the existence of pores.115 Experience confirms the given explanation and the understanding can prove that any other explanation is not equally convincing or can be discarded.116

3.9 The Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism Did Gassendi thus become a dogmatic, satisfied with self-evidence to the same degree as he was earlier a skeptic about this kind of notion? In reality, the interplay between skepticism and dogmatism is much more complex than it could appear, because the ‘dogmatism’ Gassendi is looking for is still reliant on empiricism. By the affirmations quoted above, one can actually measure the impact of the Epicurean canonic on the author of Syntagma. Following Epicurus, Gassendi thinks that there are signs and inferences “so self-evidently correct that they force themselves on the knower,”117 giving no room for any doubt. On this, Gassendi relies much more on the Epicurean semeiosis described in the Epistle to Herodotus than on the Stoic theory of signs criticized by Sextus. While distinguishing between “what is waiting for confirmation” (prosmenon) and the ‘occult’ (adelon), Epicurus admitted a regular transition from the sensible to the insensible,118 thanks to a ratiocinative stance (epilogismos, reasoning) and a procedure of control, albeit a negative one, the so-called noninvalidation (ouk antimarturêsis) by experience. Next to perception that captures signs, the intellectus therefore plays a major role, not only to overcome skeptical doubt about ‘hidden things,’ but also to widen the scope of empiricism and open up to inferences that go beyond perceptual evidence.119 Taken together, skepticism and empiricism complement and correct each other. The former prevents Gassendi from falling into the old essentialist schemes or giving in to the Cartesian pretense of a possibility of grasping substances through their attributes. The latter, starting from

Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism  97 perceptual data used as signs, develops into rational excogitations that explain for phenomena in a causal way, as long as these explanations are neither invalidated by logical fallacies nor contradicted by manifest incompatibilities with other phenomena. All these hypotheses, however, are still tentative and revisable by the light of further knowledge, both empirical and ratiocinative. It was in fact a great step forward to replace the Pyrrhonist opposition between essence and appearance, phenomenon and the thing ‘outside,’ with “a distinction between a hidden inner structure and the manifest sensible qualities that flow from it.”120 This structure is described by Gassendi as “the situation of the corpuscles from which the nature of the thing is constituted” (“conditionem corpusculorum ex quibus illa [natura] est contexta”).121 The idea, however, remains that the “latent nature, the essence and almost the source, the root, the principle and the cause of properties and specific functions” are still largely unknown. “Source and root” can only be “suspected,” because we have no “sensible representation” of this “latent nature.”122 Moreover, it is not sure that this limitation is due to a contingent situation that could be overcome by new and better technical instruments.123 Therefore, a skeptical ingredient remains at the basis of Gassendi’s later empiricism. The modality of ‘science’ accessible to men has much evolved from the pure “truth of appearances” of his early work; it remains, however, still more similar to probability and hypothetical knowledge124 than to the necessity of apodictic demonstration. The more modest quest of ‘verisimilitude’ has replaced the pretense of attaining definitive truth; the reasonable but always revisable certainty that is forced upon us by signs and inference has driven out of science both the illusion of metaphysical evidence and the delusion of Pyrrhonian doubt.

Notes 1 For a general view of the history of skepticism, after the classic Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 20033), see now Gianni Paganini, Skepsis: Le Débat des modernes sur le scepticisme. Montaigne-Le Vayer-Campanella-HobbesDescartes-Bayle (Paris: Vrin, 2008). 2 Cf. Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes, I, 210–235, and Montaigne, “Apologie de Raimond Sebond,” Les Essais, II, xii, ed. by Pierre Villey and Verdun L. Saulnier (Paris: PUF, 1965), 601–603. Montaigne relies on Estienne’s translation of Sextus. 3 On Montaigne’s connection between skepticism and empiricism, influenced by Estienne’s translation of Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes and commentary thereon, see Paganini, Skepsis, 38–52. 4 On the influence of Academic skepticism in the early modern period, cf. Charles B. Schmitt, Cicero Scepticus. A Study of the Influence of the Academica in the Renaissance (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1972); Sylvia Giocanti, “La fécondité des Académiques de Cicéron dans l’histoire du scepticisme,” Astérion 11, http://asterion.revues.org/2334

98  Gianni Paganini 5 This constructive aspect of Gassendi’s thought has been emphasized by Popkin, History, 120–127. 6 The most complete study on Gassendi remains Olivier René Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), which stresses the limits set to Gassendi’s philosophy by skepticism, nominalism, and agnosticism, despite his tendency to slip into materialism (see esp. chapter III: “Les ambiguïtés de l’agnosticisme,” 77–109). For a different approach, cf. Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), which emphasizes the Christianisation of Epicureanism in Gassendi’s philosophy. The most recent and comprehensive studies are those of Antonia LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and, from an epistemological standpoint, Saul Fisher, Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy and Science: Atomism for Empiricists (Leiden: Brill, 2005). 7 See Delphine Bellis, “Nos in Diem Vivimus: Gassendi’s Probabilism and Academic Philosophy from Day to Day,” in Academic Skepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy, eds. Plínio Junqueira Smith and Sébastien Charles (Cham: Springer, 2017), 125–152. 8 See Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 295–299, 320–324. See also below, p. 84. For Sanches’ notion of the maker’s knowledge, see Francisco Sanches, Quod nihil scitur, in Opera philosophica, ed. J. De Carvalho (Coimbra: Revista de Universidade de Coimbra, 1955), 30. 9 See Tullio Gregory, Scetticismo ed empirismo. Studio su Gassendi (Bari: Laterza, 1961). 10 Fisher, Gassendi, 19. 11 See Lynn Sumida Joy, Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 34–38. 12 Exercitationes, Praefatio (OO I, 99). Gassendi explicitly connects the ideal of “freedom of philosophizing” and Cicero’s “integra iudicandi potestas” not only to Academic probabilism, but also to the Pyrrhonist suspension of judgment and subsequent ataraxia (Exercitationes I, ii, 7; OO III, 113a–b). The title of this section emphasizes the freedom afforded by the skeptical approach: “Nimirum Animi libertas, quam Philosophia pollicetur, res pretiosa suavisque est.” 13 Exercitationes, Praefatio (OO I, 99). See also the letter to Jan Baptist Van Helmont of 9.7.1629 (OO VI, 19b–24a), where the same authors are praised. For a parallel between Gassendi’s Exercitationes and Charron, cf. José R. Maia Neto, Academic Skepticism in Seventeenth-century French Philosophy: The Charronian Legacy (Cham: Springer, 2014), 45–65. Contra Popkin, Brundell claimed that Gassendi did not go through a skeptical crisis, presenting Gassendi’s Pyrrhonism as an instrumental weapon against Aristotelianism. See Barry Brundell, Pierre Gassendi. From Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy (Dordrecht–Boston, MA: Reidel, 1987), 26–27, 104–107. This thesis is contradicted by the extensive use of Pyrrhonist arguments in the Exercitationes (see p. 77ff.) and by affinities with many modern protagonists of the skeptical revival: all this shows a deep interest in the skeptical challenge represented both by Sextus’ new editions and modern reappraisal of skepticism. 14 Exercitationes II, vi (OO III, 192–210). 15 For a comparison with Sanches and Montaigne, see Gianni Paganini, “Montaigne, Sanches et la connaissance par phénomènes: Les usages modernes

Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism  99 d’un paradigme ancien,” in Montaigne: scepticisme, métaphysique, théologie, eds. Vincent Carraud and Jean-Luc Marion (Paris: PUF, 2004), 107–136, and for a comparison with Campanella, see Paganini, Skepsis, 101–170. 16 Exercitationes, II, vi, 1 (OO III, 192a). 17 Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Logicos II, 336–481. 18 OO III, 182–191. 19 Exercitationes, II, vi, 1 (OO III, 192a): “scientiam esse notitiam quandam experimentalem et rerum apparentium.” This definition is often reiterated: see ibid., 207a–b. 20 These modes were related by Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes I, 40–78 and Diogenes Laërtius IX, 79–80. 21 Exercitationes II, vi, 5 (OO III, 197b–198a). 22 This idea of the “perfect temperament” is resumed and criticized by Sanches and Montaigne, along the same lines; see Paganini, Skepsis, 27–31. 23 Exercitationes II, vi, 5 (OO III, 200a). 24 Ibid. (OO III, 200b). 25 Exercitationes II, vi, 2 (OO III, 192b). 26 Exercitationes II, vi, 6 (OO III, 203a ff.). 27 Exercitationes, II, vi, 1 (OO III, 192a). 28 Exercitationes, II, vi, 6 (OO III, 206b): “si probe attenderis scientia et opinio possint haberi synonyma.” In this passage, Gassendi refers to the self-refutability of an affirmation like: “one cannot know anything.” Self-contradiction can be averted, claiming that this statement is not ‘scientific,’ in the Aristotelian meaning of the word, even though it has its own “certitudo, atque evidentia ac proinde probabilitas,” relying on “conjectures and quite apparent reasons.” Another way of avoiding the contradiction, truer to Pyrrhonist orthodoxy, is evoked one column later (ibid., 206b), relating the famous example of the purgative taken from Sextus. 29 Exercitationes, I, ii, 7 (OO III, 113b). 30 Cf. Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes I, 227–229; Adv. Math. VII, 176–189. On this, see Mario Dal Pra, Lo scetticismo greco (Bari: Laterza, 19752), 275–281. On the importance of Cicero, one of Gassendi’s main sources, see Carlos Lévy, Cicero Academicus: Recherches sur les Académiques et sur la philosophie cicéronienne (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1992). 31 Exercitationes II, vi, 7 (OO III, 207b). Affirmations like these opened the way for the characterization of Gassendi as a ‘constructive’ or ‘mitigated” skeptic, first in Popkin and then in Fisher. The latter, in a more sophisticated way, sharply distinguishes between “epistemic certainty and reliability,” claiming that Gassendi built a sort of “reliabilism,” according to which “we can have warrant for empirical beliefs though we cannot be wholly certain of them.” This warrant is reduced to a minimum in the Exercitationes, where the only certainty we can have is traced back to appearances as they appear to each person, whereas the warrant will be significantly expanded in Syntagma; see Fisher, Gassendi, 19–28. 32 Exercitationes, II, vi, 6 (OO III, 206b). For a critical edition of this work with a French translation, see Pierre Gassendi, Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre les Aristotéliciens, ed. and trans. Bernard Rochot (Paris: Vrin, 1959). 33 Exercitationes, II, vi, 6 (OO III, 203a). 34 See Exercitationes II, vi, 1–7 (OO III, 192–207). 35 Exercitationes II, vi, 7 (OO III, 206b). 36 Ibid. (OO III, 206a). 37 See, for example, Syntagma philosophicum, Logica, II, ii (OO I, 72b). 38 In a passage of Exercitationes II, vi, 6, Gassendi joins together Pyrrho and Arcesilaus, adding that even Epicurus had followed in Pyrrho’s footsteps

100  Gianni Paganini (OO III, 205a). This same connection between Epicureanism and skepticism is reiterated in the Syntagma philosophicum (OO I, 13b–14a). 39 Exercitationes II, vi, 7 (OO III, 207a). 40 Exercitationes II, vi, 8 (OO III, 209b–210b). For more on Gassendi’s anthropology, see Paganini, “Early Modern Epicureanism: Gassendi and Hobbes in Dialogue on Psychology, Ethics, and Politics,” in Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism, ed. Phillip Mitsis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 671–710. 41 Exercitationes II, vi, 8 (OO III, 207b–209b). 42 Ibid. (OO III, 207a–b). 43 According to Gassendi, the mathematician simply draws attention to the “appearances”; he does not look for a “middle term” as in the Aristotelian syllogism. Therefore, mathematics can be included in the broader kind of “scientia apparentialis.” Cf. OO III, 208b–209a. 44 Gregory often describes Gassendi’s idea of science as “a horizontal organization of phenomena” in opposition to the “vertical structures” characterizing Aristotelian physics and metaphysics (see Gregory, Scetticismo ed empirismo, 174), or as a “descriptive and historical science” (ibid., 178). I think it would be better to limit this description to the first phase (Exercitationes), whereas, in Syntagma philosophicum, Gassendi will look for a deeper ‘vertical’ relation connecting appearances to their causes placed into the atomic structure that lies behind the surface of things. 45 On this plagiarism, see Gianni Paganini, “Mersenne plagiaire: Les doutes de Campanella dans la Vérité des sciences,” xviie siècle 57 (2005): 747–767. 46 Exercitationes, Praefatio (OO III, 102). 47 See chapters by Sakamoto and Palmerino in this volume. 48 OO VI, 4b. 49 However, in the Epistolae de motu impresso a motore translato (1642) and in the Epistolae de proportione qua gravia decidentia accelerantur (1646), Gassendi endorses the Copernican theory and supports Galileo’s proof of the motion of the Earth based on the phenomenon of the tides. See Palmerino’s chapter in this volume. 50 See Mehl’s chapter in this volume. 51 Fluddanae philosophiae examen (OO III, 266). 52 Ad librum Herberti De veritate (OO III, 413a). 53 Ibid. (OO III, 413b–414a). 54 The consistence between skepticism, theology, and anti-essentialist metaphysics in Gassendi has been emphasized by Osler, Divine Will, 102ff. 55 Ad librum Herberti (OO III, 413b). 56 See chapters by Fisher and LoLordo in this volume. 57 Edwin M. Curley, Descartes Against the Skeptics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 44. Cf. also Henri Gouhier, La Pensée métaphysique de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 19692), 37. On the different use of skepticism by Descartes and Gassendi, see Gianni Paganini, Scepsi moderna: Interpretazioni dello scetticismo da Charron a Hume (Cosenza: Busento, 1991), 85–121; Gregory, Scetticismo ed empirismo, 78–108; and Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi, 121–134. 58 René Descartes, Meditationes, II (AT VII, 17). 59 Obiectiones quintae (AT VII, 333). 60 Ibid. (AT VII, 257–58). 61 OO III, 317a. 62 Instantiae (OO III, 315b–317b). See also Obiectiones quintae (AT VII, 297 and 318). Gassendi’s objections to Descartes’ rule of evidence are examined

Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism  101 in depth by Harry G. Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers and Madmen: The Defence of Reason in Descartes’s Meditations (Indianapolis, IN–New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 146ff. 63 See p. 95. 64 Obiectiones quintae (AT VII, 282). 65 Myles F. Burnyeat, “Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed,” Philosophical Review 91 (1982): 3–40. 66 David Sepkoski, Nominalism and Constructivism in Seventeenth-Century Mathematical Philosophy (London–New York: Routledge, 2007), esp. chap. 2. 67 See esp. Obiectiones quintae (AT VII, 271ff.). 68 Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes I, 169. 69 Instantiae (OO III, 316a): tum praecipua tua certitudo non a Deo, notitiave de illo habita dependeat: imo certitudo notitiae de Deo, firmitatem suam ex illa sortiatur, possitque adeo omnis certitudo de quacumque alia re non ad certitudinem de exsistentia et veracitate Dei, sed ad certitudinem illius tuae propositionis ego cogito revocari. 70 This objection of falling into circularity is addressed to Descartes also by Mersenne and Arnauld (Cf. AT VII, 214; Descartes’ response: AT VII, 246– 247). On this topic, see Curley, Descartes, 96ff., and Paganini, Scepsi, 104–107. 71 Agrippa’s trilemma is commented upon also in Syntagma philosophicum (OO I, 75b). 72 Instantiae (OO III, 290b). 73 Ibid. (OO III, 286a–b). 74 For the distinction between phainomena and noumena cf. Instantiae (OO III, 286a). 75 Syntagma philosophicum (OO I, 31ff.); see Garau’s chapter in this volume. The first draft of the “Logica” dates back to 1636 and according to Howard Jones, it already contained a theory similar to the final one; see H. Jones, Pierre Gassendi, Institutio Logica (1658): A Critical Edition with Translation and Introduction, ed. and trans. Howard Jones (Van Gorcum: Assen, 1981), XLV–XVII. See also the more recent edition by Sylvie Taussig: Pierre Gassendi, La Logique de Carpentras, ed. and trans. Sylvie Taussig (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012). In the Syntagma philosophicum, Gassendi mentions the new optical instruments (telescope and microscope), includes more materials on sensible data, is more exact on the relationship between sense and reason, and deals in more detail with the topic of signs. 76 OO I, 35–66. 77 OO I, 67–90. 78 OO I, 69–71. 79 OO I, 72–75. 80 OO I, 79–85. 81 OO I, 79a. 82 OO I, 80a. 83 OO I, 80a-b. 84 On Gassendi’s theory of signs, see Fisher, Gassendi, 43–54. The signs occupy in Gassendi’s theory the same place as the causal link in Hobbes. For a comparison, see Gianni Paganini, “Hobbes and the ‘Continental’ Tradition of Scepticism,” in Scepticism as a Force in Renaissance and Post-Renaissance Thought, eds. Richard H. Popkin and José R. Maia Neto (Amherst, MA: Humanities Press, 2004), 65–105.

102  Gianni Paganini 85 Cf. Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes II, 97–133; Adv. Logicos II, 145–159. These same references are given by Gassendi (OO I, 80b). 86 OO I, 81b: “Vnde & fit, vt duplex in nobis possit distingui Criterium, vnum, quo percipiamus Signum, videlicet Sensus; alteram, quo ipsam rem latentem ratiocinando intelligamus, Mens nempe, Intellectus, seu Ratio.” 87 OO I, 82a–b. For the reference to Copernicus, see OO I, 83a–b. 88 OO I, 82a: Sed talia quidem complura sunt, quae priscis occulta cum fuerint, euasere iam nobis manifesta. Ecquis scit proinde, an-non bene multa ex iis, quae adhuc nos latent, quaeque adeo sola intelligentia percipimus, futurum sit olim, vt subsidio aliquo a posteris excogitando, sensui quoque perspecta fiant. Quis ante annos quinquaginta sperare ausus fuisset, vt stellulas, ex quibus est Galaxias, discerneret visu? 89 OO I, 229–282. 90 OO I, 256–282. 91 After the ancients, Gassendi mentions and comments the theories of the alchemists, Fludd, Patrizi, Severinus, Campanella, Digby, and Descartes. 92 This lengthy doxography has been often mistaken for the effect of Gassendi’s erudition or as a kind of historical validation of the atomic thesis. This line of interpretation includes Brundell, Gassendi; Howard Jones, Pierre Gassendi 1592–1655: An Intellectual Biography (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1981); Joy, Gassendi the Atomist. In reality, this doxography is an integral part of Gassendi’s philosophical argument, because the atomic hypothesis is endorsed after a comparison with rival theories. 93 James Allen, Inference from Signs: Ancient Debates about the Nature of Evidence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 200. On skeptical theories of signs, see ibid., 139–145. 94 All this obtains within the natural order, next to which Gassendi also admits a supernatural order in which creation ex nihilo does take place. The demonstration of the material principle is a typically physical issue. 95 Syntagma philosophicum (OO I, 258–259). 96 These three principles, listed by LoLordo (Gassendi, 168–69) represent a kind of “mechanist orthodoxy.” For a slightly different list of “root assumptions,” see Fisher, Gassendi, 255. 97 See LoLordo, Gassendi, 169. 98 Void, according to Epicurus, is imperceptible, but its existence can be demonstrated by a combination of sign and inference. It is notable that the “annihilatory hypothesis,” connected to Gassendi’s theory of space and void, does not play in his work the same foundational role as in the work of Hobbes. In fact, the view on the annihilated world belongs to man in Hobbes, but to God in Gassendi, and this is part of the theological assumptions built into Gassendi’s philosophy. On this, see Gianni Paganini, “Hobbes, Gassendi und die Hypothese der Weltvernichtung,” in Konstellationsforschung, eds. Martin Mulsow and Marcelo Stamm (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), 258–339. On space, see Bellis’ chapter in this volume. 99 See Epicurus, Ep. Pyth. 87, 97. 100 Fisher, Gassendi, 354; see also ibid., 344. 101 Ibid., 364. On hypothetical methodology, see ibid., 149–190. 102 Syntagma philosophicum (OO I, 266a). Italics mine. The Latin is very ambiguous and elusive: “Probabili utcumque facta Atomorum exstantia…” “Utcumque” means “anyway” but also “somehow,” “as well as possible.” “Exstantia” is a post-classical word, meaning (e.g., in Boetius) “essence”; considering the context, it is likely that Gassendi intended “existence.”

Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism  103 103 Ibid., 275b. 104 Ibid., 280b. 105 Ibid., 630b: “pro invento quodam probabili, accomodatoque ad instituendum calculum.” Cf. also De proportione (OO III, 635a). This way of speaking about “hypotheses” was current in astronomy; see Syntagma philosophicum (OO I, 265a). 106 Epistolae tres de proportione qua gravia decidentia accelerantur I (1645) in OO III, 570a–b. 107 Syntagma philosophicum (OO I, 84a–b). 108 Ibid. (OO I, 84a–b). 109 Ibid. (OO I, 84b). 110 Gassendi’s mechanistic hypotheses include the material part of psychology. On this, see Gianni Paganini, “Hobbes, Gassendi e la psicologia del meccanicismo,” in Hobbes oggi, eds. Arrigo Pacchi, Guido Canziani, Andrea Napoli (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1990), 351–446. On a physiological explanation of sensations and consequently on the solution of skeptical puzzles, see Osler, Divine Will, 194–200; Fisher, Gassendi, 367–381. 111 Syntagma philosophicum (OO I, 84b). 112 Ibid. (OO I, 84b–85a). 113 Ibid. (OO I, 85b). 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. (OO I, 86b). 116 Ibid. (OO I, 86a). 117 Ralph Walker, “Gassendi and Skepticism,” in The Skeptical Tradition, ed. Myles Burnyeat (Berkeley, CA–Los Angeles, CA–London: The University of California Press, 1983), 319–336, at 327. 118 This is a major issue also in Epicurus; see Diogenes Laërtius (X, 32) who says: “it is from plain facts that we must start when we draw inferences about the unknown.” On this transition, see Wolfgang Detel, Scientia rerum natura occultarum. Methodologische Studien zur Physik Pierre Gassendis (Berlin, New York: W. de Gruyter, 1978). 119 Gassendi specifically refers to Epicurus about his theory of “signum sensibile,” in Syntagma philosophicum (OO I, 83a). In this passage, the author claims that skeptics complain only about “hypotheses” used by mathematicians as “signs,” like the definitions of point, line, and surface (ibid., 83b). The Epicurean theory of signs is reported by Sextus: Adv. Mathematicos, VII, 211–216. 120 LoLordo, Gassendi, 61. 121 Syntagma philosophicum (OO II, 463a–b). Cf. also De proportione (OO III, 636b). 122 Syntagma philosophicum (OO II, 463). Cf. also ibid., 456b. 123 For a review of the texts where Gassendi vacillates between inevitability and contingence, see Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi, 101ff. 124 On the relation between skepticism and probabilism, besides Fisher (Gassendi, 55–88), cf. Reiner Tack, Untersuchungen zum Philosophie-und Wissenschaftsbegriff bei Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) (Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag A. Hain, 1974); Marco Messeri, Causa e spiegazione: La fisica di Pierre Gassendi (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1985), 28ff.; Antonina Alberti, Sensazione e realtà. Epicuro e Gassendi (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1988), 17–60; and Joy, Gassendi, 130ff.

104  Gianni Paganini

Bibliography Alberti, Antonina. Sensazione e realtà. Epicuro e Gassendi. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1988. Alexandrescu, Vlad. “Regius and Gassendi on the Human Soul,” Intellectual History Review 23 (2013): 433–452. Allen, James. Inference from Signs: Ancient Debates about the Nature of Evidence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Bellis, Delphine. “Nos in Diem Vivimus: Gassendi’s Probabilism and Academic Philosophy from Day to Day.” In Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Plínio Junqueira Smith and Sébastien Charles, 125–152. Cham: Springer, 2017. Bloch, Olivier René. La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971. Brundell, Barry. Pierre Gassendi. From Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht–Boston, MA: Reidel, 1987. Burnyeat, Myles F. “Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed,” Philosophical Review 91 (1982): 3–40. Curley, Edwin M. Descartes Against the Skeptics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Dal Pra, Mario. Lo scetticismo greco. Bari: Laterza, 19752. Descartes, René. Œuvres, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 11 vols. 2nd ed. Paris: Vrin, 1996 (abridged AT). Detel, Wolfgang. Scientia rerum natura occultarum. Methodologische Studien zur Physik Pierre Gassendis. Berlin, New York: W. de Gruyter, 1978. Fisher, Saul. Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy and Science: Atomism for Empiricists. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Frankfurt, Harry G. Demons, Dreamers and Madmen: The Defence of Reason in Descartes’ Meditations. Indianapolis, IN–New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970. Funkenstein, Amos. Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Gassendi, Pierre. Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre les Aristotéliciens. Edited and translated by Bernard Rochot. Paris: J. Vrin, 1959. Gassendi, Pierre. Institutio Logica (1658): A Critical Edition with Translation and Introduction. Edited and translated by Howard Jones. Assen: Van Gorcum Limited, 1981. Gassendi, Pierre. La Logique de Carpentras. Edited and translated by Sylvie Taussig. Turnhout: Brepols, 2012. Gassendi, Pierre. Opera omnia in sex tomos divisa. Lugduni: Sumptibus Laurentii Anisson, & Ioan. Bapt. Devenet, 1658 (abridged OO). Giocanti, Sylvia. “La fécondité des Académiques de Cicéron dans l’histoire du scepticisme,” Astérion, 11, http://asterion.revues.org/2334 Gouhier, Henri. La Pensée métaphysique de Descartes. Paris: Vrin, 19692. Gregory, Tullio. Scetticismo ed empirismo. Studio su Gassendi. Bari: Laterza, 1961. Jones, Howard. Pierre Gassendi 1592–1655: An Intellectual Biography. Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1981. Joy, Lynn Sumida. Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Gassendi’s Interplay between Skepticism and Empiricism  105 Lévy, Carlos. Cicero Academicus: Recherches sur les Académiques et sur la phi­ losophie cicéronienne. Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1992. LoLordo, Antonia. Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Maia Neto, José R. Academic Skepticism in Seventeenth-Century French Philosophy: The Charronian Legacy, 1601–1662. Cham: Springer, 2014. Messeri, Marco. Causa e spiegazione: La fisica di Pierre Gassendi. Milano: Franco Angeli, 1985. Montaigne, Michel de. Les Essais, eds. Pierre Villey and Verdun L. Saulnier. Paris: PUF, 1965. Osler, Margaret J. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Paganini, Gianni. “Early Modern Epicureanism: Gassendi and Hobbes in Dialogue on Psychology, Ethics, and Politics.” In Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism, edited by Phillip Mitsis, 671–710. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Paganini, Gianni. “Hobbes and the ‘Continental’ Tradition of Skepticism.” In Skepticism as a Force in Renaissance and Post-Renaissance Thought, edited by Richard H. Popkin and José R. Maia Neto, 65–105. Amherst, MA: Humanities Press, 2004. Paganini, Gianni. “Hobbes, Gassendi e la psicologia del meccanicismo.” In Hobbes oggi, edited by Arrigo Pacchi, Guido Canziani, and Andrea Napoli, 351–446. Milano: Franco Angeli, 1990. Paganini, Gianni. “Hobbes, Gassendi und die Hypothese der Weltvernichtung.” In Konstellationsforschung, edited by Martin Mulsow and Marcelo Stamm, 258– 339. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004. Paganini, Gianni. “Mersenne plagiaire: Les doutes de Campanella dans la Vérité des sciences,” xviie siècle 57 (2005): 747–767. Paganini, Gianni. “Montaigne, Sanches et la connaissance par phénomènes: Les usages modernes d’un paradigme ancien.” In Montaigne: scepticisme, métaphy­ sique, théologie, edited by Vincent Carraud and Jean-Luc Marion, 107–136. Paris: PUF, 2004. Paganini, Gianni. Scepsi moderna: Interpretazioni dello scetticismo da Charron a Hume. Cosenza: Busento, 1991. Paganini, Gianni. Skepsis: Le Débat des modernes sur le scepticisme. Montaigne-Le Vayer-Campanella-Hobbes-Descartes-Bayle. Paris: Vrin, 2008. Popkin, Richard H. The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle, revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 20033. Sanches, Francisco. Opera philosophica, ed. J. De Carvalho. Coimbra: Revista de Universidade de Coimbra, 1955. Schmitt, Charles B. Cicero Scepticus. A Study of the Influence of the Academica in the Renaissance. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1972. Sepkoski, David. Nominalism and Constructivism in Seventeenth-Century Mathematical Philosophy. London–New York: Routledge, 2007. Tack, Reiner. Untersuchungen zum Philosophie- und Wissenschaftsbegriff bei Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655). Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag A. Hain, 1974. Walker, Ralph. “Gassendi and Skepticism.” In The Skeptical Tradition, edited by Myles Burnyeat, 319–336. Berkeley, CA–Los Angeles, CA–London: The University of California Press, 1983.

4 Gassendi and Epicureanism Saul Fisher

4.1 Introduction As the premier early modern advocate of an Epicurean alternative to the prevailing neo-Scholastic framework of Aristotelianism, Pierre Gassendi promoted not only ancient but also innovative reasoning on behalf of atomism, probabilism, empiricism, psychological hedonism, social contractarianism, and a range of other stances associated with the philosophy of the Garden. Much commentary has focused on the extent to which Gassendi ‘baptizes’ Epicurean thought—thus, for example, Olivier René Bloch holds that he advances a materialism alongside Christian dogmas, whereas Margaret Osler (1994) finds suggestions of unambiguous theological motivation.1 This is but one aspect of Gassendi’s Epicureanism, albeit a very important one. An even more fundamental question is whether, and how, Gassendi is true to core Epicurean thinking, and what he preserves and promotes as valuable to the philosophical and natural investigations of his time. To address this question, I begin by recalling the core tenets of canonical ancient Epicureanism and outlining the historical context of Gassendi’s Epicurean revivalism. Though Gassendi follows in the humanistic traditions of late Renaissance explorations of antique thought, he arrives at Epicureanism by way of a complex of ethical, physical metaphysical, and methodological considerations—and not, save fortuitously, by dint of antiquarian interests. Through biography, translation, commentary, and his own philosophical tracts, Gassendi advances his own particular brand of Epicureanism—deeply rooted in the canonical texts and tenets, as well as shaped by his Christian faith and the philosophical and scientific concerns of the day. His views give sufficient voice to some sort of Epicureanism whereby we can meaningfully speak of an Epicurean legacy that Gassendi bequeaths to much of subsequent modern philosophy. That legacy is constituted by his adjustments to, constraints on, or corrections of, the canonical views. Yet Gassendi no more solely crafts a religiously acceptable Epicureanism than he carries forward a pure Epicurean materialism. His amendments are diverse in scope and motive DOI: 10.4324/9781315521732-6

Gassendi and Epicureanism  107 or reason. For all the changes introduced, though, he retains as a primary philosophical motivation the Epicurean goal of striving for ataraxia. In this, he signals his firm commitment to a philosophy in the tradition of the canonical views, however drastic any of his faith-based constraints or amendments. And, as with Epicurus’ own notion, his account of the centrality of attaining tranquility directs us to a better understanding of our nature and that of the world around us; amenable, in Gassendi’s framework, to Christian thought and contemporary natural philosophical investigations.

4.2 Epicurean Thought I begin with a review of principal tenets upheld by Epicurus (341–270 BCE) and his followers in ‘the Garden’ (the School he founded, around 307 BCE) and later exponents. While only a modest selection of Epicurus’ own writings survive, we also have detailed reports and responses by his many followers and detractors. Among his Roman devotees, the poet Lucretius offers a thorough picture of Epicureanism in the epic poem On the Nature of Things.2 Most centrally, Epicurus and his followers embraced atomism and materialism, along the path of Democritus (ca. 460–ca. 370 BCE) as well as these further tenets: ( a) Superstition and divine engagement with the world are suspect.3 (b) Pleasure is the greatest good—but not hedonist pleasure. Rather, we attain pleasure through modest living, grasping the underpinnings of the physical world, and understanding how to constrain our longings. (c) The optimal (happiest) state, which we attain through the pleasurable life, is ataraxia, a tranquility marked by freedom from fear and accompanied by disappearance of bodily pain (aponia). The canonical form of core Epicurean thought was built around a concept of philosophy as therapy. Epicurus diagnosed universal ailments of the soul in terms of fears, pains, and evils—and Philodemus prescribed as Epicurean medicine a ‘four-fold remedy’ (Tetrapharmakos or τετραφάρμακος).4 The ‘remedies’ may be summarized as follows: (1) The gods hold no fears—divine beings are uninterested in human fortune or fate. (2) Death holds no worries—the soul dissipates after death hence death is not experienced and so there is no experience to fear, nor subject of such experience. (3) The good may be easily attained—it is sufficient to satisfy natural and necessary desires.

108  Saul Fisher (4) Evil can be readily endured—pain can be gauged, tolerated, and weighed against other, pleasurable states, as through memory. The Epicureans recommend pursuit of these remedies as a way of life and also offer a complementary suite of virtues that includes discipline, prudence, courage, and moderation. These pursuits promote life’s greatest aim, pleasure, the only thing that is good in itself. This hedonism is naturalistic, locating the criterion of good in the real, whether sensed or otherwise experienced. Ataraxia (tranquility), one such experience, represents the apex of pleasure and takes the form of painlessness—being free of care or fears, whether of death, gods, or pain itself. Two significant philosophical paths of exploration stem from this Epicurean vision of the good life—ethics and related discussions on the one hand, and a package of physical, metaphysical, and epistemological views on the other. 4.2.1 Ethics Epicurean ethics is rooted in the material: as per the hedonic calculus, concrete stimuli are primary factors in the maximizing of pleasure and the minimizing of pain (physical or mental); hence, in advancing the good life. The Epicureans reject competing Greek or Roman accounts of abstract ethical properties or features of the world, such as the good or the right. They also emphasize a negative hedonist thesis—that the avoidance of pain is as important or more important than the promotion of pleasure. Thus, we should act to maximize what is pleasurable, in the austere Epicurean sense, as long as such pleasures do not engender pain. With minimization of pain at a premium, mental pleasures are particularly prized, as our anticipations of past and future pleasures enable us to endure present pains. (This, in turn, allows for lives of pleasure regardless of individual fortune.) The Epicurean calculus of pains and pleasures is a blunt instrument, broadly characterizing entire spheres of activity. Family and political engagements, notably, are to be avoided as generating anxieties—or merely ‘unnatural’ pleasures, those short-term pleasures outweighed by consequent pains. By contrast, friendship is a source of lasting mental pleasures, as for example, through philosophical community. As a human phenomenon (and perhaps among particular persons), friendship starts out of individual need or usefulness—contributing to personal security and relief from fear or concerns—and then comes to be prized on its own.5 Indeed, as interactions among friends bear hedonic value, there is allowance for altruism despite—or as an offshoot of—the premium on maximizing one’s own pleasure. The Epicurean account of friendship yields a social theory. In a pre-social stage, friendship yields better security—an advance over competition or

Gassendi and Epicureanism  109 enmity. Organized society emerges in stages. First, competition over goods grows as language and other developments of early civilization give rise to ‘unnatural’ desires, hence to greater scarcity and conflict. At some tipping point, conflict opens the way to autocracy which, in turn, is overthrown with the establishment of civil rule of law in its stead.6 On this vaguely proto-Hobbesian picture, fear of punishment is a key consequence of civil society run by law. However, per Epicurean concerns, that is a social demerit, detracting from the Epicurean premium on seeking pleasure and reducing fear. Yet Epicurean ethics also offers a path to tranquility that accommodates—if not quite celebrating—our civic lives, through apt notions of justice and virtue. Justice, in particular, consists in agreements or compacts to not harm one another.7 Living justly by such compacts—and upholding other Epicurean virtues, such as prudence and honor—goes hand in hand with attaining pleasure. So, whereas the state may be the guarantor of some such compacts, Epicurus points to prudence as the greatest virtue and, accordingly, recommends minimal engagement in affairs of business or states. Justice, hence ataraxia, is abetted by a certain civic detachment. 4.2.2 Physics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology The Epicurean good life is only attainable with a full understanding of the world’s structure and our place in it, in turn requiring our thorough grasp of the ways in which we know the world’s nature and our justification of such knowledge. Physical and metaphysical understanding contributes to ataraxia by providing an account of worldly phenomena that rejects divine providence and strips the gods of the capacity to control our lives or what happens after death—or their interest in such. Given the dispersal of our atoms after death, we are free to seek satisfactions in life. For its part, an epistemological understanding—crucially, that material sensations are the measure of true belief—provides the reasoning which underpins (and flows from) the Epicurean atomist account. The atomist account of matter as developed by the Epicureans enriches the Democritean picture, particularly relative to the motion of atoms; spells out the nature of void; and details how atomic qualities contribute to the qualities we sense, and broader phenomena including life and cognition. Following Democritus, the basic Epicurean argument for atoms builds on the notion that, while all around us bodies appear as composites, there must be a minimal physical point beyond which bodies have no parts. Were there no such point, then bodies would be infinitely divisible, allowing for the utter dissolution of matter—which, given an infinite expanse of time, would in turn lead to all matter disappearing. And since all matter has not disappeared, and the Epicurean universe is infinite in timespan

110  Saul Fisher (and extension),8 it must not be that bodies are infinitely divisible; hence there are (and have always been) atoms. (Indeed, given the atomic population as dispersed throughout the infinite universe, there must be infinitely many atoms.) The Epicurean argument for the existence of void moves from our sensations of bodies to the suggestion that there must be empty space through which they can move; further, if this is true at the macro-scale, it must also be true at the micro-scale, down to the level of atoms.9 Building our way back up from the micro-scale, all material things are composed of atoms and void, and—there being nothing that isn’t material—this is true of all existence, as well. This last point has major consequences for the qualities of objects in the world, our sensations of them, and the nature of causation. The Epicureans follow the Democritean picture, locating the source of our sensations of qualities in variable atomic sizes and shapes, as well as their motions, collisions, or their being held in place. The sensed qualities of macro-sized bodies—such as colors—arise from the properties and relations of their constituent atoms, and while they are every bit as real as those on the atomic level (as contrasted with the Democritean view of secondary qualities as unreal), they are emergent and far more diverse and sophisticated than may be said of the basic suite of atomic properties. The properties, relations, and motion of atoms also provide fundamental elements of a mechanical universe in which fortune, fate, divine will, and goal-directed causation have no place. Any such mechanical picture as would explain all phenomena by reference to matter in motion needs to say how it is that the matter moves. In the Epicurean account, this means appealing to the nature of atomic motion, and three kinds are spelled out: a standard modality of downward motion, due to the weight of atoms10; an occasional and random atomic swerve (clinamen), as necessary to account for collisions (primarily in Lucretius’ account); and atomic ‘blows’ resulting from such collisions.11 By the light of their ‘compositional’ view, Epicureans appealed (a) to component atoms’ weight, rather than the Aristotelian natural tendency toward the Earth’s center, to explain the downward directionality of aggregate bodies12; and (b) to constraints and interactions of other component atoms to explain the motion of particular atoms within an aggregate.13 This edifice of physics and metaphysics is constructed on evidence from the senses, in keeping with Epicurean theory of knowledge and, thereby, their notion of method. Given the pervasively material character of the universe, the sum total of knowledge not only concerns the material but is also epistemically available to us only through material means. Thus, the principle that nothing comes from nothing is tendered as following direct perception that all material things have an origin, and the hypothesized void is said to follow indirectly from our perception of bodies in motion from which the void is inferred.14 To explain how we may

Gassendi and Epicureanism  111 collect evidence through the senses, the Epicureans turn once again to the atomic theory. Their theory of perception suggests we perceive qualities of objects in the world through our perception of intermediary particles thrown off the surfaces of those objects. These thin atomic effluences— simulacra—reach us at a suitable distance and stimulate our senses per their interactions (visual, aural, olfactory, etc.). These may sustain change while traveling through the medium, yet they enter our sensory organs as true reports of the atomic effluences they represent.15 The thoroughly materialist Epicurean worldview also explains the nature of the soul, consciousness, and thought. The soul has a material, distributed atomic structure that enables sensations, consciousness, and bodily motion. These sensing atomic parts are distinct from rational, judgment-yielding parts of the body’s soul in the chest. The soul, being material, is corrupted in death, along with the body. Hence there is no reason to fear or be sad about a life ending, insofar as that depends on loss or punishment of the soul. Conscious states rely on physical contact of either sensation of external stimuli—including the simulacra as they inform the senses—or stimuli internal to the body. Imaginations are based on mental impressions of “fine” simulacra directly received by the mind, which—like sensed simulacra—are all true. (Fictions or fantasies, for their part, result from defective or combined simulacra.) As the seat of the will, the soul or mind motivates our actions, yet the mechanical actions of atoms suggest a predetermined nature of human behavior (as Democritus held)—leaving Epicureans with the problem of accounting for freely motivated or chosen action. For his part, Epicurus holds that there is free will; we observe our own behavior as marked by new motions freely chosen. This suggests to Epicurus that neither atomic nor macro-sized motion is deterministic per se, which suggestion Lucretius sought to explain by reference to the atomic swerve or clinamen.16 As noted variously over millennia, it is unclear that the mere lack of determinism, via the swerve or otherwise, yields free will. Yet this foray into the free will debate shows, in any event, the Epicurean awareness of determinism’s consequences and their dedication to preserving at once the atomist picture and an account of the will that allows a freely chosen life, full of pleasures, free of pains, and progressing toward tranquility.

4.3 Epicureanism and the Early Modern Philosophical Landscape The philosophy of the Garden attracted very little adherence some 1,700 years after Epicurus—or 1,400 years after Lucretius—when recovered and translated editions of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers and Lucretius’ De rerum natura were circulated among Europe’s libraries and Latin readers.17 Two central problems plagued the reception of Epicureanism at the cusp of early modern times. First, Aristotle’s

112  Saul Fisher anti-atomist arguments were highly influential within the long tradition of wedding Christian theology to Aristotelian metaphysics and substance theory in particular. Second, there persisted a misreading of Epicurean hedonism—by Lactantius, Ambrose, Jerome, and other Church Fathers— as a decadent philosophy, indulgent, and materialist or worldly in untoward ways. This erroneous tradition was carried forward by Dante and numerous subsequent writers mining antique and patristic anti-Epicurean calumny—including Martin Luther in his dismissal of Erasmus.18 Among Renaissance Italian writers, opinions shifted slightly toward acceptance of Epicurean notions as worthy of consideration, even if flawed.19 Thus, Francesco Zabarella (De felicitate, 1400) notes the importance of mental pleasures for Epicurean ethics, and Lorenzo Valla’s De voluptate (1431) weaves an Epicurean defense of hedonism into a syncretic debate among Epicurean, Stoic, and Christian virtues. Later, Montaigne (Apologie de Raymond Sebond, ca. 1580) acknowledges some Epicurean theses, via Lucretius, as not completely mistaken—the theses endorsed included the corruption of the soul, a plurality of worlds, and an empiricist theory of knowledge. Yet other elements of the Epicurean worldview—in particular, atomist-style matter theories and materialist metaphysics—are adopted variously in the investigations of Democritean theses by late Renaissance philosophers and experimentalists including Giordano Bruno, David Gorlaeus, Sébastien Basson, and, after a fashion, Daniel Sennert.20 A number of central early modern figures followed suit, propounding one or another corpuscularian matter theory. Bacon, Galileo, Beeckman, and Descartes were all taken with a notion of sensed qualities (such as color or heat) as dependent on essential qualities of basic units of m ­ atter— as a function of their relations, orientations, and motions, as well as on our observations or other sensations of such.21 Even as some corpuscularian theorists championed active matter (departing from a strictly mechanical picture) or rejected atomism outright (e.g., Descartes),22 their shared aim was an ontology suitable for explaining at least the greater part of physical phenomena by reference to the nature and interactions of the smallest particles of matter. In this, they at least loosely rejected Aristotelian hylomorphism and echoed the Epicurean view.

4.4 Gassendi’s Epicurean Trajectory A dedicated reader of both ancient philosophies and their latter-day critics and acolytes, Gassendi followed in the steps of late Renaissance antischolasticism in his early Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (1624).23 The Exercitationes is often seen as an earlier work, largely of solely historical interest, reflecting the young scholar’s lecture notes at Aix, rather than deeper scholarly investigations, robust quarrels with contemporaries, or the empirical investigations and observations that defined his work around the time the anti-Aristotelian dissertations are

Gassendi and Epicureanism  113 first published. Yet looking backward, several themes of the Exercitationes are suggestive of Gassendi’s subsequent interests and approaches. In particular, he criticizes Aristotelianism (neo-Scholasticism) as neglecting experience as a means of investigating nature, in favor of a priori descriptive accounts and as absorbed by its own discourse rather than how it compares with other theories.24 Further, as Gassendi turns to Pyrrhonist arguments to cast doubt on the certainties of Aristotelianism, he highlights a key spiritual asset offered by those Skeptics—a freedom from Scholastic dogma that gives rise to mental tranquility: Freedom of the spirit is something more precious than all the gold in the world and, under the compulsion of nature, everything tends to be free […] thus, we men who profess philosophy, shall we lower ourselves to the point of embracing so closely and to such a degree this servitude [i.e., as Aristotelianism represents]? While philosophy promises freedom by which the highest tranquility of the soul may be provided and, with it, supreme happiness, what raging madness leads us to worship philosophy under the yoke of such servitude?25 The theme of philosophy as a path to tranquility is central for the mature Gassendi. Equally important themes first sounded in the Exercitationes and with substantial, later echoes include (1) skepticism about knowledge of natural essences (which here plays a specifically anti-Aristotelianism role)26; and (2) a critique of a thoroughgoing skepticism, introducing a viable epistemic criterion which sustains the quest for, and possibility of, empirical knowledge. In pursuit of these goals outlined in this early work, Gassendi subsequently develops a suite of Epicurean interests, scholarship, and advocacy. The historical path of Gassendi’s Epicurean scholarly project and Epicurean philosophy is well-documented, though the timeline has yet to be fully or definitively delineated.27 Gassendi rewrote and reused earlier Epicurean interpretations and variations in successive works, reflecting earlier dissatisfaction with his own scholarship at numerous stages, and a willingness to repurpose the good bits. The posthumous Syntagma philosophicum is a grand synthesis, not only of Gassendi’s philosophy and scientific thought but also of many elements of prior manuscripts, as assembled by his executors, Samuel Sorbière and Henri Louis Habert de Montmor. Close readings of the printed texts, surviving manuscripts, and relevant correspondence—by Pintard, Rochot, Bloch, Jones, Palmerino, and others—help to establish a timeline, yet questions hover over the precise road from Gassendi’s pre-Epicurean philosophy to the Epicurean apogee of Syntagma philosophicum (1658) [hereafter: SP].28 Broadly, we can state that Gassendi moved from the anti-Scholastic Exercitationes to a more express interest in Epicurean thought—and atomism in particular—following three distinct engagements. First,

114  Saul Fisher Gassendi participated eagerly in the République des Lettres at first via Peiresc and Mersenne, and later—through others again (including the frères Dupuy)—with the libertins érudits. By means of extensive correspondence and other scholarly commerce, Gassendi and the libertins would share views of Epicureanism, skepticism, empiricism, and atomism, among other topics. In a formative episode for Gassendi, one of the libertins, François Luillier, accompanied him on a visit to the Low Countries starting in 1628 and introduced him to scholars with Epicurean, atomist, or chemical interests, including Van Helmont, de Putte (Erycius Puteanus), and Beeckman. Secondly, Gassendi took particular interest in the work of de Putte, whose Stoic-inflected reading of Epicurus he praises and to whom he announces plans for his own Epicurean project, even before their encounter in Louvain later that year: […] since I read your apology of Epicurus, with publication of his portrait, I began to admire and love you with indefinable affection. This, as I have prepared for this great man [Epicurus] an Apologia, intending to consecrate a whole volume to his doctrine with the idea of joining it to my volume of Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos […].29 Thirdly, Gassendi’s meeting with Beeckman in 162930 was one at which he disclosed a burgeoning interest in an atomist matter theory—a cornerstone of his earnest search to master, and reform, Epicurean thought.31 That said, there is no historical record of why he elected Epicurus rather than any other alternative classical framework of thought—or rather than no classical alternative at all. Further, while Gassendi provides extensive argumentation defending Epicurean thought against historical critics and alternative frameworks, those arguments do not reveal his exact motivation for commencing a grand and multifaceted Epicurean project of 30 years. Once the project was underway, Gassendi pursued with vigor—and multiple revisions—a series of biographical and philological studies aimed at restoring Epicurus’ reputation and breathing new life into Epicurean philosophy. The De vita et moribus Epicuri libri octo (1647) is an apologia intended to combat defamatory criticisms attached to Epicurus and Epicurean thought by a succession of Roman, patristic, medieval, and Renaissance detractors. Not only were detractors wrong on the facts of Epicurean thought, according to Gassendi’s insistence, but Epicurus himself was sublimely virtuous—for a pagan. In a more philosophical vein, Gassendi conducts a lengthy correspondence (October 1641-November 1642) with his then-patron, Louis de Valois, Comte d’Alais (governor of Provence). Here he adds to the reputational defense an overview of Epicurean thought, situating the canonic (logic) among the ancients and introducing the physics. His epic Animadversiones in

Gassendi and Epicureanism  115 decimum librum Diogenis Laertii (1649) presents a heavily annotated translation of Book X on Epicurus, along with careful and extensive notation of central points on which Epicurean views are to be rejected on the basis of bedrock elements of faith. Against Epicurus, he insists that atoms must have been created, for example.32 The brief Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri (1649), included at the end of the Animadversiones, offers a synoptic perspective spanning ancient Epicurean views—all through the voice of Epicurus. A range of lengthier manuscripts—as for example, on the Epicurean canon—are crafted over time and form the elements of the posthumous Syntagma philosophicum. This, his own summative philosophical statement, nevertheless frequently references Epicurean thought. The Syntagma offers less in the way of Epicurean commentary and presents instead a synthesis of Gassendi’s philosophical and scientific thought as informed by Epicurus—and much else in the history of philosophy. Many themes are, broadly speaking, Epicurean, even where Gassendi’s considered, particular views diverge from those of Epicurus. Gassendi signals explicitly that his is not an Epicurean philosophy and that his depth of commitment to the philosopher of the Garden is only as great as the need to restore his moral and philosophical reputation—and insofar as Epicurus manages to capture the truth.33 Beyond this, he seeks to maintain a critical distance: […] although once having completed my defense of [Epicurus’] life I will continue on to an explanation of his teaching, I do not plan to take his side or stand as surety to his opinions or be their bondsman [...] as in other matters I heed reason alone, and unless he follows reason Epicurus will not move me more than any other philosopher […].34 In this, Gassendi rehearses the anti-dogmatism he brings to bear in undermining undue faith in neo-Scholasticism, as well as in disputations with Descartes and Morin. Yet a great number of the questions Gassendi addresses in philosophy and natural philosophy—and not a few of the answers he proposes—are Epicurean in tone if not in origin. The Syntagma addresses what Epicurean philosophy might look like where it takes on fundamental Christian premises and is revised to account for the steady progress of philosophy and natural philosophy. The degree and character of divergences from traditional Epicurean philosophy distinguish Gassendi’s thought as his own, albeit as emerging from within that tradition.

4.5 Gassendi’s Resemblances to, and Differences from, Epicureanism The starting point of Gassendi’s Epicurean theses is an ataraxic conception of philosophy. Toward the goal of promoting tranquility, his core

116  Saul Fisher Epicurean proposals include a sort of proto-utilitarian ethics, a contractarian theory of social and political justice, and two precepts of particular significance for the new sciences. First, atomism accounts for our empirical knowledge by way of explaining our sensations of qualities in the world. Secondly, the merely probable nature of our empirical knowledge keeps in check our expectations relative to knowledge about what lies beyond the senses—yet also licenses our maintaining theories for which we do not have certainty, but in relation to which we may be said to come into closer proximity.35 The better part of his amendments to Epicureanism consists in revising or purging ideas in conflict with Christian doctrine, for religious or theological reasons—in what Osler (1994) and other commentators refer to as Gassendi’s baptismal strategy.36 Gassendi pursues this strategy with self-awareness, offering the reader a parallel with early and traditional Christian renderings of Aristotle’s pagan philosophy.37 The list of theologically motivated changes is considerable: Gassendi posits a single, immaterial (Christian) deity who oversees providence in lieu of the Greek plurality of materially constituted deities who have no plan for the world—having had no involvement in its creation.38 Indeed, Gassendi recasts atoms as created ex nihilo and, given the pervasiveness of the atomic structuring of matter, thereby recasts material creation as atomic. Hence atoms are not eternal, at least at inception. Nor are they infinite in number, nor exclusively the constituents of all that exists: there are immaterial, immortal, and rational souls—as well as God and angels. While matter is generally governed by efficient cause, final causes are characteristic of biological phenomena, from motility and generation to social and psychological behavior.39 Further changes still are brought about by a doctrinal conception of divine existence and interaction with the world: providence entails that nature is neither random (per the Lucretian swerve) nor, at origin, self-causing; creation sets limits upon the world’s timeline and numbers (the world we occupy being unique). These dramatic shifts, amendments, and additions notwithstanding, a largely Epicurean natural philosophy remains intact, placing an atomic model of matter at the core of all physical entities and behavior—as well as at the center of much of what his contemporaries take to be spiritual entities and behavior.40 4.5.1 Tranquility Through Philosophy First among the Epicurean theses that Gassendi maintains is his view of philosophy as an enterprise for the realization of ataraxia. The route to Gassendist tranquility resembles the Epicurean path, navigating through our best understanding of the world and its materialist nature. Added to this, Gassendi introduces elements requiring appeal to the Divine, but here too the goal remains ataraxia through a foundational grasp of

Gassendi and Epicureanism  117 nature, how we are as natural beings (inclusive of organic, psychological, ethical, and social phenomena), and how through philosophy we can know about such matters.41 At the very outset of SP, Gassendi links our search for happiness through tranquility broadly to his account in the Physics of truths about the world; and to his account in the Ethics of the furtherance of virtue and integrity.42 In the Ethics, he offers a more focused account of the process whereby we attain tranquility, following Epicurus in the main, but with some significant changes. To begin with, the drive to attain happiness, with which the quest to attain ataraxia starts, in Gassendi’s account is invested in the human soul by God.43 As souls endowed with free will, we can choose to develop, through exercise, virtues that advance tranquility—in particular, prudence, which helps us to avoid the risks and dangers as incur pains. Furthermore, Gassendi embraces Epicurean injunctions against despair or fear of death—and likewise promotes the pursuit of knowledge44; amity as initiated by conditional utility but as supplanted by love45; and prudent choice of, and control over, our particular actions and overall path in life.46 However, Gassendi’s view is distinguished from the Epicurean model, by his extoling fuller knowledge of God, as well as fear of God. Attainment of such knowledge, with its attendant fears, Gassendi represents as an unalloyed positive step toward tranquility of the spirit.47 4.5.2 The Physical World The path to tranquility also runs through the most fundamental of truths about the world—and the comfort their concomitant explanations provide—as laid out in the Physics.48 These comprise varied aspects of Epicurean matter theory as defended by Gassendi, along with the removal of ‘falsehoods’ detracting from the theory’s overall verisimilitude.49 As with the Epicurean model, the behaviors of atoms in the void—their inexorable motions, contacts, impacts, and connections—account for all material phenomena. In other respects, their models differ. As Gassendi’s atoms are created by God, they are imbued with unchanging motive force—the actions of which are consonant with divine providence.50 Further, not all creation consists in atoms and void; other, non-material entities—­including God and immortal souls—are excluded from physical accounts except insofar as we explain their engagements with the physical. The greatest difference between Gassendi’s physics and the canonical Epicurean view is in matter theory, and in particular, the account of atomic motion. To begin with, in contrast with the canonical view, Gassendi offers not one but two views of motion and directionality. First, atomic motions contribute in summative fashion to the motion of aggregate bodies, and the dominant motions determine direction51; secondly, atoms are possessed of an active nature, endowed by God, that keeps them in constant, uniform motion—and their mass keeps them moving in

118  Saul Fisher a generally downward direction.52 The two views, while not clearly consistent, are each suggestive. In the first case, Gassendi is striving to save an Epicurean-style compositionality, appealing to the putatively scalar properties of atoms and their aggregates. In the second case, Gassendi moves partly away from Epicurus—allowing that we might explain gravity by reference to atomic properties, but inserting God into the account as the endower of activity in atoms. That this account is attuned to explaining a downward tendency of falling objects might have appealed to readers holding fast to that Aristotelian conception; at the same time, it conflicts with Gassendi’s other account of gravity as highlights a magnetic vis attrahens.53 That said, the notion of atomic mass as an inherent physical property of atoms, invested at creation and keeping them in constant downward motion, also has theological resonance for Gassendi.54 Further distinguishing the Gassendist account from the Epicurean view is Gassendi’s positing of differential rules of motion at the atomic level: inertial motion applies at the macro-scale alone. This, as Joy and Gaukroger among others have noted, allows for a mechanical picture on the atomic and macro-levels, though not as characterized by scalar invariance.55 In a sense, Gassendi is more Epicurean on this issue than are the classic Epicureans, for he accepts scalar variance as an outcome of embracing the reality of both atomic and macro-sized bodies, with certain differing properties as suggested by sensory evidence—including the nature of motion.56 Other macro-scale properties differ, among themselves and from atomic properties, as a result of the varied composite structures of atoms. Woven together by their protuberances—hooks and the like—atoms continue to vibrate so as to sustain motion and yet are locked into configurations the differences among which give rise to such qualities as color or taste as found only on the macro-level.57 Yet particular configurations also account for variation in qualities found on all levels, such as shape.58 Several commentators view this account as an early example of molecularism, albeit of a strictly mechanical form.59 Such a proposed molecular level (seminae rerum) of the structure of matter, as intermediate between atoms and their macro-sized composites (res concretae), represents a modernization of Epicurean matter theory. At this level, secondary qualities emerge—as shown by chemical experiments comprising saturation, dissolution, and crystallization.60 Other phenomena emergent at this level include life and the dynamism of matter. This departure from canonical Epicureanism is driven by explanatory rather than theological concerns: atomism builds our understanding of macro-level structures and physical, chemical, and biological phenomena through the intermediary of aggregates.61 In defense of these accounts, Gassendi tackles historical conceptual critiques of atomism by drawing on a priori Epicurean argument.62 Yet for Gassendi the empiricist, a central puzzle is how to uphold such a matter theory in the absence of direct empirical evidence. This is problematic

Gassendi and Epicureanism  119 for canonical Epicurean atomism, too. However, the problem takes on greater proportions in Gassendi’s time, given the growing capacity for experimentation and the enhanced observational techniques offered by microscopy. Brundell, Jones, Wilson, and other commentators accuse Gassendi of an over-reliance on the a priori arguments of Epicurean atomism in his rejection of Aristotle’s critique, as seen in other likeminded attacks on the Aristotelian model.63 This is an unfair judgment. While it is unclear what would even count as direct empirical evidence for atomism in his day, Gassendi suggestively summons evidence from the microscopy of crystals that indirectly points to molecular structures such as assume an atomic substructure. (Thus, through the microscope we see distinctive crystalline features of the molecular building blocks of sugar, salts, and alum, which in turn arise from specific sorts of atomic aggregations).64 Though such experimental evidence is inconclusive, it indicates his commitment to an empirical demonstration of this matter theory and its expansion on the Epicurean view. Applications of Gassendi’s atomist account highlight further renovations of the Epicurean picture. Consider his theory of perception: as with the Epicurean account, Gassendi takes vision as the fundamental form of perception and atomic transmission and reception as the means through which perception occurs. Beeckman, for his part, developed an atomist view of light as particles emitted from a light source that, reflected off illuminated objects, arrive at the retina where—per Kepler—a picture is formed.65 Gassendi similarly integrates an atomist account with the Keplerian account requiring the inversion of images sensed on the retina.66 For Gassendi, however, Beeckman-style light atoms both stimulate our vision generally qua general illumination,67 and are bundled into rays of light that, reflected off the perceived objects, yield Epicurean simulacra that materially preserve resemblances to those objects.68 Mental processing of images requires further, more explicitly mechanical steps for Gassendi than for Epicurus. Yet for both, the pathways move from the retina to our cognitive faculties, always in a material fashion.69 4.5.3 The Soul and Free Will In a more pronounced contrast, Gassendi’s soul theory departs from the Epicurean account, by positing immaterial souls as well as material souls composed of atoms. While he dedicates much effort in the Disquisitio to undermining Descartes’ arguments for substance dualism, and while the canonical Epicurean view supports materialist monism, the Syntagma offers a dualistic picture.70 Gassendi embraces the Epicurean materialist soul found in animals and people, composed of ‘subtle,’ tenuous matter, and giving rise to vegetative functions and the sentient functioning of persons. This is the corporeal soul, or anima, a ‘principle’ in the sense of Aristotelian form, giving organization to the creature with it, and—thanks

120  Saul Fisher to the subtle, fluid nature of its component atoms—yielding ‘vital heat’ that allows for the creature’s activity.71 As the anima is material, Gassendi requires a material heredity story to account for its transmission across generations of creatures.72 However, contrary to the canonical Epicurean view and in keeping with religious doctrines, he assigns rational functioning to a distinct, divinely created, incorporeal soul only found (among animals) in humans: the animus.73 Corporeal interactions with the animus are made possible by the anima, which constitutes the bodily seat of sensation, allowing for the localized sensations of pain and pleasure.74 As the animus is individuating as well as immortal,75 the Epicurean notion that material souls dissipate after the demise of the individual is unavailable—raising the question of how to allay fears of death within this eschatological framework. Gassendi’s alternate strategy is to point to the lack of fear among those who lead good and proper lives. They may lack fear because their souls will know an eternity of reward in heaven (not much salve, then, for the rest of us). The question endures, though not the Epicurean answer. A further, theologically driven question for Gassendi to resolve is the place of free will, given the threat of determinism posed by classical atomism (if not quite by canonical Epicurean materialism). Gassendi’s approach is twofold. First, his ethics promotes rational choice per hedonic aims as joined to a virtue theory, in concert with the Lucretian suggestion that character plays a role in the exercise of the will. Secondly, though Gassendi draws on a Christian notion of providence, he also stipulates that the rational soul (animus) chooses freely. While this, too, is required by Church doctrine, he further argues on behalf of free will that when we change our minds, we exercise independently our reasoning, assigning varying truth values to the same claims on differing occasions as we judge them differently.76 4.5.4 What We Know and How We Know It Connected to the Physics, and as developed in the Logic, are Gassendi’s theories of knowledge, truth, and method—each moving beyond their Epicurean foundations.77 As with the Epicurean theory of knowledge, we come to know about the world through observation and experience rather than through pure mentation. As for Epicurus, the information we receive through the senses bears the property of truth (ineluctably); if claims based on sensory inputs are also true, this is derivative of senseinformation-truth, and is dependent on the accuracy or distortion of our cognition. In addition, we may expand on empirical claims by justified inferences from signs; here Gassendi borrows from a variety of ancient sources—including later Epicureans.78 In cases where evidence is direct, criteria consist in the reliability of the perceptual apparatus; in cases where evidence is indirect, warrant is provided by the interpretation of

Gassendi and Epicureanism  121 signs as identifiably regular epistemic proxies. We come to know about God in a somewhat similar fashion, based on indirect input from the senses—though not via dreams, as Epicurus suggested. Rather, we have mental images of God based on those things we can sense that give rise to such images—as when we form an idea of God’s design of the world.79 Accordingly, our empirical studies may lead us to religious belief.80 In a more direct manner, empirical studies yield claims about the world around us and, following the Aristotelian tradition, Gassendi proposes that logical argumentation can structure these claims in such explanatory forms as produce knowledge. Against the Aristotelian tradition Gassendi warns that there is no guarantee of certitude, given the empirical path to acquiring the constituent claims of such knowledge. Scientific knowledge (natural philosophy) has a conjectural quality that does not, however, undermine its epistemic warrant. 4.5.5 Ethical and Political Theories Other major areas of Gassendi’s philosophy that build on and react to the Epicurean tradition are the Ethics and his political philosophy.81 In keeping with canonical Epicureanism, Gassendi puts at the center of his ethics the human quest for pleasure as a guide to the morally worthy—making sure to highlight the actual historical account as an ascetic, utility-driven endeavor (as Valla previously acknowledged). To Epicurus’ list of shortterm and enduring pleasures, Gassendi adds the transcendent pleasures of the love and beatific vision of God, as well as anticipation of the afterlife.82 He also stresses the Divine design by which we are oriented to seek pleasure and avoid pain. In subsuming Epicurean pleasure to the Divine Creation story, Gassendi proposes that God makes pleasurable those actions that, however otherwise burdensome, advance either the individual or the species.83 More broadly, God’s design yields an equation of the moral with the natural and, conversely, the immoral with the unnatural: we are built to seek the good, as are other species relative to their good. Though providence is inserted into the moral domain, an ethical focus among people on pleasure is sustained, with God designing us as pleasure-maximizers and hence as proto-utilitarianists of a sort. People’s moral empowerment notwithstanding, religious prescription—as, for example, mandated respect for Divine Creation such as grounds the prohibition on suicide—also features in Gassendi’s ethics.84 Through such emphasis on Christian themes, Desmond Clarke maintains that Gassendi broadens Epicurean ethics beyond its traditional subjective focus on moral conduct as gauged by the individual, introducing elements of objective judgment as theologically envisioned.85 Alongside the modified Epicurean view of pleasure and pain, Gassendi incorporates virtue theory as a second significant element of his ethics. Some commentators see this as a Renaissance eclecticism.86 However,

122  Saul Fisher though he draws on various sources, Gassendi also promotes the attendant Epicurean views. For instance, he places a great premium on mental health, or tranquility, as achieved through virtues of temperance and sobriety (along with the exercise of reason, and the pursuits of friendship and philosophy). Such mental health is of greater significance than bodily health because tranquility of mind is a condition for the health of the body.87 Furthermore, Gassendi promotes four principal virtues— prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice—of a mixed classical provenance, weaving the Epicurean together with the Aristotelian and the Stoic. Prudence entails acting by the other virtues, as well as by the Epicurean hedonic rules. Those rules classically are self-regarding, though Gassendi expands them to include regard for the pains and pleasures of others. His hybrid Aristotelian-Epicurean view has it that temperament determines propensity to act, in accordance with appetite and the passions—but actions can be freely chosen against temperament, and we can develop new habits.88 The Epicurean element consists in free choice governing our propensities or dispositions to act. The availability of free moral choice, allowing for blame and praise, echoes Epicurean reasoned deliberation by the animus through a weighing of options against the context and of the attendant pleasures or pains.89 Gassendi’s political philosophy tracks closely the Epicurean emergence of social good, including cooperation and justice, from each individual pursuing personal moral good. The ‘just’ promotes the common good, as identified through social accord.90 For Gassendi—and for his friend Hobbes—this account of social accord yields the modern form of social contract theory. The two stages of Gassendi’s sequence consist in a first contract to join together socially and so promote individual good, and a second contract to grant governing authority to a small number of persons or, possibly, to a single person.91 A civil society must first be established before a ruler may be chosen to advance its interests. The fundaments here are suggested by the Epicureans: politics is an outgrowth of human nature, and accordingly, the state grows out of the nature of humanity.92 In Gassendi’s telling, individuals are, by human nature, self-interested and utility-seeking—they see their utility maximized by acting cooperatively to yield social agreement and, ultimately, the state. Gassendi agrees with Lucretius’ extension of broad Epicurean fears to include specific fears of the violence of other persons, and he agrees with Hobbes’ assessment (in De cive) that “man is wolf to man” (homo homini lupus); the search for justice or good governance is not solely pursued on rational grounds.93 On the other hand, some form of justice in the state of nature is arrived at, in the absence of a contract, through ‘natural affinity’ (cognatio naturæ) driven by human rejection or avoidance of hostility and seeking shared benefit for all.94 Gassendi further develops the notion of shared benefit through order as based on an Epicurean appeal to the utility of legal prohibitions and

Gassendi and Epicureanism  123 injunctions. While this utility is calculable by individuals, it is better enshrined in a social agreement, such as the law represents.95 Epicurus (Ratae sententiae, 31) proposes that natural law is rooted in the utility of prospective safety; Gassendi understands the concept of natural law to be built on a natural state of humanity that tends to convention and accord, as meet prudential and individual utilitarian concerns.96 This focus on psychology and behavior of social relations under conditions of strife, characteristic of Epicurean accounts, was profoundly relevant to seventeenth-century debates concerning authority and consent, against the background tumult and disarray of the Thirty Years’ War.97 4.5.6 Rhetoric as a Philosophical Strategy Looking beyond such philosophical claims or reasoning thereto, Gassendi also engages with and deploys rhetoric in the Epicurean tradition—or in defense of that tradition. Thus, Joy and Darmon, among others, suggest we understand the Epicurean project as Gassendi offering a studied appeal to authority.98 For Joy, Gassendi embraces the history of philosophy as a source of legitimacy and warrant, offering a scholarly and systematic representation of Epicurean thought as a philosophical advance over the unruly clutter of ancient perspectives characteristic of his Renaissance predecessors. Historical representation is offered as a mode of argumentation. In like manner, Darmon highlights Gassendi’s appeal to the merits of Epicurean rhetorical features as justifying its command on our philosophical outlook.99 In particular, Epicurean thought is transparent or clear (perspicua), pithy, and direct, avoiding the unintelligible or barren qualities of the neo-Scholastic philosophy100 or the alternative logics of the Stoics and other ancients, marked as they are by unresolved debates, fallacies, trifles, and the obscure (obscura).101 Gassendi draws this stylistic and discursive contrast: No such reproach was made against the logic of Epicurus, for since he aimed only for the truth, had nothing to do with formulating fallacies, but merely required that whoever spoke should use straightforward language, and that if he did not, his hearer should compel him to speak clearly […]. Moreover, what he says in his logic concerning the imagination, or the appearances created by the senses, and concerning anticipation insofar as it is nothing but the image of a thing, or its idea dwelling in the mind, these things are applicable to forming clear ideas […]. Finally, he has something to say about making clear deductions to the extent that he draws by inference the particular conclusions that depend automatically on our anticipations […].102 While pith and directness are not always hallmarks of Gassendi’s own work, he deploys other rhetorical gestures in an Epicurean spirit.

124  Saul Fisher As Darmon suggests, some such rhetorical styles and gestures may augment the probability of claims under consideration through the historical context and clarity they lend to argumentation. What is probable depends on what is plausible, given the sort of empirical evidence provided by a historical framing of the debate. Yet other Gassendist rhetorical devices, Darmon proposes, appeal to analogy and fabulistic accounts—in the probing manner of Epicurean, and particularly Lucretian, writing. Such devices act as Epicurean prolepses—stimuli to questioning—and, thereby, recognition of truer knowledge.103 A wholly other rhetorical strategy promotes Epicureanism through the biographies, where Gassendi demonstrates his commitment to philosophy as a guide to the good life.104 The Epicurus biography, notably, is intended to persuade the reader that the philosopher of the Garden was someone whose thinking was genuinely reflected in his life, that is, who lived in accordance with his moral philosophy. Epicurus is here portrayed as a promoter of a suitably proto-modern natural philosophy. The biographies also offer accounts of virtues by example. This is most prominent among the historical biographies in that of Epicurus, while his contemporary biography of Peiresc reads as a celebration of the Epicurean virtue of friendship. In addition, the scientific biographies, alongside the correspondence, are loci for a discursive, almost didactic development of Gassendi’s brand of Epicureanism. This is especially prominent in the correspondence from 1639 to 1653 with his patron, Louis-Emmanuel de Valois.105 Taussig goes a step further, taking the biographies to represent explorations of Gassendi’s subjects as better ‘selves,’ where presentation of their thought is inevitably his own intellectual product, as is true of the work of a poetry translator.106 This suggestive reading is in keeping with the Joy–Darmon thesis according to which Gassendi’s drawing upon Epicureanism, along with other ancient wisdom, was intended to offer an improved understanding of philosophical terms, premises, and argumentation, through classification, definition, and clarification. An alternate, opposing interpretation (Pintard, Bloch) suggests that these rhetorical strategies are pragmatic, representing an attempt to mask religiously heterodox views through a mass of humanistic scholarship. That suggestion is closely tied to the view (addressed below) that Gassendi is somehow not an Epicurean, after all.

4.6 Gassendi’s Sort of Epicureanism, If Any To ask what sort of Epicurean Gassendi is, if any, prompts three further questions, given his faith-based interests and his historicizing method and style. First, we need to understand whether, and how, to reconcile Epicureanism with his commitments to Christian belief, in light of his own pronouncements regarding such beliefs. Secondly, we need to understand

Gassendi and Epicureanism  125 whether, and how, to reconcile Epicureanism with his commitments to the other ancient philosophies he follows or integrates. And thirdly, we need to decide whether the numerous particular divergences from the philosophy of the Garden add up to a body of thought that can still be described as Epicureanism. 4.6.1 The ‘Baptismal’ Strategy To begin with, at the outset of Gassendi’s Epicurean project, he promises to be mindful of religious doxastic obligations: […] in religion, I follow my elders, that is the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church, whose precepts I have defended to now and will go on defending. Nor will the speech of any learned, or unlearned, man ever separate me from it.107 This is a strong stance: no Epicurean claim survives intact if it conflicts with Church doctrine; each must somehow be accommodated or substituted. However, what this entails for conflicting Epicurean claims is variable in Gassendi’s philosophy. If the claim is merely modified to fit Church doctrine, then it can perhaps still be accounted as Epicurean; where the claim is dropped altogether for doctrinal reasons, Gassendi’s thought can here be considered fragmentary relative to Epicureanism or perhaps just not Epicurean; where the claim is amended or dropped due to contemporary empirical evidence, then that element of Gassendi’s thought isn’t Epicurean—albeit independently of doctrinal concerns. While his various amendments are motivated by different reasons, enough of them are oriented around doctrinal apprehensions to warrant consideration of what Gassendi gains through pursuit of a ‘baptismal’ strategy. Taken at face value, a baptismal strategy is a pure reflection of Gassendi’s fealty to doctrine, a sincere ‘repairing’108 or ‘clarifying’109 of Epicureanism to meet Christian belief. Gassendi then appears to respond to earlier Christian humanists, particularly Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus, who—with fewer textual resources at their disposal—worried about the consonance of Epicureanism with Christianity.110 Gassendi is therefore primarily concerned with providing the needed textual resources and addressing such questions as how to accommodate divine causation within an Epicurean framework. On one such question, his amendments represent a baptism of sorts, but only as motivated instrumentally by his interest in Epicurean atomism.111 In search of an atomism befitting the new mechanistic physics, Gassendi dutifully cleanses Epicureanism of any stains of atheism or other apostasy and thereby establishes a more modern corpuscularian hypothesis. Early modern physics and chemistry can then make further use of a ‘sanitized’ matter theory, irrespective of Gassendi’s particular religious convictions.

126  Saul Fisher A third interpretative tradition suggests that Gassendi elects to baptize Epicurus on different instrumental grounds, as a means of avoiding political difficulties and, in particular, of avoiding the wrath of the Church. Thus, Pintard understands Gassendi as being closely aligned with the libertins and sees his rejection of various Epicurean doctrines as evasion of the Church’s heavy hand.112 Freely expressed views, Gregory113 suggests, are less likely to be found in Gassendi’s positive expression of his own philosophy than in his penetrating, polemical works against Aristotle, Descartes,114 Fludd,115 Morin, and others. In an even stronger ideological vein, Bloch proposes that Gassendi is, for all the baptismal strategy, open to—and wrestling with—a thoroughgoing materialism as befits his scientific outlook.116 As Bloch has it, Gassendi subscribes to a theory of ‘double truth’ whereby science yields materialist metaphysics, religion offers contrary doctrines, and they are somehow both true at once. On this instrumentalist reading, Gassendi uses Epicureanism to advance, alternately, currently held scientific claims and religious claims.117 More recent interpretations accept Gassendi’s sincerity in his commitment to articles of faith. Indeed, Johnson concludes that the faith-based commitments are so thoroughgoing as to mark Gassendi as not even a true Epicurean (see below).118 LoLordo, for her part, crafts a balanced view of Gassendi as accepting of reason and faith for two equally viable and possibly compatible sources of truth. In this, she rejects the Pintard– Bloch view of two inevitably divergent, mutually exclusive, paths to the truth—but also the Osler–Johnson view that theological considerations fully determine the direction of Gassendi’s philosophy.119 A motivating feature of Gassendist thought, LoLordo proposes, is his emphasis on the limits to scientific knowledge—beyond which lies the illuminating body of faith-derived claims. This last view suggests a minimalist interpretation of Gassendi’s strategy, that what he is proposing is less a transformative baptism than a definition of theoretical scope. As we have seen, a traditional interpretation from De Launay to Osler locates the motivation for—and deep character of—that strategy in religious faith and doctrine. Gassendi more or less states as much. Yet he also defines the whole of his philosophical and natural philosophical enterprise through the exploration of Epicurean themes and questions. So, while he insists that Christian tenets force constraints on Epicureanism (and, he notes, on Aristotelianism), he asks the reader to consider physical and philosophical theories and methods of Epicurean shape and tenor, as fitting within an overarching, Christian worldview. Not all of it will fit, he advises—and so his constraints serve as boundary conditions on what, in the philosophy of the Garden, even counts as falling within a philosophical purview. Outside those bounds lie articles of faith, where authority and dogma are not only acceptable but to be lauded, and the corresponding substitutions for those Epicurean claims that are contrary to those articles.

Gassendi and Epicureanism  127 4.6.2 Countervailing Ancient Philosophical Commitments (Aristotelianism, Stoicism) As concerns the second question—whether Gassendi’s diverse commitments to ancient thought undercut his Epicureanism—an initial concession must be made to the diversity and depth of those alternative commitments. Perhaps most prominently, Gassendi borrows from Aristotle in the structure of his texts and the use of certain key concepts in his Physics120 and Ethics.121 This is unsurprising, given the thoroughgoing Aristotelian nature of Gassendi’s education and broader philosophical context—as well as Gassendi’s philosophically inclusive tendencies. Thus, as noted, virtues are central to Gassendi’s ethics—and while there are Epicurean purveyors of virtues, his account may be assimilated to an Aristotelian perspective, per Gventsadze, by taking pleasure as a companion to the virtues.122 Such is explicit in the case of Gassendi’s intellectual virtues, such as promote deliberation and the quest for knowledge.123 Gassendi’s moral virtues—like those of Aristotle—include prudence (as the highest ranking virtue), along with fortitude, moderation, and justice.124 The Stoics, too, emphasize virtues, and Gassendi weaves in some such concerns, particularly relative to the virtue of acting per the norms of nature as accords with divine providence.125 Moreover, there is a congruence of Stoic minimization of concerns for inevitable ills (and the futility of being troubled by such) and the Epicurean embrace of a similar virtuous strategy as minimizes pain.126 So, too, Gassendi’s account of justice as virtue upholds not only Epicurean protection and preservation of the self, but adds a plausibly Stoic-inspired outward, social direction to the aims of protection and preservation. In addition, providence—in naturalistic terms, nature’s plan—is taken to guide both forms of protection, as is consonant with Christian faith and also with Stoic doctrine.127 Other elements of ancient thought are found throughout Gassendi’s mature writings, whether in skeptical tropes directly borrowed from the Academics or in Aristotelian thought, likely preserved from his early exposure to Thomas or latter-day textbooks.128 For example, he tells us, in an Aristotelian mode, that individual freedom and moral capacity are possible because we have the capacity for rational deliberation.129 Further, Gassendi’s ethics can be understood as borrowing from Aristotelian teleology in positing the goal-state of a good life, as defined in Epicurean terms of bodily health and mental tranquility.130 We may also be inclined to see Aristotelian influences on the political philosophy: first, in that the state represents a natural phenomenon; and second, in that social relations among persons result from (a) stability or security preferences, and (b) preservation of private or individual interests in property or goods.131 Certainly, those concerns are alluded to in Epicurean sources, as well.132 These varied threads of influence suggest a mélange of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and other ancient sources as contributing to elements of

128  Saul Fisher Gassendi’s worldview. It is hardly surprising that, as with other early modern philosophers such as Bacon or Descartes, Gassendi did not entirely move past his Aristotelian education or, perhaps, the Aristotelian expectations of his readers. Moreover, Gassendi’s obsessive tapping of ancient sources to frame philosophical debates inevitably cedes ground to some ancient sources he takes to yield at least partially correct accounts. That is, after all, the counterpart to Gassendi’s promise to measure Epicurean views fairly against the same standards of truth as applied to all other perspectives. As such, these strands of other ancient philosophies lend credibility to Gassendi’s pronounced task of mining classical thought for contemporary verities—and so, to his conviction that Epicurean thought offers much that is correct and true, within properly defined constraints. 4.6.3 Depth of Commitment to Epicureanism: Reform, Critique, or Rejection? Looking at the many constraints on, and corresponding divergences from, canonical Epicureanism in Gassendi’s thought, we may ask if he is, after all, reforming or repudiating the philosophy of the Garden. Thus, Osler holds that Gassendi’s commitments to creationism, providentialism, and voluntarism are not mere fixes but a wholesale abandonment of original Epicurean intent.133 Johnson goes further, suggesting that, given Gassendi’s routine opposition, it does not make sense to think of him as an Epicurean at all.134 The notion is that the dismissal of such cosmological and theological claims as countermand the infinite, omnipotent God focused on human affairs, counts as evidence that Gassendi’s total compendium of views is only thinly Epicurean. Most notably, Johnson takes it that the Epicurean psychological project is defunct in Gassendi: we cannot arrive at tranquility through ridding ourselves of fear of God or gods given that providence is firmly in place. Along similar lines, Gaukroger and Kors see the posit of an immaterial soul (animus) as undermining the Epicurean project because only a fully material soul licenses our having nothing to fear from death or damnation.135 Thus, Gassendi blocks the Epicurean core aim of ridding ourselves of such fears. Instead, he proposes that, given judgment of the immaterial soul in the next world, we channel those fears—in conjunction with the promise of heavenly reward—to embrace the good. His Christian variation on the Epicurean route to ataraxia involves reducing, rather than eliminating, fear of death: while punishment awaits some after death, it is only administered to the evil among us in life. As for providence, Gassendi suggests (in a letter to Valois, October 1642) that we should not fear a God who looks out for the best interests of human beings.136 Yet Johnson’s critique is broader still: that Gassendi cannot be counted among the Epicureans given his theological starting point. Whereas ataraxia

Gassendi and Epicureanism  129 is attained by eliminating fears of God and death, the Gassendist accounts of God and death are, from the very beginning, orthogonal to the Epicurean accounts. They are neither talking about the same fears of something (different concepts of gods or God) nor fears by the same sort of agent (different concepts of soul). Hence, the Gassendist project can’t be made to align with the Epicurean project.137 That critique is too narrowly focused on the particulars, however. The Epicurean focus on ataraxia as a central philosophical goal—and the sorts of philosophical questions we ask as a result—are readily found in Gassendi’s thought, even if his particular answers differ greatly from those of the mainstream Epicurean tradition. Gassendi agrees with the Epicurean notion that we are riven by anxiety about our current place in the world because of our impending end, and he embraces their consequent questions about the metaphysics of the soul, the related physics of matter, and the ethical outlook, that help us best navigate our condition and context to reduce such anxieties. This framing of the questions and the nature of relations among central philosophical theories as offer answers is unremittingly Epicurean, even as his alternative Christianshaped responses diverge from key details of traditional Epicureanism. In this way, Gassendi is a staunch Epicurean, for his Christian faith does not steer him away from a fundamentally Epicurean philosophy—any more than modern experiments and observations steer him away from a generally Epicurean natural philosophy. Gaukroger raises a different doubt about a Gassendist goal of ataraxia, relative to the pursuit of natural philosophy.138 He sees Gassendi’s embrace of a natural philosophy not motivated by attainment of ataraxia—as with an Epicurean interest in metaphysics and physics—but as an outgrowth of fully grasping divine providence. Explorations of the natural world are just efforts to understand God’s goals and corresponding design for Creation. Indeed, Gassendi states as much in his definition of physics, including divine causation along with other, physical causations, in his scope.139 It might seem, therefore, that he takes the aim of empirical explorations to be driven by non-Epicurean concerns. There are two issues, however. First, this assessment does not capture the breadth or depth of Gassendi’s natural philosophical pursuits, in his own person or in his correspondence with a range of thinkers—some of whom are distant from, or even opposed to, his (or any) Christian vision of the natural world. Mere association, of course, does not establish motive or outlook. That said, Gassendi’s correspondence with diverse astronomers and other natural philosophers—including Beeckman, Kepler, Galileo, Wendelin, Schickard, Cassini, and others140—suggests motives for the pursuit of natural philosophy quite apart from obtaining a better understanding God’s Creation. In particular, it suggests an interest in deploying reason to get to the truth of the matter or, in keeping with his Epicurean epistemology, what is truth-resembling. This stance may be

130  Saul Fisher discerned in his guarded, even veiled defense of a Copernican thesis.141 Secondly, theological concerns motivating the pursuit of natural philosophy, from Gassendi’s perspective, do engage an Epicurean concern with the attainment of ataraxia—but through an embrace of God’s role in the world, not a denial of such. We achieve inner peace through knowledge of the Divine, and we come to know God, in part, by knowing Creation. Through the study of physics (or, in Epicurean terminology, Physiologia), the wise man removes fears of the unknown in nature: He knows that God, that is to say, the First Cause, governs all things while letting natural causes play their part; and since he has perceived the causes of Sunrises, Sunsets, Retrogrades, Eclipses, Comets, Lightning, Wonders, or Monstrosities, and all such things, he does not fear and receive, as evils destined for him, those phenomena which are feared and received by those who, because they relate them to gods or evil spirits, cannot think that there are other causes and who, therefore, always fear something of these invented Divinities. On the slightest occasion they suspect that an evil threatens them, and that they must divert it, as far as possible, by superstitious rite.142 In addition to their shared pursuit of ataraxic goals as the primary motivator for philosophical inquiry, Gassendi’s central philosophical project resembles en gros that of the canonical Epicurean enterprise. Gassendi seeks to restore Epicurus as a source for contemporary thought—emphasizing the merits of his atomist, empiricist, and hedonic ethical views. These are core elements of Epicurean thought, such that—even with all of the religiously unacceptable particulars exchanged for detailed claims upholding Christian dogma—the framework remains largely centered on atomist matter theory, empiricist theory of knowledge and method, and an ethics oriented around the minimization of pain and the maximization of refined, intellectual pleasure. These are also the principal views with which proponents, detractors, and heirs of Gassendi’s thought most readily engage, on what they understand to be Epicurean grounds.

4.7 Reception and Legacy of Gassendi’s Epicureanism Gassendi’s Epicureanism enjoyed an enduring legacy among sympathetic theorists of matter, method, morals, and other domains. Early sympathizers include Bernier, Charleton, and Stanley, whose influential vernacular translations and paraphrases of Gassendi’s Latin writings brought Epicurean thought to significantly wider audiences.143 Following the publication of Gassendi’s Syntagma philosophicum and Bernier’s Abrégé, many French thinkers were drawn to a consideration of one form or another of Epicureanism. These include Bayle, who promotes in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) a Gassendist

Gassendi and Epicureanism  131 atomism (though dismissing his focus on a divine origin or plan for atoms); the materialist and atomist D’Holbach, who marries virtues to a pleasure-promoting principle; the materialist and mechanist La Mettrie, who shares Lucretian foundations with Gassendi; the empiricist Condillac, who connects sensory belief acquisition to the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; and moral theorists—among them SaintÉvremond, Maupertuis (also drawn to atomism, though of a vitalist brand), and Helvétius—who debate the nature of Epicurean pleasures (voluptas) variably as lofty or worldly.144 Epicureanism subsequently gained a new following beyond England and France as well.145 Although Gassendi was not the only source of Epicurean influence on early modern or Enlightenment philosophy, the transmission of that influence through his writings enjoyed particular success, reintegrating Epicurus within the realm of philosophical possibilities. So successful was this reintegration that, by the time that Bentham and Mill advanced their moral theories—centered on the deployment of a utilitarian calculus—no one could immediately suspect that the authors of those theories were debauched, atheistic, or even necessarily materialist in orientation. The ultimate success of Gassendi’s reintegration project over the ensuing course of the history of philosophy consists in the evaluation of Epicurean claims on their own merits, and as adaptable, modernized, or even divorced from the larger bundle of claims from whence they are drawn.

4.8 Conclusion From a historical perspective, the success of Gassendi’s reintegration project—especially as contrasted with other Epicurean advocacy of his times—surely rested on its thoroughgoing and diverse nature. After all, he sought to restore Epicurus’ reputation as a palatable persona and source of virtuous thinking, potentially passing muster with theological authority; to correct for the deficits of prior scholarship and interpretation; to develop modifications of Epicurean claims that render the larger body of his thought consonant with Christian dogma; and to connect Epicureanism with contemporary scientific investigation and theoretical frameworks. In this last regard, Gassendi proposed that (a) there is plausible evidence or reasoning for some Epicurean empirical claims, and (b) Epicureanism accounts for our current empirical findings and sets out a worthy, coherent agenda for future exploration. In reintegrating Epicurean thought—as prompted by the rejection of Aristotelian thought and developed by grappling with the Skeptics—Gassendi offered an alternative systematic philosophy of ancient and honorable provenance, in which he saw theological acceptability, an enduring logic, and modern empirical promise. Gassendi’s varied and expansive Epicurean claims have appreciable value both as a connected set of beliefs and as revisions, renovations, and

132  Saul Fisher alignments of those beliefs with contemporary theology and science. He invites us to embrace ancient philosophy, not just for a Renaissance-like humanistic end, but to reach the ultimate psychological goals outlined in that ancient doctrine. We are fraught with anxiety because we know enough about our place in the world to recognize our inevitable corporeal demise; yet we do not know enough to understand how we may go through life tranquilly and in virtuous ways. As ataraxia is the highest form of pleasure (in opposition to the lower, kinetic pleasures), its attainment guides all our efforts in ethical and scientific spheres, toward truth (veritas) through physics, and integrity (honestas) through ethics. Right thinking about things and right conduct in life brings tranquility; in this, Gassendi follows the canonical Epicureans, independent of any Christian or modern scientific amendments he offers to their physical or ethical claims, or claims of any other kind. Further, while Gassendi embraces the systematic side of Epicureanism— taking up the whole edifice of the logic, metaphysics, theory of knowledge, and ethics—there is lasting value in his enhancing the viability of autonomous, abstracted consideration of Epicurean claims. Thus, his goal is to integrate the Epicurean framework with Christian precepts and empirical findings of the day, arriving at an Epicureanism compatible with theological doctrine and natural philosophy. And, in laying out this modified and modernized body of thought, Gassendi offers a coherent worldview and allied set of claims intended to be internally consistent; historically and religiously legitimated; and generative of explanations in natural philosophy. Beyond a replacement theory for Aristotelianism, Gassendi espouses Epicurean empirical enquiry as ataraxic means, all the while accommodating views that cannot be moved, be they pious beliefs (where relevant) or other, basic metaphysical conceptions. This approach turns out to be agenda-setting for modern philosophy, as seen in its broad legacy and strong echoes across domains of ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, and natural philosophy. Yet such legacy and echoes were frequently abstracted from—and considered independent of—the ancient particulars, in contrast to Gassendi’s systematic aims but as facilitated by his approach to Epicurean claims and reasoning. Following his model of advocating for Epicureanism as constrained, selected, or modified to meet faith-based or natural philosophical parameters, it was open to subsequent philosophers and scientists to take up elements of Epicureanism as found useful, and to jettison unwanted historical or doctrinal baggage attached to the canonical views.

Notes 1 See Olivier René Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971); Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes

Gassendi and Epicureanism  133 on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 2 Recent assessments of Epicurus and Lucretius include Alain Gigandet and Pierre-Marie Morel, eds., Lire Épicure et les épicuriens (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007); David Konstan, A Life Worthy of the Gods: The Materialist Psychology of Epicurus (Las Vegas, NV: Parmenides Publishing, 2008) [rev. and expanded ed. of David Konstan, Some Aspects of Epicurean Psychology (Leiden: Brill, 1973)]; David Sedley, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Francesco Verde, Epicuro (Roma: Carocci, 2013). 3 This is why ‘Epicurean’ or a cognate is a term for ‘atheist’ in some traditions. 4 Adversus Sophistas and various other works; Diogenes Laertius highlights the Tetrapharmakos among the Κύριαι Δόξαι (Kuriai Doxai) or 40 principal Epicurean doctrines. 5 Epicurus, Vatican Sayings 28. 6 Cf. Lucretius, De rerum natura, V 958–59; V 1014–1027, 1142–1155. 7 Epicurus, Ratae sententiae (Κύριαι δόξαι), 31–33. 8 Cf. Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, 41–42. 9 Ibid., 39. 10 Ibid., 43, 60–61; De rerum natura, II.84, 190, 218–219. 11 On the swerve, cf. De rerum natura, II.221–230; 244–251. On motion from collisions, cf. Letter to Herodotus, 43, 61–62; De rerum natura, II.84–88, 129–142. 12 De rerum natura, II.184–215. 13 Ibid., II.95–99. 14 Letter to Herodotus, 39. 15 De rerum natura, IV.26–215. 16 Ibid., II.216–293. 17 Cf. Enrico Flores, Le scoperte di Poggio e il testo di Lucrezio (Napoli: Liguori, 1980); Jill Kraye, “The Revival of Hellenistic Philosophies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 97–112. 18 Cf. Howard Jones, The Epicurean Tradition (London–New York: Routledge, 1989), 142–153; 164–166. 19 For Renaissance humanism upholding patristic criticism, see Ficino, Theologia platonica (1482). 20 Christoph H. Lüthy, “The Fourfold Democritus on the Stage of Early Modern Science,” Isis 93 (2000): 443–479; and Emily Michael, “Daniel Sennert on Matter and Form: At the Juncture of the Old and the New,” Early Science and Medicine 2 (1997): 272–299. 21 Cf. Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, Principles and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000); and Andrew Pyle, Atomism and Its Critics: From Democritus to Newton (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997). 22 Cf. Sophie Roux, “Descartes atomiste?” in Atomismo e continuo nel XVII secolo, eds. Egidio Festa and Romano Gatto (Napoli: Vivarium, 2000), 211–273. 23 See Garber’s chapter in this volume. 24 Exercitatio II, OO III, 111a; Exercitatio I, OO III, 108a; Exercitatio II, OO III, 114b; cf. Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre les Aristotéliciens, ed. and trans. Bernard Rochot (Paris: J. Vrin, 1959), 48–49; 32–33; and 62–63. 25 Exercitatio II, OO III, 113a; cf. Rochot (ed. and trans.), 58–59.

134  Saul Fisher 26 Some scholars suggest that Gassendi’s later, non-dogmatic approach to Epicurus follows his earlier interest, as expressed by the Excercitationes, in criticizing neo-Scholastics as degrading intellectual integrity and freedom of thinking; Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960/1979/2003) and José R. Maia Neto, Academic Skepticism in Seventeenth-Century French Philosophy: The Charronian Legacy, 1601–1662 (Cham: Springer, 2014). Gassendi’s early—and sustained—interest in ancient skepticism suggests a lasting aim of combating authority and dogmatic sectarianism in philosophy, notwithstanding his encouragement of such in religious thought; see Paganini’s chapter in this volume. 27 As Antonia LoLordo notes, this would be an apt role for a critical edition; cf. LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 20. 28 See René Pintard, La Mothe le Vayer, Gassendi, Guy Patin: Études de bibliographie et de critique suivies de textes inédits de Guy Patin (Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1943); Bernard Rochot, Les Travaux de Gassendi sur Épicure et sur l’atomisme, 1619–1658 (Paris: Vrin, 1944); Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi; Howard Jones, Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655): An Intellectual Biography, (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1981); Carla Rita Palmerino, “Pierre Gassendi’s De philosophia Epicuri universe Rediscovered: New Perspectives on the Genesis of the Syntagma philosophicum,” Nuncius 14 (1999): 263– 295; see also LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi, 20–24 for a précis. 29 Letter of 9 April 1628; OO VI, 11b–12a; cf. also a letter of 13 September 1629; OO VI, 26b–27a. De Putte came by his neo-Stoicism from his teacher, Lipsius; the former’s Epicuri sententiae aliquot aculeatae ex Seneca (On Epicurus, in the opinion of a number of Seneca’s followers) was published at Louvain in 1615. 30 Isaac Beeckman, Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 à 1634, ed. Cornelis de Waard (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1939–1953), III 123–124; cf. the useful reconstruction of Gassendi’s encounter in Bernard Rochot, Les Travaux, 34–41. 31 There is, additionally, Sarasohn’s suggestion that Gassendi may have taken an earlier interest in atomism as encountered in Galileo’s Il Saggiatore (Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 9). See Gassendi’s letter to Galileo, 18 July 1625, OO VI, 4. 32 Pierre Gassendi, Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii (Lugduni: Apud Guillelmum Barbier, 1649), 721, 732–733. 33 SP, OO I, 29b–30a. 34 De vita moribusque Epicuri, OO V, 172; On the Life and Character of Epicurus, Dedicatory Letter, trans. Patrick Baker and Michael Weichenhan, in Biography, Historiography, and Modes of Philosophizing: The Tradition of Collective Biography in Early Modern Europe, ed. Patrick Baker (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 317–329, at 327. 35 SP, OO I, 103b–104a; cf. Saul Fisher, Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy and Science: Atomism for Empiricists (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Delphine Bellis, “Nos in Diem Vivimus: Gassendi’s Probabilism and Academic Philosophy from Day to Day,” in Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy, eds. Plínio Junqueira Smith and Sébastien Charles (Cham: Springer, 2017), 125–152. 36 In his Essais Physiques (1678), Gilles de Launay was already referring to Gassendi’s “accommodating” the opinions of Democritus and Epicurus to Christianity.

Gassendi and Epicureanism  135 37 SP, OO I, 5a (De philosophia universe). 38 Cf. Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi, 300f. 39 See Duchesneau’s chapter in this volume. 40 Jones, The Epicurean Tradition, 178–179; Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi, 356–357; 364–365; 368–370. 41 OO VI, 155a. 42 SP, OO I, 1. 43 SP, OO II, 701b. 44 SP, OO II, 678b (quoting Cicero, Academica 2 (Lucullus), 127–128). 45 SP, OO II, 815b. 46 SP, OO II, 743b; 747a. 47 SP, OO I, 128b; OO II, 710a–b. 48 The calm they bring is not by reducing fear of gods or the irrational, but by appealing to the surety of God’s design for Creation. 49 SP, OO I, 279b–280a; Pierre Gassendi, The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi, trans. Craig Brush, (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972), 398. 50 SP, OO I, 280a–b. 51 SP, OO I, 338a. 52 SP, OO I, 274a–275a, 280a–b; Gassendi, Selected Works, 399–400. 53 De Motu I, 17–18; OO III, 497a–b. 54 Cf. Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi; Fisher, Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy; LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi. 55 Lynn Sumida Joy, Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 56 On Gassendi’s conception of motion, see Palmerino’s chapter in this volume. 57 SP, OO I, 282b; cf. also the corpuscularian theory of color in the Fourth Letter of De Apparente Magnitudine Solis (1642). Gassendi sees the origins of this account in canonical Epicurean atomism, which allows for the dissolution of macro-scale bodies into atomic aggregates rather than just individual atoms; cf. OO III, 469a-b. 58 Cf. Antonia LoLordo, “Gassendi and the Seventeenth-Century Atomists on Primary and Secondary Qualities,” in Primary and Secondary Qualities: The Historical and Ongoing Debate, ed. Lawrence Nolan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 62–80. 59 Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi; Marco Messeri, Causa e spiegazione: La fisica di Pierre Gassendi (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1985); Henk H. Kubbinga, “La théorie moléculaire chez Gassendi,” in Pierre Gassendi 1592–1655: Actes du Colloque International Digne-les-Bains, 18–21 mai 1992 (Digne: Société scientifique et littéraire des Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, 1994), 283–302; Clericuzio, Elements, Principles and Corpuscles. 60 Cf. Hiro Hirai, Le Concept de semence dans les théories de la matière à la Renaissance: de Marsile Ficin à Pierre Gassendi (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), esp. 466–471. 61 While Gassendi takes this sort of molecular account as necessary for atomism to bear explanatory power, he doesn’t—and couldn’t—suggest that, conversely, such a molecular account requires the Epicurean view, or perhaps even atomism altogether; any account of variable smaller component parts would suffice. 62 SP, OO I, 229–282; 372–458, passim. 63 Barry Brundell, Pierre Gassendi: from Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy (Dordrecht–Boston, MA: Reidel, 1987); Jones, The Epicurean

136  Saul Fisher Tradition; Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 64 SP, OO I, 271a, 472a. 65 Beeckman, Journal, vol. I, 92, 211. 66 SP, OO II, 380–381. 67 SP, OO I, 422–432. 68 SP, OO I, 441–449; II, 403ab. 69 SP, OO II, 339a. 70 SP, OO II, 250ab; 255a–256b; 627a–628a. 71 “Therefore the soul (anima) seems to be rather a very tenuous substance, and like the flower of matter (florem materiae) with a special disposition or condition, and symmetry of the parts holding among the crasser mass of the body,” SP, OO II, 250b. 72 Cf. SP, OO II, 170b–173a, 266b–267a, 275a–280b; cf. Fisher, Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy. 73 SP, OO II, 440. 74 SP, OO II, 425–426. Gassendi’s dual account is a Christian adaptation of the Lucretian splitting of the Epicurean soul into the irrational anima (spirit) and the rational animus (mind); cf. De rerum natura III.94–416. 75 SP, OO II, 627a. The eternal nature of the immaterial animus follows the given Epicurean linkage of materiality to mortality as exhaustive: whatever cannot be corrupted physically (and fall into parts) must last forever (SP, OO II, 628a). 76 SP, OO II, 824a–b. 77 See Garau’s chapter in this volume. 78 While there are suggestions of a theory of signs in Epicurus and Philodemus, the roots of Gassendi’s theory look to be largely in Sextus Empiricus; for the range of ancient views, cf. James Allen, Inference from Signs: Ancient Debates about the Nature of Evidence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 79 SP, OO I, 293. 80 Cf. SP, OO I, 128b. 81 See Rutherford’s chapter in this volume. 82 SP, OO II, 717a; cf. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics, 66. 83 SP, OO II, 701b; the advancement of the species is also an Aristotelian concern; see Veronica Gventsadze, “Aristotelian Influences in Gassendi’s Moral Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 45 (2007): 223–242. 84 Thus, suicide is a prohibited offense to God as the creator of nature—as well as to nature, by which we have an ingrained love of life; cf. SP, OO II, 672b–673a. 85 Desmond M. Clarke, French Philosophy, 1572–1675 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 86 Gventsadze, “Aristotelian Influences”; Clarke, French Philosophy. 87 SP, OO II, 664b–665a. 88 SP, OO II, 504a; cf. Gventsadze, “Aristotelian Influences.” 89 SP, OO II, 840a. 90 OO III, 87b. 91 SP, OO II, 785b. 92 SP, OO II, 787b–788a. 93 Gianni Paganini, “Hobbes, Gassendi and the Tradition of Political Epicureanism,” Hobbes Studies 14 (2001): 3–24, at 17. 94 SP, OO II, 753b–754a. 95 SP, OO II, 791–794. This utility appeal appears in the works of the Epicurean Hermarchus (as cited by Porphyry, De abstinentia ab esu animalium, I 7–12); Paganini, “Hobbes, Gassendi.”

Gassendi and Epicureanism  137 96 Animadversiones III, 1748; cf. also SP, OO II, 795a. 97 Cf. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics, 145, 152–153; Paganini, “Hobbes, Gassendi,” 10–13; and Clarke, French Philosophy, 216. 98 Cf. Jean-Charles Darmon, “Épicurisme et rhétorique au temps de la ‘Révolution scientifique’: Remarques sur le Cas Gassendi,” Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences 55 (2005): 211–234; and Joy, Gassendi the Atomist. 99 Darmon, “Épicurisme et rhétorique,” 216; Gassendi, De vita et moribus Epicuri libri octo, Book 8, chapter 9. 100 Cf. Exercitationes, OO III, 109b; Rochot, Les Travaux, 40–41, and passim. 101 SP, OO I, 38a–66b; 86b–90b. 102 SP, OO I, 89a. 103 Darmon, “Épicurisme et rhétorique.” 104 Michael Weichenhan, “Biography as a Medium of Philosophy and the History of Philosophy: Pierre Gassendi,” in Biography, Historiography, and Modes of Philosophizing, 297–316; Pierre Gassendi, Vie et mœurs d’Épicure, ed. and trans. Sylvie Taussig (Paris: Éditions Alive, 2001); Sylvie Taussig, Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655): Introduction à la vie savante (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003); Joy, Gassendi the Atomist. 105 Cf. Taussig, Pierre Gassendi, 246–254. 106 Ibid., 19, 23. 107 De vita moribusque Epicuri, OO V, 172; On the Life and Character of Epicurus, 327. 108 Osler, Divine Will, 45. 109 Alan Charles Kors, Epicureans and Atheists in France, 1650–1729 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 57. 110 John Monfasani, “Twenty-fifth Annual Margaret Mann Phillips Lecture: Erasmus and the Philosophers,” Erasmus Studies 32 (2012): 47–68. 111 Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, 262. 112 Pintard, La Mothe le Vayer, Gassendi, Guy Patin. 113 Tullio Gregory, Scetticismo ed empirismo. Studio su Gassendi (Bari: Laterza, 1961). 114 See LoLordo’s chapter in this volume. 115 See Mehl’s chapter in this volume. 116 Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi, 430, 476–481. Bloch follows two threads of mixed judgment of Gassendi in Marx who, on the one hand hails Gassendi as “the restorer of Epicurean materialism” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique (Die heilige Familie), trans. Richard Dixon (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1845/1956), 170) but, on the other hand notes of his religiously motivated amendments, “It is as though one wanted to throw the habit of a Christian nun over the bright and flourishing body of the Greek Lais.” (The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature (Differenz der demokritischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie, dissertation, 1841, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, 1, trans. Dirk J. and Sally R. Struik (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1902/1975), 29). 117 Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi, 301. Bykhovsky takes Bloch’s instrumentalist assessment one step further, proposing that the actual aim is not a faith-oriented correction but a truth- and utility-oriented mining exercise: “Unlike Aquinas, Gassendi has no intention of “baptizing” Epicurus, but instead insists on extracting from his teachings all that is true, valuable, and fruitful.” Bernard Emmanuilovich Bykhovsky, Gassendi (Гассенди) (Moscow: Thought, 1974), 72. 118 Monte Ransome Johnson, “Was Gassendi an Epicurean?” History of Philosophy Quarterly 20 (2003): 339–359.

138  Saul Fisher 19 LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi, 33. 1 120 Cf. Margaret J. Osler, “New Wine in Old Bottles: Gassendi and the Aristotelian Origin of Physics,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26 (2002): 167–184. 121 Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics; Gventsadze, “Aristotelian Influences”; Clarke, French Philosophy. 122 Gventsadze, “Aristotelian Influences,” 237. 123 SP, OO II, 482b–483a; 736b. 124 SP, OO II, 740b–741a; cf. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics, 61; Gventsadze, “Aristotelian Influences,” 236. 125 Cf. Fred S. Michael and Emily Michael, “Gassendi’s Modified Epicureanism and British Moral Philosophy,” Journal of European Ideas 21 (1995): 743–761. 126 SP, OO II, 768b–769a; Michael and Michael, “Gassendi’s Modified Epicureanism,” 748–749. 127 SP, OO II, 748b–749b; 803b (here Gassendi cites Cicero, De officiis, III [21] 5); Michael and Michael, “Gassendi’s Modified Epicureanism,” 749. Gassendi might be drawing on Stoic thought here—for example, Cicero’s suggestion in De legibus (1.16–17) that nature provides humankind with justice and the law as befits humankind. Yet there are diverse origins— including Thomas, Suárez, and Molina—to early modern discussions of natural law; cf. Jan Schröder, “The Concept of (Natural) Law in the Doctrine of Law and Natural Law of the Early Modern Era,” in Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe: Jurisprudence, Theology, Moral and Natural Philosophy, eds. Michael Stolleis and Lorraine Daston (London–New York: Routledge, 2017), 57–71. 128 Cf. Bellis, “Nos in Diem Vivimus.” 129 SP, OO II, 831b–832b; Gventsadze, “Aristotelian Influences,” 230–231. 130 SP, OO II, 682a; Clarke, French Philosophy, 176. 131 SP, OO II, 755a; Aristotle, Politics 2.5 1263 a21–b15; cf. Gventsadze, “Aristotelian Influences.” 132 For Gassendi, the preservation of individual interests demands of us—as a matter of natural law—to associate with others in social arrangements. From this flows his political contractarianism; cf. SP, OO II, 801b–802a; Gianni Paganini, “Early Modern Epicureanism: Gassendi and Hobbes in Dialogue on Psychology, Ethics, and Politics,” in Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism, ed. Phillip Mitsis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 671–710, at 691–692. 133 Osler, Divine Will, 45. 134 Johnson, “Was Gassendi an Epicurean?,” 339. 135 Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, 273 and Kors, Epicureans and Atheists. 136 Cf. OO VI, 155b; Sylvie Taussig, “La Vie d’Épicure par Gassendi,” in Der Garten und die Moderne: Epikureische Moral und Politik vom Humanismus bis zur Aufklärung, eds. Gianni Paganini and Edoardo Tortarolo (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2004), 139–159. 137 Johnson, “Was Gassendi an Epicurean?,” 344–345. 138 Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, 275. 139 SP, OO I, 125a. 140 Taussig, Pierre Gassendi (105–137) offers a helpful overview of Gassendi’s scientific correspondence among the collected Latin letters. 141 Gassendi’s view of Copernicanism evolves in response to Galileo’s condemnation (1633) and to his own appointment to the Collège Royal (1645), eventually recommending suspension of judgment among competing claims concerning heliocentrism due to insufficient evidence—recalling Epicurus’

Gassendi and Epicureanism  139 similar move relative to the density or rarity of the outer spheres. (SP, OO I, 152a; I, 630a); cf. Brundell, Pierre Gassendi, 45–46; and Sakamoto’s chapter in this volume. 142 SP, OO I, 128b. 143 Cf. Walter Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, or, A Fabrick of Science Natural, Upon the Hypothesis of Atoms Founded by Epicurus Repaired [by] Petrus Gassendus (London: Tho. Newcomb for Thomas Heath, 1654); Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy: Containing the Lives, Opinions, Actions, and Discourses of the Philosophers of Every Sect, Volume Three (London: Humphrey Moseley and Thomas Dring, 1660); and François Bernier, Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi (Lyon: Anisson & Posuel, 1678). Cf. also Bernier in early English translation, Three Discourses of Happiness, Virtue, and Liberty, Collected from the Works of the Learn’d Gassendi (London: Awnsham and John Churchil, 1699). On the broad influence of Gassendi’s Epicureanism on British thinkers, including Locke and Boyle, see Clericuzio’s chapter in this volume. 144 Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique (Rotterdam: Chez Reinier Leers, 1697); Paul Henri Dietrich Baron d’Holbach, Système de la nature ou des loix du monde physique et du monde moral (Amsterdam: Chez MarcMichel Rey, 1770)—indicative of the ongoing trepidation about the promotion of Epicureanism is the fact that D’Holbach published this work under the name of Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud, a member of the Académie française who had died ten years previously; Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L’Homme machine (À Leyde: De l’imp. d’Elie Luzac fils, 1748), and Système d’Épicure, in Œuvres philosophiques (A Londres: Chez Jean Nourse, 1751), 332–364; Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines (Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1746); Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis de Saint-Évremond, Sur la Morale d’Épicure (1685), in Œuvres mêlées, ed. Charles Giraud (Paris: J. Léon Techener fils, 1865), I: 170–178; Pierre-Louis M. de Maupertuis, Système de la nature, 1751, volume II, 135– 184, in Œuvres de Maupertuis (A Lyon: Chez Jean-Marie Bruyset, 1756); and Claude-Adrien Helvétius, De l’homme: de ses facultés intellectuelles et de son éducation (Londres: Chez la Société Typographique, 1773). Epicurean influences were diverse among Enlightenment thinkers in France and throughout Europe; cf. Kors, Epicureans and Atheists; Wilson, Epicureanism; Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Jean-Christophe Abramovici, “Epicureanism,” in Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, ed. Michel Delon (London–New York: Routledge, 2002), 468–471; and Sylvia Murr, ed., Gassendi et l’Europe, 1592–1792 (Paris: Vrin, 1997). Others shared Gassendi’s enthusiasm for the particulars of Lucretius’ Epicureanism; cf. Catherine Wilson, “The Presence of Lucretius in Eighteenth-Century French and German Philosophy,” in Lucretius and Modernity: Epicurean Encounters Across Time and Disciplines, eds. Jacques Lezra and Liza Blake (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 71–88. 145 Epicurean strands are found in Vico, Jefferson, Peirce, Nietzsche, and Fechner, among numerous others.

Bibliography Abramovici, Jean-Christophe. “Epicureanism.” In Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, edited by Michel Delon, 468–471. London–New York: Routledge, 2002.

140  Saul Fisher Allen, James. Inference from Signs: Ancient Debates about the Nature of Evidence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Baker, Patrick, ed. Biography, Historiography, and Modes of Philosophizing: The Tradition of Collective Biography in Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Bayle, Pierre. Dictionnaire historique et critique. A Rotterdam: Chez Reinier Leers, 1697. Beeckman, Isaac, Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 à 1634, ed. Cornelis de Waard. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1939–1953. Bellis, Delphine. “Nos in Diem Vivimus: Gassendi’s Probabilism and Academic Philosophy from Day to Day.” In Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Plínio Junqueira Smith and Sébastien Charles, 125–152. Cham: Springer, 2017. Bernier, François. Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi. Lyon: Anisson & Posuel, 1678. Bernier, François. Three Discourses of Happiness, Virtue, and Liberty, Collected from the Works of the Learn’d Gassendi. London: Awnsham and John Churchil, 1699. Bloch, Olivier René. La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971. Brundell, Barry. Pierre Gassendi. From Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht–Boston, MA: Reidel, 1987. Bykhovsky, Bernard Emmanuilovich. Gassendi (Гассенди). Moscow: Thought, 1974. Charleton, Walter. Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, or, A Fabrick of Science Natural, Upon the Hypothesis of Atoms Founded by Epicurus Repaired [by] Petrus Gassendus. London: Tho. Newcomb for Thomas Heath, 1654. Clarke, Desmond M. French Philosophy, 1572–1675. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Clericuzio, Antonio. Elements, Principles and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000. Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de. Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines. Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1746. D’Holbach, Paul Henri Dietrich Baron. Système de la nature ou des loix du monde physique et du monde moral. Amsterdam: Chez Marc-Michel Rey, 1770. Darmon, Jean-Charles. “Épicurisme et rhétorique au temps de la ‘Révolution scientifique’: Remarques sur le Cas Gassendi,” Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences 55 (2005): 211–234. Fisher, Saul. Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy and Science: Atomism for Empiricists. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Flores, Enrico. Le scoperte di Poggio e il testo di Lucrezio. Napoli: Liguori, 1980. Gassendi, Pierre. Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii, qui est De vita, moribus, placitisque Epicuri. Lugduni: Apud Guillelmum Barbier, 1649. Gassendi, Pierre. Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre les Aristotéliciens. Edited and translated by Bernard Rochot. Paris: J. Vrin, 1959. Gassendi, Pierre. Opera omnia in sex tomos divisa. Lugduni: Sumptibus Laurentii Anisson, & Ioan. Bapt. Devenet, 1658 (abridged OO). Gassendi, Pierre. The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi. Translated by Craig B. Brush. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972.

Gassendi and Epicureanism  141 Gassendi, Pierre. Vie et mœurs d’Épicure. Edited and translated by Sylvie Taussig. Paris: Éditions Alive, 2001. Gaukroger, Stephen. The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210–1685. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Gigandet, Alain and Pierre-Marie Morel, eds. Lire Épicure et les épicuriens. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007. Gregory, Tullio. Scetticismo ed empirismo. Studio su Gassendi. Bari: Laterza, 1961. Gventsadze, Veronica. “Aristotelian Influences in Gassendi’s Moral Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 45 (2007): 223–242. Helvétius, Claude-Adrien. De l’homme: de ses facultés intellectuelles et de son éducation. A Londres: Chez la Société Typographique, 1773. Hirai, Hiro. Le Concept de semence dans les théories de la matière à la Renaissance: de Marsile Ficin à Pierre Gassendi. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Israel, Jonathan I. Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Johnson, Monte Ransome. “Was Gassendi an Epicurean?” History of Philosophy Quarterly 20 (2003): 339–359. Jones, Howard. Pierre Gassendi 1592–1655: An Intellectual Biography. Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1981. Jones, Howard. The Epicurean Tradition. London–New York: Routledge, 1989. Joy, Lynn Sumida. Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Konstan, David. A Life Worthy of the Gods: The Materialist Psychology of Epicurus. Las Vegas, NV: Parmenides Publishing, 2008 [rev. and expanded ed. of David Konstan, Some Aspects of Epicurean Psychology. Leiden: Brill, 1973]. Kors, Alan Charles. Epicureans and Atheists in France, 1650–1729. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Kraye, Jill. “The Revival of Hellenistic Philosophies.” In The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, edited by James Hankins, 97–112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Kubbinga, Henk H. “La théorie moléculaire chez Gassendi.” In Pierre Gassendi 1592–1655: Actes du Colloque International Digne-les-Bains, 18–21 mai 1992, 283–302. Digne: Société scientifique et littéraire des Alpes-de-HauteProvence, 1994. La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. L’Homme machine. À Leyde: De l’imp. d’Elie Luzac fils, 1748. La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. Œuvres philosophiques. A Londres: Chez Jean Nourse, 1751. LoLordo, Antonia. “Gassendi and the Seventeenth-Century Atomists on Primary and Secondary Qualities.” In Primary and Secondary Qualities: The Historical and Ongoing Debate, edited by Lawrence Nolan, 62–80. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. LoLordo, Antonia. Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Lüthy, Christoph H. “The Fourfold Democritus on the Stage of Early Modern Science,” Isis 93 (2000): 443–479. Maia Neto, José R. Academic Skepticism in Seventeenth-Century French Philosophy: The Charronian Legacy, 1601–1662. Cham: Springer, 2014.

142  Saul Fisher Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works, 1. Translated by Dirk J. and Sally R. Struik. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1902/1975. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique (Die heilige Familie). Translated by Richard Dixon. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1845/1956. Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis M. de, Œuvres, 4 vols. A Lyon: Chez Jean-Marie Bruyset, 1756. Messeri, Marco. Causa e spiegazione: La fisica di Pierre Gassendi. Milano: Franco Angeli, 1985. Michael, Emily. “Daniel Sennert on Matter and Form: At the Juncture of the Old and the New,” Early Science and Medicine 2 (1997): 272–299. Michael, Fred S. and Emily Michael, “Gassendi’s Modified Epicureanism and British Moral Philosophy,” Journal of European Ideas 21 (1995): 743–761. Monfasani, John. “Twenty-fifth Annual Margaret Mann Phillips Lecture: Erasmus and the Philosophers,” Erasmus Studies 32 (2012): 47–68. Murr, Sylvia, ed. Gassendi et l’Europe, 1592–1792. Paris: Vrin, 1997. Osler, Margaret J. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Osler, Margaret J. “New Wine in Old Bottles: Gassendi and the Aristotelian Origin of Physics,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26 (2002): 167–184. Paganini, Gianni. “Early Modern Epicureanism: Gassendi and Hobbes in Dialogue on Psychology, Ethics, and Politics.” In Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism, edited by Phillip Mitsis, 671–710. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Paganini, Gianni. “Hobbes, Gassendi and the Tradition of Political Epicureanism,” Hobbes Studies 14.1 (2001): 3–24. Palmerino, Carla Rita. “Pierre Gassendi’s De philosophia Epicuri universe Rediscovered: New Perspectives on the Genesis of the Syntagma philosophicum,” Nuncius 14 (1999): 131–162. Pintard, René. La Mothe le Vayer, Gassendi, Guy Patin: Études de bibliographie et de critique suivies de textes inédits de Guy Patin. Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1943. Popkin, Richard H. The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle, revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960/1979/2003. Pyle, Andrew. Atomism and Its Critics: From Democritus to Newton. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997. Rochot, Bernard. Les Travaux de Gassendi sur Épicure et sur l’atomisme 1619– 1658. Paris: Vrin, 1944. Roux, Sophie. “Descartes atomiste?” In Atomismo e continuo nel XVII secolo, edited by Egidio Festa and Romano Gatto, 211–273. Napoli: Vivarium, 2000. Saint-Évremond, Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis de. Œuvres mêlées, ed. Charles Giraud. Paris: J. Léon Techener fils, 1865. Sarasohn, Lisa T. Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1996. Schröder, Jan. “The Concept of (Natural) Law in the Doctrine of Law and Natural Law of the Early Modern Era.” In Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe: Jurisprudence, Theology, Moral and Natural Philosophy, edited by Michael Stolleis and Lorraine Daston, 57–71. London–New York: Routledge, 2017.

Gassendi and Epicureanism  143 Sedley, David. Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Stanley, Thomas. The History of Philosophy: Containing the Lives, Opinions, Actions, and Discourses of the Philosophers of Every Sect, Volume Three. London: Humphrey Moseley and Thomas Dring, 1660. Taussig, Sylvie. “La Vie d’Épicure par Gassendi.” In Der Garten und die Moderne: Epikureische Moral und Politik vom Humanismus bis zur Aufklärung, edited by Gianni Paganini and Edoardo Tortarolo, 139–159. Stuttgart: FrommannHolzboog, 2004. Taussig, Sylvie. Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655): Introduction à la vie savante. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003. Verde, Francesco. Epicuro. Roma: Carocci, 2013. Weichenhan, Michael. “Biography as a Medium of Philosophy and the History of Philosophy: Pierre Gassendi.” In Biography, Historiography, and Modes of Philosophizing, edited by Patrick Baker, 297–316. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Wilson, Catherine. Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Wilson, Catherine. “The Presence of Lucretius in Eighteenth-Century French and German Philosophy.” In Lucretius and Modernity: Epicurean Encounters Across Time and Disciplines, edited by Jacques Lezra and Liza Blake, 71–88. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

5 Tranquility as the Highest Good Gassendi between Epicurus and Cicero Donald Rutherford

5.1 Introduction Gassendi’s ethics is usually portrayed as an attempt to synthesize Epicureanism and Christianity. There is an initial plausibility to this reading. One of Gassendi’s principal projects was the rehabilitation of Epicurus’ philosophy. Believing that Epicurus’ views had been misrepresented and unfairly maligned, Gassendi devoted considerable effort to collecting textual evidence in support of an informed understanding of Epicurus’ doctrines and defending them against misinterpretation. This he carried out in his works De vita et moribus Epicuri (1647) and Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii, qui est de vita, moribus, placitisque Epicuri (1649). At the same time, Gassendi was a priest who accepted the spiritual authority of the Roman Catholic Church and expressed his willingness to conform the expression of his views to the Church’s teachings.1 Though one might read such vows of submission as attempts to conceal an underlying irreligiosity, there is little basis for doing so.2 We should rather take Gassendi at his word: he was a Catholic who remained faithful to the teachings of the Church while defending specific doctrines of Epicurus’ natural philosophy and ethics. The question is how to put these points together. What, in short, is meant when one attributes to Gassendi “a Christianized Epicurean ethical system”?3 A common strategy in addressing this question is to begin from the assumption that Gassendi is an Epicurean in ethics and then to ask how his Epicureanism must be compromised in order to be reconciled with the teachings of the Church. Supposing that Gassendi succeeded in creating a hybrid position, it would require him to abandon central Epicurean doctrines, concerning, for example, divine providence and the immortality of the soul. In that case, we might wonder, why call him an Epicurean at all? Strictly speaking, he is not an Epicurean if he does not accept Epicurus’ authority as a teacher and the reasoning that supports his principal doctrines.4 To take an obvious example: one of the four precepts of Epicurus’ tetrapharmakon inveighs against the fear of death. According to Epicurus, death is not to be feared, because it is nothing to us. Death deprives us of DOI: 10.4324/9781315521732-7

Tranquility as the Highest Good  145 our very existence, so it is impossible for us to suffer in its aftermath.5 Gassendi affirms Epicurus’ precept, death is not to be feared, but he construes it in an entirely different way. In his view, only the good have no reason to fear death; the wicked rightly fear it.6 To hold as a tenet of faith that the righteous are rewarded with eternal life and the wicked damned is to declare oneself a Christian and not an Epicurean, whatever superficial agreement one finds between the positions. The description of Gassendi’s ethics as a “Christianized Epicureanism” leaves him with a position that is barely coherent. Just as importantly, it undersells the interest and ambition of Gassendi’s philosophy as presented in Syntagma philosophicum (1658) [hereafter: SP]. One point that is missed is Gassendi’s general strategy for dealing with the relation of philosophy and Christianity. Rather than seeking a synthesis that integrates the two sets of teachings, Gassendi follows Galileo and Descartes in dividing the competence of the two domains. Philosophy’s competence is limited to the study of nature, including the natural powers of human beings and their prospects for happiness within a natural life. This it pursues through the use of reason. The teachings of the Church, on the other hand, concern the supernatural end of human beings, about which philosophy has nothing to say.7 Along with most of his contemporaries, Gassendi makes it a condition for the acceptance of philosophical doctrines that they be shown not to contradict principles of faith, however these are interpreted. Furthermore, he holds the view, traceable to the ancients, that natural reason on its own can reach conclusions supportive of religion.8 The combination of these points, however, falls short of showing that Gassendi seeks a synthesis of philosophy and religion, and in particular that the position he defends in SP is best described as a “Christianized Epicurean.” To appreciate the significance of SP as a work of philosophy, dedicated to the investigation of nature and pursued from the perspective of reason, we must look elsewhere. The clearest model for Gassendi’s approach in philosophy is Cicero’s Academic skepticism. Gassendi was intimately acquainted with Cicero’s writings and drew heavily on them, especially in the ethical part of SP. Gassendi shares with Cicero the assumption that philosophy is best understood and engaged through its history, which reveals a succession of competing schools, defending different answers to a common set of questions. From among these schools, Cicero identifies his own stance as that of an Academic skeptic, who questions the ability of any philosopher to arrive at certain knowledge of the truth. At most, Cicero allows, we can establish that one position is more plausible, or better supported by reason, than rival positions, and this is sufficient to accept its claims, defeasibly, as true for the purposes of life. Gassendi’s commitment to this sort of ‘mitigated’ skepticism has been recognized by commentators, but its relevance for his ethics has not been adequately explored. The goal of this chapter is to develop and substantiate this connection.9

146  Donald Rutherford In ethics, Gassendi finds important common ground with Epicurus, but this agreement does not justify describing him as an Epicurean. As an Academic skeptic, Gassendi assesses the competing claims of philosophers—documented at length in SP—judging where there is underlying agreement between them and, when there is not, judging which view he finds more plausible. With respect to the central topic of happiness, conceived as the highest good, Gassendi believes that Epicurus advances the most plausible position. Yet this admission is consistent with Gassendi disagreeing with Epicurus on other key points, formulating in this way an eclectic system from the perspective of ancient philosophy, but one that is uniquely his own. Stepping back from the details, we find in Gassendi a distinctive form of modern philosophy that rejects the much vaunted insistence of Descartes and Hobbes on a sharp break with the past and emphasizes instead the continuity of philosophical inquiry from antiquity up through the seventeenth century.10 A single chapter can address only some of these points. Section 2 considers in more detail Gassendi’s understanding of philosophy, the place of ethics within it, and his reliance on Cicero’s skeptical method. Section 3 examines the argumentation offered in Book 1 of SP III on behalf of the Epicurean thesis that the highest good is a kind of pleasure—namely, tranquility of mind. Section 4 weighs a potential challenge to this account, stemming from Gassendi’s views on the value of virtuous action and the freedom of philosophizing.

5.2 The “Idea of Philosophy” Gassendi draws his general understanding of philosophy, on which SP is based, from the ancients. He favors the view of those who conceive of philosophy as consisting of three closely related parts: logic (dealing with norms of reasoning and knowledge), physics (dealing with the universe of existing things and their force of acting),11 and ethics (dealing with the best way of life for a human being). Ancient sources attest to broad agreement on this scheme among the schools, including Epicureanism.12 In adopting it as his own, Gassendi emphasizes that he is doing more than defending Epicurus’ account. He gives what he regards as the true account of philosophy—one which has points of contact with Epicurus’ position but also diverges from it, and which tracks what Gassendi takes to be an underlying consensus among the ancients.13 We acquire a fuller perspective on this topic from Gassendi’s definition of philosophy in the opening sections of SP’s Liber proœmialis, titled “On Philosophy in General.” Philosophy, he writes, is “the love, pursuit and exercise of wisdom”; and “wisdom is nothing other than the disposition of the soul for perceiving things correctly and acting correctly in life.” This disposition of the soul is grounded in the natural directedness of its powers of intellect and will to the ends, respectively, of truth and

Tranquility as the Highest Good  147 rectitude (honestas).14 The intellect tends toward truth and the will toward rectitude, and these become the starting points for two of the three parts of philosophy: physics examines the truth of everything in nature, and ethics scrutinizes the manners (mores) of human beings that promote rectitude. The wisdom pursued by philosophy is explained as the “perfection” of the cognitive and conative powers of the soul: the wise or virtuous person who has perfected the soul’s powers through philosophy, consistently apprehends the truth and acts rightly.15 In emphasizing the perfection of the soul as the basis of the wisdom sought by philosophy, Gassendi’s account is suggestive of the versions of Stoicism presented by Cicero and Seneca. Yet Gassendi immediately goes on to complicate his account. The perfection of the soul through the pursuit of truth and rectitude is also, he argues, the source of “the greatest happiness that can be obtained by natural powers,” a happiness based on the “tranquility” we enjoy when we are free from false opinions and disruptive passions. This is a happiness that all human beings desire (whether or not they recognize it) and one that philosophy is uniquely able to supply.16 Consequently, philosophy has another end over and above wisdom: “although one end of philosophy is the pursuit of truth and the formation of rectitude, a further end of both of these is happiness itself; this end is also the concern of philosophy.”17 Gassendi’s distinction between philosophy’s dual ends of wisdom and happiness signals a break with Stoicism, which insists that the two ends are identical: the happy life is the life of the wise person. We might see here a move toward the position of Epicurus, for whom wisdom is merely a means to happiness, conceived as a life of pleasure, or freedom from pain. But it would be a mistake to attach this label too quickly to Gassendi. Having outlined his understanding of philosophy as defined by two ends—the internal end of wisdom and the external end of happiness— Gassendi draws his most extensive support for it from Cicero.18 In keeping with Cicero’s approach, he regards the account he has given as expressing the idea of philosophy (Idea Philosophiae), broadly accepted in antiquity, which different philosophers have articulated in different ways (varie).19 Gassendi’s task in SP is to work out how he will develop this conception of philosophy—in logic, physics, and ethics—which he regards as the common property of the ancients. The impression of a constructive project, continuous with the ancients’ model of philosophy, is confirmed when we turn to Gassendi’s ethics. Gassendi introduces the third part of SP by locating Epicurus’ philosophy within a synoptic history of ethics, drawn from Sextus Empiricus, Plutarch, and Cicero. The principal topic of ethics is the “art of living,” or more fully, the “art of acting well and in accordance with virtue,” as this bears on the life of any individual, regardless of their social role.20 The importance Epicurus assigns to ethics, subordinating physical inquiries to it, finds a precedent in the position of Socrates, who demanded of

148  Donald Rutherford philosophy that it “ask questions about the way of life and morals and things good and bad.”21 Appealing to the Tusculan Disputations, Gassendi highlights Cicero’s description of moral philosophy as a medicina mentis, designed to purge passions that disrupt our capacity to act well and in accordance with virtue.22 At the end of the Preface, Gassendi returns to Epicurus, but this is chiefly to affirm Epicurus’ philosophy as part of the tradition of ethical thought he has reconstructed. Gassendi is keen to emphasize that, far from being an outlier to this tradition, Epicurus upholds a defining commitment of it: that philosophy is pursued for the sake of living well and happily. This is to acknowledge Epicurus’ credentials as a philosopher, but it stops short of accepting membership in his school. The strongest confirmation of this point is found at the end of the Liber proœmialis, where Gassendi denies his allegiance to any philosophical sect and qualifies his acceptance of Epicurus’ doctrines: it may seem, in fact, that Epicurus is preferable to the others, because having undertaken to vindicate his morals, I seemed to perceive that many more problems in physics could be explained much more conveniently by his position on the void and atoms, and likewise in ethics by his position on pleasure, than by the positions of other philosophers. Yet I do not for that reason either approve of all his tenets, even those not pertaining to religion, or, of those I do approve, I do not embrace them in such a way that I hold them to be indubitable and certain; I take them not as established but as within the bounds of the probable.23 Gassendi registers his agreement with two doctrines defended by Epicurus: atomism and hedonism. These are significant points of contact, the latter of which is consequential for Gassendi’s ethics, yet they fall short of a wholesale endorsement of Epicurus’ philosophy. Of equal importance is Gassendi’s qualification of the attitude he adopts toward these doctrines: he does not hold them to be “indubitable and certain” but takes them to remain “within the bounds of the probable [intra limitates verisimilitudinis].”24 Gassendi aligns himself with the standpoint of the Academic, or mitigated skeptic, as represented in Cicero’s philosophical writings. This is evident both in the terminology he uses to describe the grounds of his assent to different philosophical doctrines (probabile, verisimilitudo), and in the “freedom” (libertas) he takes to characterize the attitude of the philosopher: I enlist in no sect which I hold in esteem above all, and I follow now this one, now that one, if it seems to hold something probable compared to the others […]. No one has been deprived of the freedom of philosophizing [libertas philosophandi].25

Tranquility as the Highest Good  149 Gassendi philosophizes within a tradition that he traces to the ancients, but he denies identifying himself with any one school within it. His primary concern in SP is constructive: he seeks to develop his own system, drawing on the model of ancient philosophical thought. A defining feature of this model is that philosophy is pursued for the sake of living well or happily. This reinforces the centrality of ethics, which has as its focus the “art of living well.” Philosophy is thus pursued for the sake of an end that is reached via the path supplied by ethics. This path can only be discerned if we know what it is to live well, or happily, as a human being—a central concern of the ethical part of philosophy. On this issue, as we will see, Gassendi draws heavily on Epicurus, though not in a way that excludes the relevance of other viewpoints. His overarching stance is that of a philosopher who retains his freedom to form judgments about the happy life, based on the plausibility of the opinions he encounters.

5.3 Happiness as the Highest Good The dominant ethical theory in Western philosophy up through the seventeenth century, today called ‘eudaimonism,’ holds that rational decisions about action take as their principle the promotion of the ‘end’ or ‘highest good’ of a human being. For most ancients, there is a strict identity between the highest good (summum bonum) and happiness (beatitudo, felicitas), or a happy life (beata vita).26 The term ‘highest good’ signifies whatever makes life as a whole go well for a human being, and this going well is just what it means to live happily. For Cicero, we have seen, philosophy is pursued for the sake of living well or happily, and it follows from this that a principal concern of philosophy is ascertaining the highest good or ‘final goal’ of action.27 On Cicero’s telling, Epicurus’ philosophy is part of this tradition, but it is not a serious contender for the correct account of the highest good. Epicurus’ position is an outlier among competing views because of its identification of the highest good with a kind of pleasure: to live happily, to live as well as a human being can, is just to enjoy a pleasing life, free of bodily pain and mental disturbance. Cicero makes several criticisms of this position.28 One charge detects a basic incoherence in Epicurus’ theory, which equivocates between a hedonism that identifies the good with pleasure and an account of the end that identifies the highest good with the condition of being free from pain and mental disturbance. These, Cicero alleges, are distinct mental states, and arguments supporting the former cannot be used to support the latter. A more fundamental objection targets the willingness of Epicureans to subordinate virtue to pleasure, as they must if pleasure is the highest good. For Cicero, as for most ancient philosophers, this is an unacceptable conclusion because it robs virtue of its intrinsic value and renders it an instrument or servant of pleasure.29

150  Donald Rutherford Gassendi defends Epicurus against these charges, often echoing points made by Cicero’s Epicurean spokesman Torquatus in De finibus. Gassendi insists that the absence of pain or mental disturbance is correctly described as a kind of pleasure. Hence, Epicurus’ ethics is not compromised by a fallacy of equivocation.30 Furthermore, the image of the virtues pandering to sensuous pleasure misrepresents Epicurus’ position. The pleasure that Epicurus elevates as the highest good is not the sensual pleasure ridiculed by the Stoics, but one that is pure and undefiled, consisting chiefly in tranquility of mind.31 This kind of pleasure cannot diminish the value of virtue, for tranquility of mind can only be achieved through the pursuit of virtue. For this reason, Gassendi contends, Epicurus proposes nothing other than what the Stoics themselves endorse when they assert that “virtue is sufficient for living well and happily.”32 Gassendi implies that despite the invective Stoics level against Epicurus, they end up agreeing with him, since both assign the highest value to the refined pleasure (‘tranquility’) that supervenes on the possession or practice of virtue. Even if this were true, however, the two positions remain far apart. Although Epicurus nominally agrees with the Stoics that “virtue is sufficient for living well and happily,” the two parties understand the maxim in very different ways. For the Stoics, virtue is sufficient for a life that is happy or blessed, because it is constitutive of the best life for a human being; it is the highest good. The Stoics acknowledge that such a life is accompanied by the positive affects of joy or tranquility, but they deny that the goodness of the life is explained by the joy it produces. That is an incidental feature, or by-product, of virtue. The goodness of the happy life is ascribed solely to the possession of virtue.33 The position of Epicurus is different: he takes the goodness of the best life to consist in the pleasure it contains. Contra the Stoics, the end, or highest good, is a pleasing life, free of bodily pain and mental disturbance. Care is needed in locating Gassendi’s own view relative to that of Epicurus. Gassendi’s initial move in Part 1 of SP III raises the possibility of a conceptual distinction between happiness and the highest good that is foreign to any of the ancient schools, Epicureanism included: happiness is the state of which no better can be sought—that in which there is the enjoyment, or which is the very enjoyment, of the highest good—but the highest good, or the highest of goods, is not so much happiness as the object itself, or the thing by whose enjoyment we are rendered happy.34 Gassendi begins from the thought that happiness, the end which philosophers agree is desired by all human beings, is most plausibly identified with a desirable affective state: the feeling of peace or tranquility, labeled by Democritus euthumia. He cites a wide array of authors, including Seneca in De tranquillitate animi, who make the attainment of this

Tranquility as the Highest Good  151 psychic state a central concern of ethics and a defining mark of happiness.35 On these grounds, Gassendi proposes that the debate that divides the ancient schools is not about happiness as such, but about the causes of happiness: though so many different opinions have commonly been advanced about happiness, they are nonetheless for the most part not about happiness itself but about the causes of happiness, or what are called by another name: means; which things and from where else they come, since they are goods, and, among goods, whether there is one which alone, or chiefly, produces happiness, and so is called the highest good, in the sense already explained earlier; for this reason it seems it has not so much been disputed what happiness is, than what is the highest good by means of which we are happy.36 Gassendi advances an original argument, supported by ancient sources, concerning the core meaning of the term ‘happiness.’ Although philosophers have defended divergent views about the objective basis, or causes, of happiness, they have agreed that happiness involves a subjective state of contentment, peace, or tranquility. Whatever its causes, no life could be called ‘happy’ that did not include an agent’s feeling of joy or contentment with their life.37 If Gassendi can uphold this claim, he will have succeeded in shifting the burden of proof in the longstanding battle between Epicurus and his critics. Now, the outliers will not be those who identify the happy life with a life of pleasure, but those who claim that a life could be happy, because the highest good is achieved, independently of the delight or pleasure it produces.38 So far, Gassendi’s argument does not decisively favor Epicurus’ position. As initially presented, the argument turns on drawing a distinction between happiness as a state of enjoyment and the highest good as the objective condition from which that enjoyment is derived. Epicurus, for his part, collapses this distinction, since for him a stable state of pleasure is the highest good. Yet there is no necessity that Gassendi should follow Epicurus on this point; he might hold, rather, that happiness is best understood as the enjoyment of an independently specified good such as virtue. This, in fact, is the position of Descartes, who, in a letter to Princess Elisabeth, distinguishes ‘happiness’ and the ‘highest good,’ making them coordinate ends of action. Like Gassendi, Descartes identifies happiness with a subjective state, “contentment of mind,” while holding that this state can only be achieved insofar as one is aware of possessing the highest good, a virtuous will.39 Let us call this the ‘compromise view.’ Although it is tempting to ascribe the compromise view to Gassendi, this avenue is blocked by passages in SP that pull him closer to the position of Epicurus. Observing the distinction between happiness and the highest good, Gassendi notes that

152  Donald Rutherford because happiness or the [affective] state, that is, the enjoyment itself, encompasses [complectitur] the highest good, it has come about that it too has been called the highest good. And because, similarly, happiness is so great and so excellent a good that for the happy person it is equal to all the things that can be pointed to in the world, and therefore is the highest good since nothing can be sought beyond it, for this reason Epicurus says that when we possess happiness there is nothing we do not have, or we have everything it concerns us and benefits us to have.40 Gassendi moves in this passage from the idea that happiness is the enjoyment of the highest good to the idea that happiness itself is the highest good. Starting from a view reminiscent of Descartes’ position, Gassendi initially suggests that happiness ‘encompasses’ the highest good and that for this reason it too has been called the highest good. From here, though, he slides effortlessly to Epicurus’ position that happiness alone—meaning the state of enjoyment—is the highest good. A corollary of this is that virtue is not constitutive of the highest good but is only its efficient cause or a means to it. An explicit defense of this conclusion is delivered by Gassendi in the fourth chapter of SP III.1. Starting from what he claims is Epicurus’ common ground with the Stoics—the thesis that virtue is sufficient for happiness—he asks rhetorically: [1] But is there anyone who does not understand from this tenet that virtue is not the highest good or final end, but a means that contributes to achieving the actual highest good or final end, in such a way that it itself is sufficient and does not require the participation of any other means? [2] Is there anyone, consequently, who does not also conclude that the happy life itself, or happiness, for whose possession virtue serves, is the highest good or final end, because such a good and such an end is already for its own sake, and would not be procured for the sake of having something else beyond that? [3] But would anyone admit that living blessedly, or happily, can be judged to be anything other than living pleasantly, sweetly, delightfully, and (that I may add the principal synonym) with pleasure?41 The argument is far from compelling. In the first place, it is difficult to see why a Stoic would concede [1], that the sufficiency of virtue for happiness implies that virtue is not sought for its own sake but only for the sake of happiness, thus making it merely a means to that end. The precedent for Gassendi’s line of reasoning, as he acknowledges elsewhere, is Aristotle’s analysis of an end in Nicomachean Ethics I.7. According to Aristotle, virtue is “final” or “complete” (teleion), because it is sought for its own sake, but it is not “absolutely final” (teleion to kath’auto) because it is

Tranquility as the Highest Good  153 also sought for the sake of happiness (eudaimonia). By contrast, happiness is “absolutely final,” because it is sought for its own sake and not for the sake of any other end (1097a31–b6). If Gassendi followed Aristotle faithfully, he should admit that virtue is sought for its own sake while insisting that it is also sought for the sake of happiness (which he construes differently from Aristotle). Yet this is not Gassendi’s view. He argues that virtue is valued only as a means to happiness, which itself is the final end and highest good. With respect to this latter claim [2], Gassendi’s position looks like that of Aristotle, but it is in fact a very different doctrine. Aristotle’s distinction between virtue and happiness turns on the claim that virtuous activity cannot be identified with the best life because it omits the value of external goods (e.g., health, longevity, friendship) on which happiness depends. Virtue is constitutive of a happy life, but it is not sufficient, because external goods are also required. Against Aristotle, the Stoics insist that virtue is sufficient for happiness, since they deny the necessity of external goods and maintain that happiness can be identified with the life of the virtuous person. Gassendi, for his part, rejects both of these positions and agrees instead with Epicurus [3] that pleasure is constitutive of the happy life: “But would anyone admit that living blessedly, or happily, can be judged to be anything other than living pleasantly, sweetly, delightfully, and (that I may add the principal synonym) with pleasure?” As we have seen, Gassendi can reasonably question whether Aristotle or the Stoics have adequately explained the value human beings assign to pleasure. With greater or lesser explicitness, these philosophers acknowledge that a happy life is a pleasing life in which an individual experiences joy in her actions and is at peace with herself and the world. At the same time, Epicurus’ opponents downplay these subjective aspects of happiness, emphasizing the objective conditions—principally virtue—that render a human life well lived and identifying these conditions with the highest good. The compromise view, defended by Descartes, is that happiness is constituted by the pleasure we experience insofar as we act virtuously. From this one might infer that virtue is a good sought for its own sake and also for the sake of happiness. Yet Gassendi appears to resist this conclusion, claiming instead that virtue is merely a means to happiness, and that it has only an instrumental value in relation to the highest good: mental tranquility and freedom from bodily pain. I shall address in the next section whether Gassendi is consistent in holding this position and whether it is, all things considered, the position he should have defended. First, however, we must understand better the grounds on which he aligns himself with Epicurus. One of the charges he levels against Aristotle and the Stoics is that they misrepresent the role that the anticipation of pleasure plays in motivating virtuous action. Epicurus’ opponents maintain that the virtuous person acts for the sake of what is right or honorable (honestum), while simultaneously allowing

154  Donald Rutherford that the same action can be advantageous (utile) and pleasing (jucundum) to the agent. Gassendi objects that their view is false from the perspective of human psychology. Although the Stoics say that the virtuous person acts from her judgment about the rightness of an action, this is implausible. The pursuit of a happy life, and of virtue as a means to that end, is only intelligible if agents are motivated not by rightness itself but by the pleasure they anticipate from acting rightly.42 If Gassendi’s case rested solely on this claim about motivation, he would not have succeeded in casting doubt on the compromise view that accepts the intrinsic goodness of virtue, or action aimed at the “honorable.” In principle, we can separate the issue of the value of virtue from the issue of how human beings are motivated to pursue it. We might suppose, for example, that it is possible to know that virtue is good, and even the highest good, and yet for it to be true that human beings are motivated to pursue virtue because they find it pleasing. Such a position is not unknown in the seventeenth century.43 It is precisely this distinction, though, that Epicurus rejects, and on this point Gassendi follows him. Gassendi’s defense of Epicurean hedonism insists on the identity of the good with what is pleasing. If the honorable (honestum) and the useful (utile) are kinds of good, he argues, this is true only because they both involve pleasure: although it is customary to distinguish three kinds of good, the honorable [honestum], the useful [utile] and the pleasing [jucundum], the pleasing itself, or pleasure, is mixed together with the others in such a way that it may seem to be distinguished from them not so much as a species but as the common genus of them, or certainly as a common affection, which in relation to them is the very concept of the good or the desirable [ipsa ratio boni, expetibilisve]; that is, that on account of which they are desired.44 Gassendi begins from the widely held premise that the good is what is desirable. But the only thing that makes anything desirable, he argues, is pleasure. Consequently, the goodness of the honorable and the useful is reducible to the goodness of pleasure, and the purported threefold division of the good must be rejected: the honorable and the useful are merely species of pleasure.45 On the face of it, the argument looks fallacious. Hasn’t Gassendi confounded a claim about the desirability of the honorable and the useful with a (possibly false) claim about the desires that cause us to pursue them? Even if it were true—which the Stoics deny— that the honorable is pursued because it is found pleasing, it wouldn’t follow from this that the honorable is good because it is desired. Gassendi is not guilty of this simple version of the naturalistic fallacy. The argument for the honorable and the useful as species of pleasure is not based simply on a claim about the desires that prompt the pursuit of

Tranquility as the Highest Good  155 these goods. Rather, it rests on a substantive naturalistic thesis about the grounds of evaluative judgment: pleasure is not simply an object of desire, but the only standard we have for judging something good. Stoics and Aristotelians will disagree with this, claiming a higher ground from which they can defend conclusions about value that are independent of desire. Gassendi rejects this: there is no basis for judging something good except our disposition to pursue it, and we have a natural disposition to pursue something—a disposition that expresses our nature—only if we anticipate deriving pleasure from it.46 Here, Gassendi’s larger conception of philosophy intersects with Epicurus’ naturalism. For Gassendi, the proper domain of philosophy is nature. As such, philosophy is limited to an investigation of the natural grounds of human happiness, as opposed to the supernatural grounds, the province of the sacred teachings of the Church. The investigation of nature proceeds through the weighing of empirical evidence, and from this perspective pleasure emerges as the only viable candidate for a criterion of the good. Given this, Gassendi takes Epicurus’ doctrine to be the most plausible position to adopt, for it limits claims about the good to those that can be directly confirmed through the study of nature. A final passage underscores the connection between Gassendi’s support for Epicurus’ hedonism and the skeptical methodology he adopts from Cicero. In Book 5 of De finibus, Cicero advances a purportedly exhaustive division of theories of the highest good drawn from the Academic skeptic Carneades. An initial step in the analysis imposes the constraint that any acceptable account of the end must find a basis in “something suited and accommodated to [our] nature [aptum et accommodatum naturae], such that by itself it would elicit and attract the appetite of the soul that the Greeks call horme.” Cicero distinguishes three possible opinions, associated with different philosophical schools, concerning the natural object of appetite. Some take it to be pleasure; some, freedom from pain; and some, the “primary things according to nature” (prima secundum naturam), of which a non-exhaustive list includes the health and soundness of the body, beauty, properly functioning sensory organs, and mental powers.47 In his discussion of the passage, Gassendi insists (contrary to Cicero’s own view) that the first and second opinions correspond to Epicurus’ position. The third opinion is that of the Stoics and of “Aristotle himself,” according to some commentators, and this opinion, Gassendi writes, “should be considered less plausible” (minus probabile habenda).48 Although any living thing desires to preserve its life, the integrity of its body, its health, etc., it desires these things because it finds them pleasing. Thus, pleasure is desired “originally and most of all, and on account of itself,”49 making it the only viable candidate for the end of desire. Again, we find Gassendi defending Epicurus’ theory of the good, while qualifying the stance he takes toward it. He does not follow Epicurus

156  Donald Rutherford uncritically, nor offer a demonstrative argument on behalf of his doctrine. Rather, Gassendi judges it the most plausible account and one on which wider agreement is found in the history of philosophy than is generally acknowledged.

5.4  Honestum and the Value of Virtue According to Epicurus, “We should honor rectitude and the virtues and suchlike things if they bring pleasure; but if not, we should say goodbye to them.”50 Virtue—meaning chiefly practical wisdom (phronesis)—is the knowledge of how to achieve a stable state of pleasure. This wisdom is epitomized in the maxims of Epicurus’ tetrapharmakon, and an agent need only incorporate these teachings in order to achieve a happy life. There is no value in the teachings themselves, or in their influence on an agent’s character, except insofar as they promote the end of pleasure. Thus, virtue has only an instrumental value in relation to this end: “The virtues too are chosen because of pleasure, and not for their own sakes, just as medicine is chosen because of health.”51 Much of SP III confirms Gassendi’s agreement with Epicurus on this point: virtue has value only as a means to the end of pleasure. Yet it is not clear that everything Gassendi says is consistent with this thesis. Gassendi defends the proposition that virtue is desirable, in part at least, because it is an inherently pleasing state of mind. On his account, virtue does not produce a stable state of pleasure merely by being practical knowledge that allows an individual to manage the pursuit of pleasure—ensuring, for example, that the pleasures she seeks are those that will endure and do not entail too many painful consequences. Instead, virtue is desirable because it is the mental state in which a person enjoys the highest good: tranquility of mind. For both Epicurus and Gassendi, virtue is productive of tranquility. However, their explanations for this differ. If virtue is valued merely as a means to an end, then we can imagine achieving the end by other means. Perhaps the same tranquility of mind can be attained through meditation or pharmacological agents. By contrast, if the highest good is identified with the pleasure we enjoy in acting virtuously, then there is no other way to achieve the desired end: one has to be virtuous in order to enjoy the kind of pleasure that is the highest good. Gassendi does not distinguish these views as sharply as he might, but the difference between them helps to make sense of the support he claims for his position from philosophers other than Epicurus. Gassendi proposes that Aristotle can be understood to agree with Epicurus’ dictum that “the virtues are desirable not for their own sake but for the sake of pleasure.”52 He supports this with a long passage from Nicomachean Ethics, I.9, in which Aristotle comments that “actions in conformity with virtue […] are pleasant essentially as well as pleasant to lovers of the noble (tois philokalois). Therefore their life has no need of pleasure as a

Tranquility as the Highest Good  157 sort of ornamental appendage, but contains its pleasure in itself.”53 According to Aristotle, the virtuous life is necessarily a pleasant life, because virtuous acts are pleasing by nature (ta phusei hedea).54 Granting that the pleasure obtained in this way is stable and fulfilling, a person has no reason to pursue other, less reliable forms of pleasure. It strains credulity to suppose that Aristotle holds, in agreement with Epicurus, that virtue is not desirable for its own sake but only for the sake of pleasure. Aristotle’s position, rather, is that virtue is desirable for its own sake, but that virtuous acts are also, for the virtuous person, inherently pleasing. Knowing that this is Aristotle’s position, we might wonder how Gassendi can claim him as a supporter of Epicurus’ doctrine. Is Gassendi so unreliable a scholar, or so partisan, that he is willing to represent Aristotle as saying something that he evidently does not say? If the view with which Aristotle is supposed to agree is that virtue is valued merely as a means to happiness, then it would be difficult to defend Gassendi. If, on the other hand, the view is that virtuous acts are inherently pleasing—and that the ‘pleasingness’ of the acts explains why they are desirable—then we find Aristotle agreeing with at least the first half of this statement. He does not agree with the second half of the statement, but here we may read Gassendi as making an implicit criticism of Aristotle. Acknowledging that virtuous acts are by nature pleasing, he may object that Aristotle fails to perceive an implication of his own view: virtuous acts are inherently pleasing, and this best explains (according to Gassendi) why they are desirable. In arguing that virtuous acts are inherently pleasing, Gassendi breaks with Epicurus’ philosophy. For Epicurus, the value of virtue is limited to its being the practical knowledge we need to manage the satisfaction of desire in a way that sustains a life free of pain and mental disturbance. There is no suggestion that we derive pleasure from virtuous acts themselves, irrespective of their consequences. The strongest evidence that this is Gassendi’s view comes in his discussion of the “honorable” (honestum). As we have seen, Gassendi rejects the view of philosophers who take the honorable to be a good in its own right, associated with the rightness or fineness of virtuous action. Against them, he insists that the goodness of the honorable consists in the pleasure we derive from it. He rehearses the argument, ascribed to Epicurus by Cicero,55 that actions are called “honorable” because they are praised by others and that the praise they receive is the source of the pleasure we find in them.56 Having registered this point, however, Gassendi offers a more involved explanation of the value of honestum. He notes that “the more esteemed [probatiores] authors take honestum and virtue to be synonyms, and thus hold the honestum good to be something solid, existing in the soul, whereas honor is something fickle and external, which resides in another.”57 Furthermore, the quality of being honorable, that is, right and fine, belongs not just to moral virtue but also to intellectual virtue, and so to every perfection of

158  Donald Rutherford the mind. Having established this, Gassendi gives a two-part explanation of the value of the honorable. First, as a habit of mind identical with virtue, the honorable is not sought for its own sake but for the sake of the acts it facilitates; the goodness of honorable acts explains the goodness of the habit that produces them. Secondly, honorable acts are good because they are pleasing in themselves, as well as pleasing on account of the praise they receive from others.58 Thus, Gassendi concludes, the honorable can be said to be related to pleasure in two ways: one, the pleasure of the act itself, which occurs by itself; the other, the pleasure of the honor that is added to the act; and so, consequently, the pleasure of the honorable itself, or the ultimate reward of virtue, is in the same way twofold.59 This might seem a minor amendment to Epicurus’ position. Even if honorable or virtuous acts have value independently of their consequences or of the praise they receive, they are nonetheless good because they are pleasing. On this point, Gassendi does not waver. Yet, in accepting that virtuous acts are inherently pleasing, Gassendi prompts the question of why they are pleasing: why do we enjoy pleasure of the sort he identifies with the highest good in just these sorts of acts? Although Gassendi seems satisfied to rest his argument with the conclusion that the virtuous life is the most pleasing life, it is fair to ask whether the pleasure we take in virtuous acts is not best explained by our responsiveness to an objective quality of those acts, namely, their being honorable. If there is an objective quality of this sort that distinguishes virtuous acts, and if the pleasure we take in those acts is explained by our finding that quality pleasing, then there is reason to say that we perform virtuous acts for their own sake, with the act and the pleasure united as a single end. Although it may be true that we would not desire to perform such acts if we did not find them pleasing, we may construe this pleasure as registering the goodness we find in the act itself, which we desire for its own sake. I do not suggest that this is Gassendi’s position. His thought remains centered on the idea that the good or the desirable is identical with the pleasing. Yet even in passages in which he argues for this conclusion, Gassendi remains open to seeking a wider accommodation with the views of other authors. Rather than insisting that the honorable and the useful are merely species of the pleasing, he is willing to suppose that there are “three species, or if you prefer three distinct kinds, of goods.” Here, he reiterates that “the honorable and the useful are desired for the sake of pleasure.”60 In other passages, even this condition is relaxed: “nothing seems to prevent us saying that the honorable is in a certain sense desired for its own sake or on account of itself [quodam sensu per se, sive propter se expeti].”61 In support of this, he again appeals to Aristotle’s analysis of

Tranquility as the Highest Good  159 ends, which allows that some things are desired both for their own sake and for the sake of other things. Such, he suggests, is the status of “whatever can be understood by the term honestum.”62 Although the honorable may be desired for the sake of external benefits, “someone can desire honor, knowledge and all virtue to the end that he may enjoy honor, that he may possess a learned mind, that he may be well ordered emotionally.”63 In saying this, Gassendi invokes the distinction between pleasure derived from the act itself and pleasure received from external sources. Yet his own examples put pressure on this account. If someone seeks knowledge so that he may “possess a learned mind [eruditam mentem possideat],” it is natural to infer that the latter is a good sought for its own sake, even if our registering it as such is a function of the pleasure we find in it. Likewise, a ‘well-ordered,’ or temperate, soul suggests a good in itself, even if our desire for this good is mediated by the pleasure we find in it.64 If this is not a conclusion that Gassendi reaches, it arguably is one to which he should have given more attention than he does. At the beginning of SP, he introduces us to a view of philosophy as pursued for the sake of the dual ends of wisdom and happiness. Wisdom is an end determined by the directedness of the natural powers of the mind—their striving for truth and rectitude (honestas). Happiness, or tranquility of mind, is an end that depends upon the mind’s success in pursuing wisdom: we enjoy tranquility insofar as we acquire knowledge and a virtuous character, characterized as “perfections” of the mind.65 Throughout SP III, Gassendi writes as if judgments about the good are restricted to judgments about the pleasing, consistent with the hedonism he adopts from Epicurus. Yet this is open to doubt. If knowledge and rectitude are sought for their own sakes as well as for the sake of happiness, then it follows on Aristotle’s analysis that only happiness, and not knowledge and rectitude, is an “absolutely final” end. But it doesn’t follow that knowledge and rectitude are not final ends, desired for their own sake. And if they are desired for their own sake then they should, on this analysis, qualify as goods in their own right, contradicting Gassendi’s hedonism. That Gassendi was able to gloss over these differences is easy to understand. He summarizes Epicurus’ doctrine with these words: he located happiness, or the end, in the body’s freedom from pain and tranquility of mind, and he taught that the efficient causes of these things are not drinking parties, revelries, and things of this sort, but sound reason joined with the virtues (which are inseparable from it).66 According to Gassendi, Epicurus advances two theses: (1) happiness, as the highest good and final end of human action, consists in the most desirable affective condition: a life free of bodily pain and mental disturbance; and (2) the attainment of this condition presupposes excellences

160  Donald Rutherford of the mind, in the form of sound reason and moral virtue. Gassendi is correct in noting the broad consensus on these points among ancient philosophers. Although Peripatetics and Stoics disagree with Epicurus’ formula of the end, they agree that the best human life is one in which we enjoy the most desirable affective condition; furthermore, all parties agree that moral and intellectual virtue are required for happiness. Disagreements arise when we begin to think through exactly what these commitments involve. Is it true to say that moral and intellectual virtue are not goods in their own right, but have value only as means to, or causes of, pleasure? Gassendi appears to think so. He acknowledges that the target of moral virtue—the honorable, right, or fine—is pursued for its own sake; and he would have us believe that the honorable is pursued for its own sake because it is pleasing in itself. But nothing compels Gassendi to this conclusion. A viable alternative exists in the compromise view that virtue, or the honorable, is desired for its own sake and for the sake of the pleasure that supervenes on it. On this point, we may think, Gassendi has not availed himself sufficiently of the skeptical method he inherits from Cicero, exploring the arguments pro et contra, and asking with seriousness whether Epicurus’ hedonism is the most plausible explanation of the value of virtue.

Notes 1 “To be sure, there is only one orthodox, Catholic, Apostolic, Roman religion, to which I uniquely adhere, that is, the one I received from my forefathers” (SP, Liber proœmialis, ix; OO I, 29b–30a). Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own, with assistance from Monte Johnson and the late Eliot Wirshbo. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Eliot, who worked tirelessly to keep the Latin language alive and graciously shared his learning with his friends. 2 For the charge of dissimulation, see Olivier René Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi: Nominalisme, matérialisme, et métaphysique (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971). On Gassendi’s affiliation with the libertins érudits of the first half of the seventeenth century, see René Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du xviie siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1943); John S. Spink, French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire (London: Athlone, 1960). 3 Lisa Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 74; Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 44–45; eadem, “Early Modern Uses of Hellenistic Philosophy: Gassendi’s Epicurean Project,” in Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy, eds. Jon Miller and Brad Inwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 30–44, esp. 39–40. See also Fisher’s chapter in this volume. 4 A point argued in Monte Ransome Johnson, “Was Gassendi an Epicurean?” History of Philosophy Quarterly 20 (2003): 339–359. 5 Letter to Menoeceus, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (hereafter: DL) 10.124–5.

Tranquility as the Highest Good  161 6 Letter to Louis de Valois, 26 September 1642 (OO VI,155b). For Gassendi’s correspondence, I have relied on Sylvie Taussig’s French edition of the Latin letters (Pierre Gassendi, Lettres latines, ed. and trans. Sylvie Taussig, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004)) and the notes she provides. 7 OO II, 662a: [W] e are talking here about the happiness of this life, and not indeed that which the sacred doctors have proclaimed as a profession of faith, teaching, that is, how happy he is who, supported by supernatural grace, adheres to the sincere worship of God and full of faith, hope and charity passes over smoothly, whatever age he is, but that which can be called natural, as if comparable to the very powers of nature, and such as philosophers do not despair can be obtained. 8 Examples include the doctrines of divine providence and the immortality of the soul, both defended by pagan philosophers in antiquity. Gassendi likewise cites the identification of the highest good with pleasure as a doctrine that “seems most in conformity with the teaching of sacred faith,” which promises the enjoyment of “eternal delights in heaven” (OO II, 715a). 9 Gassendi’s mitigated skepticism is recognized by Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics; and Osler “Early Modern Uses of Hellenistic Philosophy,” but it is not explored in any detail in relation to his ethics. A more careful treatment is found in Delphine Bellis, “Nos in Diem Vivimus: Gassendi’s Probabilism and Academic Philosophy from Day to Day,” in Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy, eds. Plínio Junqueira Smith and Sébastien Charles (Cham: Springer, 2017), 125–152, to which I am indebted. Bellis focuses primarily on Gassendi’s natural philosophy. This chapter advances a complementary argument concerning his ethics. 10 On this point, see Lynn Sumida Joy, Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Veronica Gventsadze, “Aristotelian Influences in Gassendi’s Moral Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 45 (2007): 223–242. 11 OO I, 125a. 12 As Gassendi notes in his letter to Louis de Valois of 28 March 1642, citing the Stoics, Plato, Aristotle, and “Epicurus himself” (OO VI, 137–138). For a general discussion, see Pierre Hadot, “Les divisions des parties de la philosophie dans l’Antiquité,” Museum Helveticum 36/4 (1979): 201–223. 13 Cf. Liber proœmialis, ix, OO I, 29b: if, in fact, our intention were only to lay out Epicurus’ philosophy, we would have called the first part not ‘logic’ but ‘canonic’; but since we are also concerned with those things which have been very clearly established and discussed by others, and because the word ‘logic’ is not only more widely accepted but also better expresses the topic and scope of the first part, it seems to us that it should be employed instead. 14 The terms honestum and honestas are notoriously difficult to translate. Honestum is Cicero’s rendering of the Greek kalón. In Cicero’s usage, honestum refers to the quality of virtuous actions or states of mind that makes them praiseworthy in themselves, independently of any advantage or reward derived from them (De finibus, 2.45; De officiis, 1.14). The translation of honestum as “honorable” preserves the link to praiseworthiness but leaves unexplained the quality in virtue of which such acts and states are praiseworthy; see Margaret Graver, “Honor and the Honorable: Cato’s Discourse in De Finibus 3,” in Cicero’s De Finibus: Philosophical Approaches, eds. Julia Annas

162  Donald Rutherford and Gábor Betegh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 118–146. Cicero locates this quality in their objective rightness and fineness: the honestum is “in itself right and praiseworthy [per se rectum atque laudabile]”; even if human beings were unaware of its existence, “it would be praiseworthy because of its beauty and splendor [pulchritudine esset specieque laudabile]” (De finibus, 2.49). As we will see in section 4, the construal of this concept is pivotal for the interpretation of Gassendi’s ethics. 15 OO I, 1a. 16 OO I, 1b. 17 OO I, 3b. 18 OO I, 4b–5b. 19 OO I, 1b. Cf. Cicero: “[T]he whole aim of philosophy is to lead us to a happy life [ad beate vivendum]. It is for this reason alone that people have turned to its pursuit; but to live happily means different things to different people” (De finibus, 2.86). 20 OO II, 659a–b. 21 OO II, 660a. 22 OO II, 660b. 23 OO I, 30a–b. 24 OO I, 30b. 25 OO I, 29b, 30b. The degree of affinity between Cicero’s and Gassendi’s skepticism deserves more attention, but I pass over it here for reasons of space and because it is explored with care in Bellis, “Nos in Diem Vivimus.” Cicero’s own standpoint as a skeptic remains controversial; see Harald Thorsrud, “Radical and Mitigated Skepticism in Cicero’s Academica,” in Cicero’s Practical Philosophy, ed. Walter Nicgorski (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 133–151; Charles Brittain, “Cicero’s Sceptical Methods: The Example of the De Finibus,” in Cicero’s De Finibus, 12–40. 26 Given the focus on Gassendi and Cicero, I limit myself to the relevant Latin terms. 27 De finibus, 1.11: For nothing in life is more worth investigating than […] the question raised in this work in particular: what is the end, what is the ultimate and final goal, to which all our deliberations on living well and acting rightly [bene vivendi recteque faciendi] should be directed? Ibid., 5.15–16: [W]hen we perceive the greatest good and bad, we have discovered a way of life [vitae via] and a conception of all duties, and thus [the end] to which any action may be referred; from this, we can discover and formulate the rule of living happily [beate vivendi ratio] that all seek. 28 For an analysis of Cicero’s arguments, see James Warren, “Epicurean Pleasure in Cicero’s De Finibus,” in Cicero’s De Finibus, 41–76. 29 See Cicero, De finibus, 2.69 and De officiis, 3.118–9 (quoted by Gassendi at OO II, 690a), and Seneca, De beneficiis, 4.3.1–4 (quoted at OO II, 690b), all commenting on the image (attributed to Cleanthes) of pleasure seated on a throne and served by her handmaids, the virtues. 30 OO II, 715b. 31 OO II, 691a. 32 Ibid. Cf. OO II, 708, where the text cites “4. Tuscul.” The correct citation is Tusculan Disputations, 5.1: “virtutem ad beate vivendum se ipsa esse contentam.”

Tranquility as the Highest Good  163 33 Cf. Seneca’s response to this point in De vita beata, 9.1–2 (quoted by Gassendi at OO II, 690b): if virtue should offer pleasure, it is not therefore sought on account of it; for it is not responsible for pleasure, but offers it in addition, and it does not work for it, but its labor, though aimed at something else, also achieves it. Just as in a field that has been broken up for grain, some flowers will spring up here and there, yet it was not for these little plants, though they may please the eye, that so much labor was expended—the sower had a different purpose, this came along with it—so pleasure is neither the reward nor the cause of virtue, but a bonus, and virtue is not commendable because delightful, but if commendable it is also delightful. 4 OO II, 661a. 3 35 OO II, 662b–663a. 36 OO II, 662b. 37 As support for this, Gassendi quotes (OO II, 662b) a suggestive passage from De finibus (5.23), where Democritus’ position is dismissed as a contender for an account of the highest good: But that calmness [securitas], which is the tranquility of the soul, called by Democritus euthumia, has had to be excluded from this discussion, because this tranquility of the soul is the happy life itself [ista animi tranquillitas ea est ipsa beata vita]; but we are asking not what it is but whence it comes. Cf. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 5.43 and 5.67. 38 Seneca moves back and forth on this question in De vita beata, eventually reaching this conclusion (15.2): Not even that joy [gaudium] that arises from virtue, though a good, is part of the absolute good, any more than delight [laetitia] and peace of mind [tranquillitas], even if they arise from the finest causes: for though these are goods, they are the sort that attend the highest good but do not bring it to perfection. 39 Descartes to Elisabeth, 18 August 1645 (AT IV, 275–277). For further discussion, see Donald Rutherford, “On the Happy Life: Descartes vis-à-vis Seneca,” in Stoicism: Traditions and Transformations, eds. Steven Strange and Jack Zupko (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 177–197. 40 OO II, 661a. 41 OO II, 708b. 42 OO II, 708b: Still, it can scarcely be doubted that if the happy life were, or were understood to be, lacking sweetness and pleasingness, they would forsake it completely, and they would not bear patiently so many troubles in climbing their exceedingly steep mountain of virtue, unless they believed that delight were furnished at the summit. Gassendi is not above massaging textual evidence in support of the claim that Epicurus’ opponents disagree with him “not so much in fact as in words” (ibid.). At OO II, 709b, he quotes a long passage from Seneca, which he says shows Seneca’s support for the thesis that the right is sought for the sake of pleasure, but he conveniently omits the conclusion of the passage: “I focus on the thing itself. I know that this is honorable [honestum]. Thus, wherever it leads me and calls me, I go” (Ep. 76.29).

164  Donald Rutherford 3 In addition to Descartes, Malebranche and Leibniz defend views of this type. 4 44 OO II, 700a–b. 45 OO II, 703a: [T]hough it is common to distinguish three kinds of goods, the honorable, the useful and the pleasing, the concept of being pleasing is the general one, since both the honorable and the useful also seem to be pleasing. Indeed, from this it seems to follow that ‘good’ and ‘pleasing’ are synonyms, and nothing is conceived as good unless it is at the same time conceived as pleasing, which naturally is why it is sought, and, for this reason, the good is, and is defined as, that which all desire. From this it seems likewise to follow that the honorable and the useful are only species [of the pleasing]. 46 Pleasure “is inseparable from the choice of anything we desire, and for this reason, it rightly seems the principal thing suited to [our] nature [Primum naturae accommodatum]” (OO II, 700b). 47 De finibus, 5.17–18. 48 OO II, 699b. 49 OO II, 700a. 50 Reportedly in the work, On the End, as recorded in Athenaeus, see Usener 70, quoted from A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, Volume 1: Translations of the Principal Sources, with Philosophical Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 117. A more pointed fragment from the same work is preserved in Aetius: “And in other passages, he says ‘I spit upon the honorable and those who vainly admire it, whenever it produces no pleasure’”; see Usener 512, quoted from Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson, Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1988), 101. 51 DL 10.138, quoted from Inwood and Gerson, Hellenistic Philosophy, 44. Admittedly, this is a controversial point. Cicero reads Epicurus in this way, but he is hardly an unbiased judge (cf. Tusculan Disputations 3.41–2). Annas attempts to rescue Epicurus from the charge that virtue is valued merely as a means; see Julia Annas, “Epicurus on Pleasure and Happiness,” Philosophical Topics 15 (1987): 5–21. The strongest evidence is a passage from the Letter to Menoeceus (DL 10.132, quoted in Annas, “Epicurus on Pleasure and Happiness,” 11): It is impossible to live pleasantly without living wisely and honorably and justly, or wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly; for the virtues have grown to be part of living pleasantly, and living pleasantly is inseparable from them. If this is Epicurus’ position, then it is close to the one I attribute to Gassendi. 2 OO II, 740b. 5 53 Nicomachean Ethics, I.9, 1099a11–12. 54 Cf. Nicomachean Ethics, VII.13; X.1–6. 55 De finibus, 2.49–50. 56 OO II, 704b–705a. 57 OO II, 705b. 58 OO II, 705b: Because honestum is virtue itself, and a virtue is some habit, and every habit exists for the sake of an act (namely, so that it may be performed more easily), for this reason, honestum can be said to be not so much for its own sake as for the sake of the act itself. But here it has two kinds of acts: one kind, because it is from a good habit and therefore may be elicited pleasantly, or with pleasure; the other, if it is the kind of act that is observed externally and

Tranquility as the Highest Good  165 may deserve honor, the receiving of which is again pleasing or accompanied by pleasure. 9 OO II, 705b–706a. 5 60 OO II, 703a. 61 OO II, 705a. 62 OO II, 705b. 63 OO II, 705b. 64 Another example: contrasting Epicurus’ position with that of Aristippus, who holds that bodily pain is worse than mental pain, Gassendi writes (OO II, 715a): any noble and courageous man [vir generosus ac fortis], believing the opposite with Epicurus, holds that mental pain is worse than any bodily pain, and so decides that not things belonging to the body but things belonging to the soul are the supreme bad. This serves as a defense of the greater harm of mental pain only if independent value is ascribed to the virtues Gassendi cites. 65 OO I, 1a. 66 OO II, 664b.

Bibliography Annas, Julia. “Epicurus on Pleasure and Happiness,” Philosophical Topics 15 (1987): 5–21. Bellis, Delphine. “Nos in Diem Vivimus: Gassendi’s Probabilism and Academic Philosophy from Day to Day.” In Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Plínio Junqueira Smith and Sébastien Charles, 125–152. Cham: Springer, 2017. Bloch, Olivier René. La Philosophie de Gassendi: Nominalisme, matérialisme, et métaphysique. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971. Brittain, Charles. “Cicero’s Sceptical Methods: The Example of the De Finibus.” In Cicero’s De Finibus, edited by Julia Annas and Gábor Betegh, 12–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Descartes, René. Œuvres, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 11 vols. 2nd ed. Paris: Vrin, 1996 (abridged AT). Gassendi, Pierre. Lettres latines. Edited and translated by Sylvie Taussig, 2 vols. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004. Gassendi, Pierre. Opera omnia in sex tomos divisa. Lugduni: Sumptibus Laurentii Anisson, & Ioan. Bapt. Devenet, 1658 (abridged OO). Graver, Margaret. “Honor and the Honorable: Cato’s Discourse in De Finibus 3.” In Cicero’s De Finibus: Philosophical Approaches, edited by Julia Annas and Gábor Betegh, 118–146. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Gventsadze, Veronica. “Aristotelian Influences in Gassendi’s Moral Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 45 (2007): 223–242. Hadot, Pierre. “Les divisions des parties de la philosophie dans l’Antiquité,” Museum Helveticum 36/4 (1979): 201–223. Inwood, Brad and L. P. Gerson, eds. Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1988. Johnson, Monte Ransome. “Was Gassendi an Epicurean?” History of Philosophy Quarterly 20 (2003): 339–359.

166  Donald Rutherford Joy, Lynn Sumida. Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Long, Ashley and David N. Sedley, eds. The Hellenistic Philosophers, Volume 1: Translations of the Principal Sources, with Philosophical Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Osler, Margaret J. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Osler, Margaret J. “Early Modern Uses of Hellenistic Philosophy: Gassendi’s Epicurean Project.” In Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Jon Miller and Brad Inwood, 30–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pintard, René. Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle, 2 vols. Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1943. Rutherford, Donald. “On the Happy Life: Descartes vis-à-vis Seneca.” In Stoicism: Traditions and Transformations, edited by Steven Strange and Jack Zupko, 177–197. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Sarasohn, Lisa T. Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1996. Spink, John S. French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire. London: Athlone, 1960. Thorsrud, Harald. “Radical and Mitigated Skepticism in Cicero’s Academica.” In Cicero’s Practical Philosophy, edited by Walter Nicgorski, 133–151. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Warren, James. “Epicurean Pleasure in Cicero’s De Finibus.” In Cicero’s De Finibus: Philosophical Approaches, edited by Julia Annas and Gábor Betegh, 41–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Part II Gassendi the Polemist

6 Gassendi in the Philosophical Debate Stakes of the Essay Concerning the Principles of Robert Fludd’s Philosophy (1630) Édouard Mehl 6.1 Introduction The Epistolica exercitatio in qua principia philosophiae Roberti Fluddi Medici reteguntur, written by Gassendi during the year 1629, and published by his friend Marin Mersenne in 1630, is a rather long discussion of the hermetical and theosophical works of Robert Fludd, and Fludd’s pamphlets against Mersenne.1 Robert Fludd (1574–1637) made a reputation for himself through numerous and voluminous publications throughout the 1610s.2 Several of these made public declarations of allegiance to the mysterious Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians. The content of his philosophy, for which he claimed a deeper knowledge of the genuine nature of all things (whether they belong to our physical world, or to the mundus intelligibilis) is based on an identification of the matter/form and light/darkness couples. The result is a rather obscure and confused hylemorphism, which was criticized by promoters of the new science, such as Kepler, Mersenne, and Gassendi.3 In the third part of his Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim (1623), the Observationes et Emendationes, Mersenne attacked as impious the ideas Fludd presented in his Utriusque cosmi historia (1617–1621). Fludd struck back with two works: the Sophiae cum moria certamen and the Summum bonum (both published in 1629) in which he attempted to defend the orthodoxy of his principles. Mersenne then appealed to Gassendi to take up his defense and respond to Fludd. Gassendi’s response was issued as the Epistolica exercitatio which is divided into four parts: the first is an introduction focusing on the history of the quarrel between Mersenne and Fludd; the second part is devoted to the general exposition of the principles contained in Fludd’s Monochordum mundi symphoniacum (Frankfurt, 1623); the third examines Fludd’s polemical writing against Mersenne’s Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim, namely Fludd’s Sophiae cum moria certamen…; and finally, the fourth part examines the brief opusculum entitled Summum bonum, and the Fluddian claim to consider magic, cabala, and alchemy as the deepest sciences reaching into the nature and essence of both DOI: 10.4324/9781315521732-9

170  Édouard Mehl material and spiritual things. As Gassendi notes from the outset, Fludd’s philosophy is a syncretic doctrine that does not speak of light as a phenomenon from an optical or physical point of view. It rather considers light ‘intelligible’ in itself and without relation to existing things (‘ante creationem’). As such, ‘light’ does not refer to any created thing but designates the immediate emanation of divine essence.4 Gassendi does not have much sympathy for this imposing theosophical sum, nor for an author who so violently accused his friend Mersenne of being a “hypocritical and lying monk,” but he refrains from slandering him, and does not seek to put forward—as Mersenne had done—the supposedly “atheistic” consequences of Fludd’s philosophy. A study of the Gassendi–Fludd controversy, and of Gassendi’s original manner of intervention, is relevant not only in order to better understand the social, historical, and intellectual context in Europe and the birth of a broad scientific network, but also sheds light on the role of criticism in Gassendi’s own philosophical work, and on his original contribution to modern science. The aim of the Epistolica exercitatio against the “Principia philosophiae Fluddanae” was not to demonstrate the falsity of these principles, as per Gassendi’s method two years earlier “against the Aristotelians,” but rather to shed some light on what should be regarded as Fludd’s general positions concerning the definition of science in relation to its object, especially with respect to physics. These issues were rooted in the controversy between Robert Fludd and Johannes Kepler, which started with the publication of Kepler’s Harmonice mundi (1619), a controversy which Mersenne himself continued a few years later in the Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim.5 In this paper, I will show how the controversy with Fludd actually reveals Gassendi’s complex positions regarding Kepler. As we will see, although Gassendi was obviously sympathetic to Kepler’s position, he remained neutral and did not side with either of the two opponents. The most interesting aspect of this polemical piece of work, therefore, is that it sheds some light on the way in which Gassendi and his contemporaries understood Kepler’s Harmonice mundi. Let us recall the words of Alexandre Koyré, who claimed in the conclusion of his Astronomical Revolution that, although Gassendi frequently quoted Kepler, he “did not understand anything about his planetary theory.”6 In order to test the accuracy of this judgment—which I will try at least to temper, if not to refute—I will start by recalling the history of Robert Fludd’s antagonism with Kepler and Mersenne during the 1620s (section 6.2). I will then briefly examine Gassendi’s scientific activity that accompanied the writing of his Examen (section 6.3), and will show how the philosophical positions on which Gassendi’s observations are based must be understood in the light of the contemporary debate between theology and modern science (the Galileo affair) (section 6.4). I will then underline how decisively important for the writing of the Examen was Gassendi’s encounter with Isaac Beeckman (section 6.5). Finally, I will ask

Gassendi in the Philosophical Debate  171 whether the neutrality professed by the Canon of Digne was dictated by political precaution, or whether it was based on the principles of his phenomenal epistemology (section 6.6).

6.2 Political and Scientific Background of the Controversy In France, during the 1620s, Mersenne and his friends fought against heterodox and Hermetic explanations of Scripture, particularly the Book of Genesis, believing, as Mersenne ironically observed, “Holy Scripture doesn’t need Alchemy for its salvation.”7 Followers of Paracelsus, like Heinrich Khunrath (ca. 1560–1605) or Robert Fludd, represented a threat, not for their refutation of the Aristotelians—seen in their claims that scholastic Aristotelianism contained the seeds of heresy—but because they claimed to expose the true and genuine “Mosaic Philosophy,” and to build a new way to understand Holy Scriptures.8 This was the main reason for Mersenne’s first attack on Robert Fludd in his Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim. But, behind this broadly theological polemic, the real origin of the affair is to be found in a dispute initiated by the Imperial Mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) two years earlier (1619). Fludd’s major work, Utriusque cosmi historia, divided into two volumes (1617–1618), is briefly evoked in the Appendix to the five books of the Harmonices mundi (1619), the ‘opus magnum’ in which Kepler unveils the law of periodic times, a fundamental discovery that gives for the very first time a concrete and precise mathematical meaning to the notion of harmony.9 After Fludd’s first reply (Veritatis proscenium, 1621), Kepler responded immediately with his Apologia for his Harmonices mundi (“1622”[1621]),10 which is by far the most important text, at the theoretical level, of the whole series of arguments that appeared throughout the 1620s. Kepler delivered the Apologia to his Frankfurt publisher Tampach alongside the revised edition of his early opuscule, the Mysterium cosmographicum, with additional notes. These two texts—the Apologia pro suo opere Harmonices mundi and the Mysterium cosmographicum—were written simultaneously and must be read in close parallel.11 In his Apology, Kepler shows that his purely quantitative, even geometrical, concept of harmony differs from that which can be found in Fludd. First, Kepler notes the immense difference (“immane discrimen”) between his own use of the terms ‘harmony’ and ‘music’ and Fludd’s use, the model for which Fludd seeks in the Pythagorean tradition (Proclus, Porphyry and Iamblicus), attributing to ‘formal numbers,’ —that is, numbers considered in themselves, separated from matter—the essential properties of every natural thing.12 According to the Imperial Mathematician, Fludd is obscure and confusing. The principle of his so-called science of both the ‘great’ and the ‘small’ worlds lies in the Hermetic analogy of the supera (mundus intelligibilis, archetypus) and the inferis (mundus sensibilis, materialis).

172  Édouard Mehl This means that there is no solution of continuity between ‘matter’ and ‘spirit,’ between which there is not a difference in nature but only a difference in degree. Moreover, Fludd is not at all dealing with the search for harmonic proportions in pure quantities, as Kepler does, but with the various degrees of the mixture or interpenetration of form (or light) and matter (or darkness).13 Kepler shows himself very confident in the reality of the subject matter of his harmonies (although, as he readily concedes, harmonies do not exist outside the mind), whereas Fludd, according to him, does not deal with the world itself, but with a “concept of world” vaguely “painted in his mind.”14 One should notice here that there may be a political reason behind Kepler’s attack. Both Fludd and Kepler dedicated their works to James I of England, a choice which, in Fludd’s case, is somewhat surprising.15 His Paracelsian and Hermetic work often deals with natural magic, and the influence of John Dee is quite obvious. But King James waged a wellknown campaign against witchcraft, astrology, and magic, which included the quasi-banishment of John Dee, whose occult influence poisoned the Elizabethan court. James himself wrote an interesting tract against all forms of magic (1597, 1604), according to which the “occult mentality,” of a kind albeit strongly intellectualized by Fludd, should be forbidden and severely punished. It would seem as if the choice to dedicate the Utriusque cosmi historia (at least the first book) to King James was an attempt to defend the philosophical and religious value of Hermetism. But there is more. As shown by Frances Yates, the two books of the Utriusque cosmi historia were published by De Bry in Oppenheim, and in them Fludd did not hide his sympathy for James’ Protestant son-in-law, Frederick V, often called the “Winterkönig,” following his designation as King of the Bohemian States in 1619 (while he was the leader of the Protestant Union). The aim of the dedication of the Utriusque cosmi historia to James is clear: Robert Fludd wanted to reinforce the support of the King of England to his son-in-law, the Palatine, to whom he gave the hand of his own daughter Elisabeth Stuart in 1613.16 By the end of 1618, Kepler too took the decision to dedicate his Harmonice mundi to James.17 That decision was risky, because of the deterioration of the political state of affairs, which was to lead to a direct conflict between the Palatine and the Habsburg, after the death in March 1619 of Kepler’s patron, the Emperor Matthias. Of course, Kepler could not know, at the end of 1618, how badly things would pan out some short months later; so, his dedication can be considered a sincere and ecumenical appeal to peace. The political message of the dedication and the scientific content of the work are linked, because “harmony,” as Kepler says, is nothing but the resolution of a dissonance, and politics, therefore, is nothing but the art of making harmony in human affairs. This, precisely, will be the subject matter of the “digressio politica” in the third book of the Harmonice mundi. Moreover, looking at Kepler’s

Gassendi in the Philosophical Debate  173 agenda in the years 1617–1619, we can see that he was more and more involved in the witchcraft trial of his mother Catharina even if there is no evidence for it, we cannot exclude the hypothesis that Kepler wanted to draw the attention of a renowned opponent of witchcraft and all kinds of magic, in order to get some help and support in his mother’s defense. It could be that the reasons that initially led Kepler to distance himself from Robert Fludd were related to questions of editorial policy and were, as such, fairly contingent. However, the development of the controversy leads him to stress more and more clearly the philosophical distance between himself and Fludd, and this is mostly clearly emphasized in the Apologia. Mersenne and his circle would read this Apologia very carefully, as shown, for example, by La Mothe Le Vayer’s Discours sceptique sur la musique, reminding the reader that Kepler makes fun of all the worldly consonances of the planets, considered from the Earth, and he can conceive their harmony only by looking at them from the center of the Sun, that is, according to his doctrine, from the true center of the universe.18 This is indeed a rather important claim, grounded in Kepler’s attempt, since the Astronomia nova (1609), to reconstruct the “real” movements of Mars (motus physicus), against the Tychonian model. Gassendi never explicitly joins the Keplerian side in their fight against Fludd’s antiCopernican arguments; unlike La Mothe Le Vayer, Gassendi does not even mention that point.19 Nevertheless, he is perfectly aware of the precise technical details of Kepler’s astronomy and his “Copernican Campaign,” as shown by all the details of the astronomical observations he made in the 1620s, which the good Father Mersenne took the liberty of publishing together with the Epistolica exercitatio, without much waiting for Gassendi to authorize it.20 As a matter of fact, the astronomical observations published by Mersenne together with the Epistolica exercitatio contain a final section dedicated to the observations of Mars, in order to verify the parallax of “Mars acronychus.” This section reports observations made during the year 1623, and longitudinal observations of Jupiter dated November 1620.21 Let us recall that Kepler’s Epitome astronomiae copernicanae (Book I) had been censured by the Congregation of the Index, on the recommendation of Francesco Ingoli, and its author declared a heretic.22 The Keplerian “attack on Mars” was the decisive battle against Tycho’s followers. The issue of Mars’ parallax was indeed crucial in order to determine whether the Earth or the Sun occupies the center of the world.23 In chapter 11 of the Astronomia nova, Kepler shows that Tycho’s assumption that Mars appears with a greater diurnal parallax than the Sun is not based on real and proper observations, but on a supposition, made by

174  Édouard Mehl Tycho’s assistants, about what this diurnal parallax should be according to the Copernican hypotheses. Moreover, Kepler shows that this supposition depends on the real distance of the Sun—which Kepler increased from 1,200 to 3,469 e.r. (earth radii). As if knowing nothing of Kepler’s battle with the Tychonians (of which, of course, he was very well aware), Gassendi tried to measure Mars’ parallax by himself. Not surprisingly, some mistakes rendered the observation inconclusive and Gassendi was led to recognize that although the observation was made with every possible patience and accuracy, “it does not appear that (the data) are accurately consistent” (“non videtur ad minuta plane cohaerere”).24 The cause of that error is not clear, but Tycho’s observation appears in any case to be suspicious and partly incorrect. Gassendi’s conclusion was rather conventional and made to satisfy Father Mersenne: “ἐπέχω” [I suspend (my judgment)]; but the damage was done to the Tychonian camp.25 We can therefore imagine the tremendous excitement and, at the same time, deep embarrassment with which Gassendi might have presented his book to Kepler. Kepler died suddenly and unexpectedly on 15 November 1630 and hence we will never know what his reaction would have been if he had received the book and the accompanying letter, via their common friend Wilhelm Schickard.26 Nevertheless, Gassendi’s observation of Mercury’s transit in front of the Sun (as had been predicted by Kepler with hitherto unequaled precision), would furnish Gassendi with the opportunity to continue his task of verifying the observational data of Keplerian astronomy.27 Kepler’s successor, Wilhelm Schickard, was to give a mathematical explanation of the discrepancy in the observations of Mercury’s transit in terms of period and apparent diameter (which both Tycho and Kepler had predicted as much bigger than it appeared to Gassendi), and therefore planetary distance from the Sun.28 In his letter to Kepler, dated 17/27 August 1630, which accompanied the sending of the Epistolica exercitatio (a letter that Kepler probably never received, but which was published the following year in the Mercurius sub sole visus), Gassendi put together three observations from the current year: the eclipse of the Sun in June 1630, predicted and calculated with the greatest care by Kepler in his Ephemerides of 1630;29 an occultation of Saturn by the Moon in June 1630, and a passage of the Moon into alignment with a small star in the foot of Ophiuchus. In addition, he referenced observations of the apparent diameter of Jupiter. Gassendi had revisited his own observation of Jupiter from November 1620, integrated with that of Mars. However, in August 1630, in a procedure he repeated a few months later with the diameter of Mercury, Gassendi observed the apparent diameter of Jupiter which, according to him, could not exceed one arc second. However, he did not draw any conclusions about the distance between Jupiter and Earth nor Jupiter and the Sun. The publication of 1630 revealed that although Gassendi, at this time, did not take any position on the question of heliocentrism, his

Gassendi in the Philosophical Debate  175 astronomical observations throughout the 1620s corresponded quite exactly to Kepler’s scientific agenda. This shows that Gassendi had a very ambiguous reaction to Mersenne’s initiative of publishing the Epistolica exercitatio together with his observations: he was both delighted at the idea of entering into communication with Kepler, and afraid that he might be suspected of having done so.

6.3 The Fortune of Gassendi’s Observations The observation of Mercury’s transit takes on remarkable significance and interest in the context of the very heated discussion between Kepler and Isaac Beeckman’s young disciple, Martinus Hortensius (Martin van Den Hove), about the reliability of telescopic observations.30 As soon as Gassendi’s Mercurius was published, Hortensius praised his sense of observation and even enlisted Gassendi in the campaign he himself led against Kepler, against whom he directed some very harsh words.31 Kepler, according to Hortensius, lacked geometric evidence—which must be the rule of truth in any human knowledge—and made arbitrary physical assumptions to explain the inconsistencies of his observations. Hortensius had written an important preface to his Latin translation of Johan Philip Lansbergen’s Commentationes in motum terrae diurnum et annuum. Here Hortensius targets very precisely Kepler’s observations of the Sun, the determination of its diameter, and subsequently, its size and distance from the Earth. If the measurements are false, this is due (at least partly) to the tools used by Kepler, who claims that the lens-telescope cannot be more precise than a simple tubum opticum, with no lens but a simple aperture.32 After Kepler’s short answer in an Additiunculam, Hortensius in his Responsio (published, however, in 1631, after Kepler’s death) repeated his attack. Here he gives a fairly good explanation as to why, according to Kepler, the telescope could not be as accurate as the tubum (a camera obscura) for solar observations. Hortensius rejected Kepler’s claim that the Sun, like the Moon, is surrounded by an atmosphere whose optical properties make it appear bigger than it really is. In Hortensius’ view, this is a kind of assumption arbitrarily imported into astronomy, where nothing should be affirmed except what corresponds clearly and unambiguously with the observations. From this point of view, Kepler sinned doubly: through the physical assumptions he made about the matter and density of celestial bodies, and through his metaphysical assumptions. Unlike those of Gassendi, Kepler’s determination of planetary diameters and distances were not made by sufficiently accurate observations, but by “harmonic speculations.”33 This was enough for Hortensius to enlist Gassendi into his anti-­ Keplerian campaign. The conclusion of his “Discussion with Gassendi” (1633) is supposed to paraphrase the Mercurius conclusion, but it is clear

176  Édouard Mehl that Hortensius puts rather a radical spin on Gassendi’s moderate skeptical positions and impresses them into a war machine against the method and all the results obtained by Kepler.34 In fact, as we will see, Gassendi was far from being as virulent in his opposition toward the Imperial Mathematician as were the Dutch (Snell, Beeckman, Lansbergen, Hortensius), and, to the contrary, showed a moderation that can be regarded as a recognition of the disproportionate grandeur of Kepler’s genius. Such moderation, as we will see (section 6.6), can also be seen as a fundamental implication of his epistemology.

6.4 Theological Implications of the Galileo Affair, 1629–1630 It is easy to imagine how amazed Kepler would have been to see his own philosophy presented as a pure mental construction, and as a physical theory lacking any metaphysical foundation. As I will now show, this however is the way Gassendi presented Kepler’s positions in chapter VII of the third part of the Epistolica exercitatio devoted to the examination of Fludd’s book against Mersenne—the Sophiae cum moria certamen— and more precisely to its third chapter where Fludd defends his theory of the macrocosmic consonances. Obviously, Gassendi there tries to save the value of Keplerian “smart discoveries” (inventa operosa)35 independently of any cosmological statement, and even independently of heliocentrism itself, to which Gassendi never makes any reference in the Exercitatio.36 Moreover, in chapter VII of the third part of the Epistolica exercitatio, Gassendi claims, against all common sense, that he does not believe that “God”—in Kepler’s cosmological synthesis—is bound to the “harmonical laws” ruling the universe. Though Kepler’s concept of harmony is purely a mathematical one based on the “eternal truths” of geometry, it does not mean that God is lacking any power to produce the world by other means; by means other than this mathematical “harmony,” as if God’s mind was strictly the same as the human intellect. This claim, therefore, draws Gassendi deeply into some theological issues—about God’s freedom, God’s power, and their implications for human knowledge37—the major protagonists of which are Galileo, Beeckman, and Descartes. Let us quote the whole page of Gassendi’s “apology” (III, ch. 7, 1630, p. 103–105; here an apology of Kepler—indeed, just like Kepler wrote his own Apologia against Fludd a couple of years earlier):38 At ch. 3 he considers his macrocosmical consonances. Although I concede one may build, following the Pythagoreans, some harmony between the main parts of the world, I think I can say, however, that what he dreams of here and there about this is not far from the fable. And indeed, if the Artisan of the world had some reason to have established everything at the place where he did, with the mass with which he did it, with the form in which he did it, the puny homunculi

Gassendi in the Philosophical Debate  177 seem however to determine this reason too blindly. For God would in no way be wiser than we are if we were allowed to know his ineffable decisions in depth. But why, in your opinion, do some people believe that the plants could have been installed much more elegantly in the mountains, as well as the stars in the ether, if only because in their opinion it is impossible that there exists a convenient order if the human thought does not discern it? They are the same who, because of their narrow-mindedness, whenever human sagacity has imagined some artificial combinations that are pleasing, immediately attach themselves to transpose them to nature, and consider that its works, as soon as they have imitated art, are the most beautiful. As if there were, apart from the human mind, no other mind that harmonic laws please. From there we can certainly, as if per game, apply to the immense work what we have discovered to be well tuned with our ears, but it seems perfectly unreasonable to be seriously convinced that it is this harmony that has titillated the divine ears in the manufacture of the world. Certainly, I believe that even Kepler has not so far presumed of his discoveries obtained after great efforts that he dared to swear that the consonance he had built was the very true consonance of the world. He is a man of too great a discernment to submit the rich nature to his reasonings and to think that these are something other than scholarly reflections, which exercise intelligences through their subtlety and are not unpleasant because of the shadow of the analogy they have with actual reality.39 An attempt to understand this complex paragraph must be placed in the very specific context of the anti-Copernican decree of March 1616. First of all, it seems that the theme of ‘macrocosmic consonances’—“harmonia mundana,” “symmetria mundi”—is a topic on the horizon of which not only Fludd and Kepler are placed, but also Copernicus and his pupil Rheticus in the Narratio prima (1540). Copernicus himself claimed that the heliocentric disposition (ordinatio) of the planets was the only one; only under this disposition can we perceive “the admirable symmetry of the world, and the bound of harmony between the planetary distances and periods.”40 With such a fundamental proposal, the Copernicans were in danger of subjecting God to mathematical necessity. Yet they denied it, as is clear from the fact that Mästlin or Rothmann often appealed to the incomprehensible power of the sovereign creator, in particular when justifying the spatial immensity which, in the heliocentric hypothesis, must separate the planetary spheres from the fixed stars. Gassendi’s separatist position on the subject matter of philosophy and theology—according to which, Scripture, and therefore theology, is not made to teach rational truths but to teach every common man the supernatural means of salvation41—leans clearly toward Copernicans like

178  Édouard Mehl Rothmann. Together with the latter’s position, Gassendi’s separation of philosophy and theology is also directed against Tycho Brahe. While fully aware of their transgression of the limits in this regard, Gassendi nevertheless refrains from reproaching Mersenne or Kepler for submitting Scripture to their philosophical speculations: this reproach is addressed only to Robert Fludd, the only one guilty of building a ‘philosophy’ whose principles are supposedly contained in Scripture itself.42 Gassendi’s maneuver is rather subtle indeed: it consists in turning on Robert Fludd much the same criticism as the Holy Office had addressed to Galileo—not, of course, on the grounds of heliocentrism, which Fludd fights with rearguard arguments, but because of Fludd’s constant confusion between theology and philosophy.43 Since this criticism must remain independent of astronomical hypotheses, it is not surprising that the Canon of Digne puts insistent emphasis on Fludd’s ‘philosophical’ positions with regard to articles of the Christian Faith, such as Creation.44 By this very subtle tactic on this point, Gassendi insists on the multiple affinities between Fludd, Proclus, Origen, and other ‘Platonists.’ The same dynamic is at work in his description of the Empyreus, which attributes quite precisely to Fludd what the Congregation of the Index censored in the work of the Platonist Steuco. In other words, Gassendi levels charges against Fludd’s non-Christian philosophy, with the intention of exculpating Kepler. Therefore, it should not be very surprising that all of Kepler’s “inventa operosa” are presented as a critical effort to correct the philosophers’ errors (that is, the errors of the Tychonians), and that even Kepler’s mathematics is presented as a recreational mind game, in terms that faithfully echo those used by the Jesuit Melchior Inchofer to demonstrate, in the context of Galileo’s trial, that Holy Scripture teaches positively the stability of the Earth, and that geomobilism is against the principles of physics!45 Indeed, it is undeniable that Gassendi and Inchofer share the same conviction that mathematical arguments cannot be transposed to physics in a straightforward or perfect way, except by practicing an imaginary physics, subject to all kinds of paralogisms.46 It is therefore very important for Gassendi to stress that this is precisely what is not done by Kepler, who is not vain enough to “transfer to nature his own conceptions,” and to “submit the rich nature to its reasonings.” To conclude, then, let us say that in chapter VII of the third part of the Epistolica exercitatio, whose dialectical construction is very sophisticated, Gassendi tries to exonerate Kepler from the charge of subjecting God to physical necessity. Gassendi is certainly very well informed, particularly about the publication of Agostino Oreggi’s De deo uno, in the same year in which he wrote the Exercitatio (1629).47 Oreggi’s book reports the statements made by Cardinal Maffeo Barberini in 1616, at the time of the anti-Copernican decree leading to the suspension of the De revolutionibus. The cardinal (now Pope Urban VIII) argued, in particular, that divine power cannot be compelled to produce things in the way we

Gassendi in the Philosophical Debate  179 consider necessary. Gassendi claims, in a similar vein, that “it seems perfectly unreasonable to be seriously convinced that it is this harmony that has titillated the divine ears in the manufacture of the world.” The ratio creandi therefore escapes any human intelligence; we, miselli homunculi,48 may well know that this ratio exists, but we cannot determine what it is. This argument is central to the “admirable doctrine” which Galileo had a formal obligation to quote in the fourth day of the Dialogo, which he completed in the summer of 1630; a doctrine which, as we know, Galileo quoted evasively and rather ironically (putting it in the mouth of Simplicio) in the very last pages of the Dialogo. The aftermath of the case is well known; the rest, as they say, is history.

6.5 A Crucial Encounter: Isaac Beeckman Obviously, Gassendi was only interested in Fludd’s philosophy to the extent that it allowed him to take a position concerning the relationship between philosophy and theology; and, as we have just seen, to redirect the theological censorship on Robert Fludd, by addressing to him exclusively a criticism which Mersenne and others had also leveled at Kepler. As we have also seen, Gassendi’s attitude was much more moderate, and even opposed to the criticism against the “harmonic speculations,” which Hortensius had put forward in his important preface to his Latin translation of the work of the Copernican Lansbergen. If we look more closely at Isaac Beeckman’s Journal, we will not be surprised to discover that Gassendi’s visit to him in July 1629 followed a period in which Beeckman had read and discussed with the greatest attention Kepler’s two most important works: the Astronomia nova (1609) and the great cosmological synthesis proposed in Part IV of the Epitome astronomiae copernicanae.49 In the list of topics covered in their meetings, Beeckman mentions a discussion about Kepler and his invention of a theory of a force that stabilizes the Earth’s axis, totally useless and even “unworthy of a philosopher” (Astronomia Nova, ch. 57 = IBJ III, 75–76). To put it simply, having explained to Gassendi “his” principle “that in a void, things once set in motion are always moving” (“omnia, quae semel moventur in vacuo semper moveri”), Beeckman showed how it could be used in astronomy: planetary movements and librations can be explained in a much more natural and economic way than in the Keplerian model, which assumes a magnetic force directing the planets from the body of the Sun. In Beeckman’s view, it is enough to consider light and magnetic forces as a body in order to avoid many of the difficulties into which Kepler had unnecessarily fallen. However, even if Beeckman did not mention it explicitly in the list of subjects discussed between them, it is likely that the discussion focused on the very last point about Kepler which was covered in the Journal

180  Édouard Mehl (fol. 344v, IJB III, 120–121), just before the mention of Gassendi’s visit in the next folio (fol. 345r, IJB III, 123). This last comment concerned a very specific passage from Part IV of the Epitome astronomiae copernicanae (1621), which goes back to the law of periodic times, itself discovered by Kepler in 1618 and set out in Book V of the Harmonice mundi (1619). As Beeckman clearly understood, the Epitome does not merely restate this law, but seeks to give a demonstration propter quid, that is, by the true cause of the appearances: “Kepler eagerly searches for the cause why the motions of the planets are in inverse relation to their distance [sc. from the Sun]” (“Keplerus… sollicite quaerit causam cur motus planetarum… sint in proportione intervallorum… eversa”).50 Here, Beeckman argues that instead of introducing a new variable (the density of planetary bodies), Kepler could have limited himself to the sole consideration of the size of the surfaces and the resistance that the liquid matter surrounding these bodies exerts on their surface, “to prevent their speed from increasing indefinitely” (“ne infinite eorum celeritas crescat”).51 However, this point was actually discussed with Gassendi a few days later, because it was involved in the principle: “(compared to their size) large bodies have a small surface area, but small bodies have a large surface area” [“corpora magna habere superficiem parvam, parva vero magnam”].52 It is clear that Gassendi could not find here the “ratio” of periodic movements, and of the relationship between their distance from the Sun and planetary motions. But at the end of the aforementioned paragraph, Beeckman made a remark suggesting that such a “reason” may not exist at all, that it could not be found in harmonies, too well-proportioned to the human understanding, and that the sovereign creator freely disposed of these things, by a sovereign decree (fortuito Dei jussu), so that there would be no more reason to seek the cause of the disposition of celestial bodies than there is to seek that of mountains, coasts, and oceans.53 The proximity of this commentary to the one we read in the Exercitatio54 is very striking; from the question of the ultima ratio to that of divine freedom, and even the example of the mountains.55 Although treated in slightly different ways here and there, the parallels attest that these two comments stem from a common matrix, whose inspiration could be found in both Bacon and Galileo.56 The proximity is such that Beeckman and Gassendi, who praise each other so much, may seem to say the same thing twice. However, the previously quoted judgment on Kepler in the Epistolica exercitatio (OO III, 233b) attempts to mitigate Kepler’s rationalist positions and to attribute to him the moderate view that metaphysical speculations on the ultima ratio rerum are merely heuristic assumptions.57

6.6 Metaphysical and Epistemological Neutrality Gassendi’s attempt to kill two birds with one stone—his apology for Kepler, and his contesting of the Hermetic Fluddian theosophy—suffers,

Gassendi in the Philosophical Debate  181 however, from an internal inconsistency that makes it unconvincing. Gassendi could only defend Kepler, indeed, by overlooking what Kepler himself claimed to have built: an authentic description of the world’s factory. To deny this is to destroy at its root the Keplerian project and its realistic aim, which is decidedly irreconcilable with an epistemology of an instrumentalist or phenomenal type, such as that defended by Gassendi, on the back of a fideist skepticism. Instead of attacking the realism that forms the backbone of Kepler’s science, Gassendi pretends to ignore it. This point is all the more interesting since Gassendi should, in principle, hold the same positions as Fludd with regard to criticisms of Keplerian mathematics. Fludd denies in a wholly consistent way (both against Kepler and Mersenne) that mathematical truths reach the essence of material things. That this is a negative thesis that Gassendi shares de facto with Fludd, is evidenced, for example, by the last sections of his Exercitationes (II, VI, 8), where, relying on the Jesuit Pereira’s criticism of mathematics, Gassendi concludes that mathe­ matics never show the propter quid, but only the quia –meaning, according to the Aristotelians, that they are not scientific: The (mathematical) demonstration, or the means used (in mathematical demonstration), is not the cause by which a thing is what it is [causa cur ita res sit] […] but only shows that the thing is so [quod res ita sit]. Hence I conclude that everything that is certain and obvious in mathematics relates to appearance, but in no way to their proper causes or the intimate nature of things. However, I would add that, through mathematics, I could establish with greater certainty (than through simple sensory perception) that the Earth is indeed spherical: this can indeed appear by means of the eclipses of the Moon, and by the variable height of the poles; but why the Earth is spherical, what is its essential nature, whether it is animated or not, and if it is, of which nature is this soul, what functions it performs, or what properties it has, why it remains motionless in the center, or, if it moves, what force sets it in motion […] the mathematical disciplines and all the others are entirely blind.58 This text could very well have been directly aimed at Kepler; one may even wonder whether Gassendi did not write it after a first reading of the Epitome, or of the Mysterium cosmographicum (1596; “editio altera” 1621). It should also be noted that this attack against animism is perfectly consistent with Kepler’s first critical reception in Mersenne’s Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim (1623) and, as we have seen, with the reaction of the Congregation of the Index. If Gassendi, at that time, had very carefully read Kepler’s Apologia in response to Robert Fludd, perhaps he would have noted that, in the debate on quantity (substance or accident), Kepler defends a position

182  Édouard Mehl which is not incompatible with the idea expressed here by Gassendi that mathematics is about appearances, not about the essence of bodies. Kepler admits—as Descartes will later do—that we cannot know the substances without something from them making us know them: if it is true, as Kepler admits, that quantity is not the substance but an accident, the fact remains that substances can only be known to us through the intercession of their accidents, inasmuch as they reveal to us something by which the existence of bodies is indicated: “I deny that it is possible for anyone to come into contact with the sole substances without the intermediary of their accidents.” (“ego in nudis substantiis sine accidentium internunciis negociari, nego possibile cuiquam”).59 Finally, it seems that Gassendi did not pay enough attention to this crucial specification: quantity, the subject of mathematics, may not reveal the essence of bodies, but, conversely, without quantity it is certain that there are no bodies that could be known to us. This, without doubt, is the limit of his epistemology, which is too resolutely skeptical. Gassendi did not have the audacity to declare (or rather to decide), against both Fludd and Kepler, that quantity is not an accident of bodies, but their “true form and essence”60—meaning, precisely, that their “appearance” or phenomenality, as a determined quantity, is their true and original nature. The decisive step was taken by Descartes, in what can be understood, a posteriori, as a leaving far behind of all the protagonists in the debate (Kepler, Mersenne, Fludd, Beeckman, Gassendi)61. This would soon trigger a war in which Gassendi’s Instances against Descartes was just one skirmish.

6.7 Conclusion To conclude in a few words, let us say that the Robert Fludd “case” confronts Gassendi with an example of speculative metaphysics, of Hermetic and neo-Pythagorean inspiration, which is only an intellectual construction of the world. The vanity of this speculative doctrine had already been strongly contested by Kepler, but only to fall for another dogmatism: that of science, in its tendency to rationalize everything and even in its arrogant claim to make mathematics the genuine structure or essence of things. Gassendi obviously could not agree with either of these two extremely dogmatic positions. Nevertheless, the Epistolica exercitatio bears the trace of an original attempt to save the followers of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler from Roman censorship, by presenting Kepler’s entire scientific approach, and even his theology, as a simple form of heuristic hypothesis. It is likely that the meeting with Isaac Beeckman in 1629 played a decisive role in the formation of Gassendi’s fundamental positions, a point that deserves further systematic and indepth examination.

Gassendi in the Philosophical Debate  183

Notes 1 See the remarkable edition of the text by Sylvie Taussig: Pierre Gassendi, Examen de la philosophie de Robert Fludd, ed. and trans. Sylvie Taussig (Paris: S.É.H.A./ Milano: Archè, 2016), as well as her previous study on this topic: “Gassendi contre Fludd: des choses occultes aux choses inconnues,” in Gassendi et la modernité, ed. Sylvie Taussig (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 215– 258; see also Luca Cafiero, “Robert Fludd e la polemica con Gassendi,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia 19 (1964): 367–410 and 20 (1965): 3–15; Jean-Charles Darmon, “Quelques enjeux épistémologiques de la querelle entre Gassendi et Fludd: les clairs-obscurs de l’Âme du Monde,” in Aspects de la tradition alchimique au XVIIe siècle, ed. Franck Greiner (Paris: S.É.H.A./ Milano: Archè, 1998), 63–84. The Epistolica exercitatio will be published in Gassendi’s Opera omnia under the title Examen philosophiae Roberti Fluddi medici: see OO III, 211–268. 2 On Fludd, see William H. Huffman, Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance (London–New York: Routledge, 1988); Johannes Rösche, Robert Fludd: Der Versuch einer hermetischen Alternative zur neuzeitlichen Naturwissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2008). 3 On the scientific and philosophical context of Mersenne’s entourage, see the classic study by Robert Lenoble, Mersenne ou la naissance du mécanisme (Paris: Vrin, 1943). 4 See Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi majoris scilicet et minoris, metaphysica, physica atque technica historia (Oppenhemii: Ære Johan-Theodori de Bry, 1617), I, Book II, ch. 2, 47. 5 See Édouard Mehl, “L’Essai sur Robert Fludd (1630),” Libertinage et philosophie au XVIIe siècle 4 (2000): 85–119. On the Kepler-Fludd/Fludd-Mersenne controversy, see Natacha Fabbri, Cosmologia e armonia in Kepler e Mersenne. Contrappunto a due voci sul tema dell’“Harmonice mundi” (Firenze: Olschki, 2003), esp. 186–204; eadem, De l’utilité de l’harmonie. Filosofia, scienza e musica in Mersenne, Descartes e Galileo (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2008). 6 On the reflection of Keplerian ideas in Gassendi, see the valuable indications in Kuni Sakamoto, “The German Hercules’s Heir: Pierre Gassendi’s Reception of Keplerian Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009): 69–91. See also Isabelle Pantin, “La discussion sur les taches solaires en France: Peiresc, Sizzi, Tarde, Gassendi,” Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences 166 (2016): 353–367. 7 Marin Mersenne, Questions inouyes (1634), ed. André Pessel (Paris: Fayard, 1985), Question xxviii, 316. Mersenne reproduces the condemnation of the Amphitheatrum of Khunrath by the Sacred Faculty of Theology of Paris (1 March 1625); see also Nicolas de Villiers, sieur de Chandoux, Commentaire sur l’amphithéâtre de la Sagesse éternelle de Khunrath, ed. Sylvain Matton (Paris: S.É.H.A., 2013), 447. 8 Robert Fludd, Sophiae cum moria certamen ([Francofurti]: [de Bry], 1629), 19: “Unde tibi (ô Peripatetice vane) dico, quod causae omnes formales subalternae sint delendae, et ex mundo Christiano in exilium relegendae cum ad unicum et solum Deum, quippe qui est actus actuum, omnis actio tam mediata quam immediata est referenda.” (“That is why I say to you (O vain Peripatetician) that all secondary formal causes must be suppressed and exiled from the Christian world, where every action, both mediated and immediate, must be referred to the one and only (power) of God, inasmuch as He is the act of all acts.”) 9 Johannes Kepler, Harmonice mundi, Appendix, in Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, 22 vols., eds. Max Caspar, Volker Bialas, Friederike Boockmann, Daniel A. Di

184  Édouard Mehl Liscia, Walther von Dyck, Franz Hammer, Hella Kothmann, Peter Michael Schenkel, Friedrich Seck (München: C.H. Beck, 1938–2017) (hereafter: GW followed by volume number), VI, 373–377; see Max Caspar, Kepler, trans. Clarisse Doris Hellman (New York: Dover Publications, 1993), 290–293. 10 Johannes Kepler, Pro suo opere Harmonices mundi apologia. Adversus demonstrationem analyticam Roberti de Fluctibus Medici Oxoniensis, in qua ille se dicit respondere ad appendicem dicti operis (Francofurti: Sumptibus Godefridi Tampachii, 1622). The date appearing at the end of this work is “Cal. Augusti Anni 1621” (GW VI, 457). Kepler gave it to Tampach at the end of the summer 1621 (GW VI, 513–514); Tampach, therefore, probably antedated the publication. A few years later, Gassendi himself was involved in discussions with Tampach about the publication of an annotated translation of Book X of Diogenes Laertius (on Epicurus), but this project would not succeed: TL, 217–218. 11 Johannes Kepler, Le Secret du monde, trans. Alain-Philippe Segonds (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984), xl–xliii. 12 Johannes Kepler, Apologia, “Ad Analysin IX,” GW VI, 395. 13 On the Fluddean interpretation of the Book of Genesis, the “lux primogenita” as intellectual or “empyrean” nature in the human soul, see Pierre Gassendi, Examen, § XXIV, 107, OO III, 226b, comparing Fludd’s positions with those of Origen and the Platonists. It should also be noted that the diagram representing the metaphysical constitution of things through the interpenetration of the two pyramids (formal and material) is directly borrowed from Nicolas of Cusa, De conjecturis, ch. IX, trans. Jean-Michel Counet (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011), 37—who calls it “figure P” because it is paradigmatic (“quia paradigmatica”). 14 On this topic, see Christoph Lüthy “What Does a Diagram Prove that Other Images Do Not? Images and Imagination in the Kepler-Fludd Controversy,” in Image, Imagination, and Cognition: Medieval and Early Modern Theory and Practice, eds. Christoph Lüthy, Paul J.J.M. Bakker, and Claudia Swan (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 227–273, esp. 255. Johannes Kepler, Harmonice mundi, GW VI, 377. Kepler claims that his science is that of the real world, studying the actual movements of the planets, whereas Fludd, with his “harmonia mundana,” describes at best only an intellectual system of the world. By ‘real motion’ or ‘true motion’ we mean motions, the speed of which varies according to the distance from the Sun, whereas ‘mean’ motions, strictly speaking, are only a view of the mind, and are more imaginary than real (Apologia, GW VI, 390, l. 7–13). 15 On the dedication to King James, see William H. Huffman and Robert A. Seelinger, “Robert Fludd’s ‘Declaratio Brevis’ to James I,” Ambix 25/2 (1978): 69–92. 16 On the dedication of the first book of the Utriusque cosmi historia, see Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London–Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972, 1978), 78–80. 17 See Aviva Rothman, The Pursuit of Harmony: Kepler on Cosmos, Confession, and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 200–203. 18 François de La Mothe Le Vayer, Discours sceptique sur la musique, in Œuvres, vol. V, part 2 (Dresde: Chez Michel Groell, 1757), 108–109: “Kepler se moque de toutes les consonances mondaines des planètes, à les considérer de la Terre, et ne peut concevoir leur harmonie qu’en les regardant du dedans du Soleil, c’est-à-dire, selon sa doctrine, du véritable centre de l’Univers.” Cf. Kepler’s Apologia, GW VI, 390, l. 7–20. 19 Except for the final passage of § XVIII (Examen, 101), which is actually a perfect preterition (OO III, 244a):

Gassendi in the Philosophical Debate  185 Here I do not in any way dwell on the fact that he attacks Copernicus and Gilbert about the movement of the Earth; and I am not surprised that, despite his passion for Pythagorean and Platonic symbols, he contemptuously rejected Copernicus’ comment on the sun, that is, the fire, or the guard of Jupiter in the center, when he speaks of another non-volatile earth and another central sun than those we commonly hear. What I agree with is that, while disapproving of the opinions of these two incomparable men, he nevertheless uses not without elegance the magnetic forces of Gilbert and recommends Copernicus as a very experienced astronomer, because memory of the latter is written in the sky itself. 20 See the references in Édouard Mehl, “Kepler’s second Copernican Campaign: the Search for an Annual Stellar Parallax after the Roman Decree (1616),” in Copernicus Banned: The Entangled Matter of the Anti-Copernican Decree of 1616, eds. Natacha Fabbri and Federica Favino (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2018), 191–209. 21 Epistolica exercitatio (Parisiis: Apud Sebastianum Cramoisy, 1630), 334–357. 22 See Giovanni Pizzorusso, “Francesco Ingoli: Knowledge and Curial Service in 17th Century Rome,” in Copernicus Banned, 157–189. See my “Kepler’s Second Copernican Campaign,” 196, n. 18. Ingoli, convinced that Kepler fell into Origen’s errors concerning the animation of the stars and the Sun, suggested that the Congregation should take a position on this question. 23 Regarding the problem of Mars’ parallax, see the seminal article by Owen Gingerich and James R. Voelkel, “Tycho Brahe’s Copernican Campaign,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 29 (1998): 1–34. The argument had already been formulated by the disciple of Copernicus, Georg Joachim Rheticus, in the Narratio prima (1540): see Narratio prima (Wroclaw: Ossolineum, 1982), 55. 24 Epistolica exercitatio, 354. 25 Ibid., 360. 26 Gassendi to Kepler in Sagan, 17/27 August 1630, OO VI, 35a. See W. Schickard, Briefwechsel, ed. F. Seck, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Frommann Verlag, 2002), letter n° 456, I, 565–568 = GW XVIII, 434–437 (n°1139). See also Schickard to Gassendi, 4 October 1630, letter n° 468, Briefwechsel, I, 581–585. 27 Mercurius in sole visus, et Venus invisa, anno 1631. Pro voto et admonitione Keppleri… (Parisiis: Sumptibus Sebastiani Cramoisy, 1632); see Kepler’s booklet: Admonitio ad astronomos, rerumque coelestium studiosos, De raris mirisq; Anni 1631, Phænomenis, Veneris puta et Mercurii in Solem incursu (Lipsiae: Minzelius, 1629; GW XI, 1, 475 sq.). 28 Albert Van Helden, Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1985), 95–104. 29 GW XI, 327–335. Beeckman (probably with the assistance of Hortensius) observed the eclipse: see Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 à 1634, ed. Cornelis de Waard, 4 vols. (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1939–1953) (hereafter: IBJ followed by volume number in Roman numerals), III, 153–156. 30 It is not the place to go into the details of this controversy, which goes back to Kepler’s Dioptrice, and his conviction that the apparent diameter of telescopic images must be corrected and reduced. The importance of Gassendi’s observations published as an appendix to the Epistolica exercitatio was emphatically underlined in Martin Hortensius’ preface to his Dissertation on

186  Édouard Mehl Mercury Transit: Dissertatio de Mercurio in Sole viso et Venere invisa: Instituta cum clarissimo ac coctissimo viro D. Petro Gassendo, Cathed. Ecclesiae Diniensis Canonico, Theologi, Philosopho, ac Mathematico celeberrimo (Lugduni Batavorum: Apud Isaacum Commelinum, 1633 [sign: Lugd. Batavor. Idibus Decembr. Anni 1632]). Note that the title of this important piece of work (Dissertatio… cum… Gassendo: “Conversation with Gassendi”) may well refer to Kepler’s own Dissertatio cum nuncio Sidereo (1610). 31 See Édouard Mehl, “Descartes a-t-il critiqué les lois de Kepler?” in Kepler: La Physique céleste. Autour de l’Astronomia Nova (1609), ed. Édouard Mehl (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011), 231–259 and idem, “Optics, Astronomy, and Natural Philosophy: Beeckman, Descartes, Kepler, and the Dutch Connection,” in Knowledge and Culture in the Early Dutch Republic. Isaac Beeckman in Context, eds. Klaas van Berkel, Albert Clement, and Arjan van Dixhoorn (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022), 129–156. 32 The reason for this preference is that Kepler placed all his hopes in the observatory built by Landgrave Philipp of Hessen-Butzbach, which commissioned a giant optical tube whose quality seems to Kepler to be unrivaled for sunspot observation. The existence of this instrument, as well as the name of the mathematician in the service of the Landgrave, Daniel Mögling, is recalled by Schickard at the beginning of his Pars responsi ad epistolas P. Gassendi de Mercurio sub Sole viso (Tubingae: Typis Theodorici Werlini, 1632), 14–15, and by Hortensius in his Dissertatio de Mercurio in sole viso et venere invisa, 24. On the Butzbach Observatory and the Keplerian observation of sunspots, see Édouard Mehl and Pierre Jeandillou, “Bibliothèques, Conservatoires, Observatoires. Nouveaux matériaux pour l’histoire de l’astronomie moderne: autour du landgraviat de Hessen-Butzbach,” La Revue de la BNU 18 (2018): 61–71. 33 Hortensius, Dissertatio de Mercurio in sole viso et venere invisa, 65: “Kepleri […] sententiam […] de Veneris Diametro […] ex speculationibus Harmonicis, non observationibus determinarit” [“Kepler determined the diameter of Venus by harmonic considerations, not by observations”]. 34 See Ibid., 68: “Nam nisi diligentibus τῶν φαινομένων observationibus inventa nostra congruant, frustra Harmonias advocamus, frustra leges praescribimus motibus corporum Caelestium incompertis […]Qui contrasentiunt, videant quaeso quot jam bonas horas perdendas haberet praecipuus Harmoniarum Architectus Keplerus, si quemadmodum observatio tua omnem Consonantiarum supellectilem difflavit ac destruxit; ita genuinam Caelestium globorum symmetriam de novo teneretur extruere.” 35 Epistolica exercitatio, 103–104; OO III, 233b. 36 Kepler did quite the same thing in the fifth book of the Harmonice mundi, by claiming that his “perfect harmonia” is valid for whatever astronomical hypothesis: either the Copernican or the Tychonian one. The title of Book V is actually: “De harmonia perfecta motuum coelestium […] ad normam doctrinae astronomicae hodierna emendatissima, Hypothesesque Copernici, sed & Tychonis Brahei” (GW VI, 288, my italics). 37 On Gassendi’s voluntarist conception of God, which would imply the adoption of empiricism and of a mitigated form of skepticism, see Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 48 sq. 38 See Sylvie Taussig, “L’examen de la Philosophie de Robert Fludd par ses horstexte,” Bruniana & Campanelliana XV (2009): 247–340, stressing that the Opera omnia present the Epistolica exercitatio as an ‘Apology,’ without specifying for whom the book apologizes.

Gassendi in the Philosophical Debate  187 9 OO III, 233a–b. 3 40 Nicolaus Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, eds. MichelPierre Lerner, Alain-Philippe Segonds, and Jean-Pierre Verdet (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2015), book I, ch. X, 39; see also G. J. Rheticus, Narratio prima, ch. X, 112. 41 Gassendi relies here both on the Letter to Christina of Lorraine (1615) and on Kepler’s Preface to his Astronomia nova (1609), which is known as Perioche ex introductione in Martem Ioannis Kepleri (GW III, 31–34). 42 This criticism is to be found in the few pages preceding the passage in chapter VII of the third part of the Epistolica exercitatio analyzed above: Epistolica exercitatio, 94–102; OO III, 231b–233a. 43 Gassendi judged that the two domains must be separated, and that the condemnation of Galileo rests on a vice of form, since it presupposes, without demonstrating it, that Scripture teaches “philosophical” truths, meaning physical truths—whereas, in his eyes, Holy Scriptures contains only moral teachings and knowledge of the truths necessary for salvation. See the valuable insights of Tullio Gregory, Genèse de la raison classique de Charron à Descartes (Paris: PUF, 2000), 168–171 (who quotes from a long passage in the Examen, OO III, 231b–232a). 44 See Norma E. Emerton, “Creation in the Thought of J.B. Van Helmont and Robert Fludd,” in Alchemy and Chemistry in the 16th and 17th Centuries, eds. Piyo Rattansi and Antonio Clericuzio (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 85–101. 45 Melchior Inchofer, Tractatus syllepticus, in quo, quid de Terrae, Solisque Motu, vel statione, secundum S. Scripturam, & Sanctos Patres sentiendum, quaeve certitudine alterutra sententia tenenda sit, breviter ostenditur (Romae: Ludovicus Grignanus, 1633), ch. 12, 48: “Dico secundo …” As brilliantly shown by Luca Bianchi, Pour une histoire de la double vérité (Paris: Vrin, 2008), 150, Inchofer complies with the letter of the decree Apostolici Regiminis of the Lateran Council V (1513), which obliges philosophers to limit their competence to dissolving philosophical arguments whose conclusions are contrary to the Faith. Inchofer relies on session 8 of the Council, as Descartes will do later in the Dedication of his Meditations to the Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne (AT VII, 3, 4–8), although in a very ironic way, since Descartes claims to apply the instruction to “Christian philosophers” by doubting any philosophical position regarding the existence of things. 46 See Descartes, Lettre à Clerselier sur les Instances de Gassendi, AT IX-1, 212. Inchofer insinuates that all Copernicans reason “mathematically” in matters of physics, and that this is the root of their “Phylosophia [sic] falsa et imaginaria” (Tractatus syllepticus, 56), or “somnia pythagorica” (Tractatus syllepticus, 58). See also Tractatus syllepticus, 85: “Et ut semel dicam, ex mathematicis ducta argumenta ad physicas considerationes, saepe incautos paralogizare cogunt.” 47 See Luca Bianchi, “Urbain VIII, Galilée et la toute-puissance divine,” in Galilée en procès, Galilée réhabilité?, ed. Francesco Berretta (Saint-Maurice: Éditions Saint-Augustin, 2005), 67–90; idem, “‘Mirabile e veramente angelica dottrina.’ Galileo e l’argomento di Urbano VIII,” in Il Caso Galileo, una rilettura storica, filosofica, teologica, eds. Massimo Bucciantini, Michele Camerota, and Franco Giudice (Firenze: Olschki, 2011), 213–233. 48 Gassendi, Epistolica exercitatio, 103 (see my translation supra). 49 See Ferdinand Sassen, De reis van Pierre Gassendi in de Nederlanden (1628– 1629) (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1960). On Beeckman, see Klaas van Berkel, Isaac Beeckman on Matter and Motion:

188  Édouard Mehl Mechanical Philosophy in the Making (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). 50 IBJ III, 120. 51 IBJ III, 120. 52 IBJ III, 123. 53 IBJ III, 120–121. 54 See above the text quoted in section 3: OO III, 233a–b. 55 Beeckman, IBJ III, 120–121: “[…] isti harmoniae non assentimur, et magis fortuito Dei jussu haec corpora esse constituta, qua ille [sc. Kepler] existimat, exemplis montium apud nos et marium omniumque omnimo, quae in Terra proveniunt.” 56 See Édouard Mehl, “Descartes a-t-il critiqué les lois de Kepler?” 253, quoting a letter from Galileo to G. Gallanzoni (July 1611, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, Edizione Nazionale, vol. XI (Firenze: Barbèra, 1901), 150): “God, as if he had thrown (the stars) by hand and at random, gives us the impression of having scattered them without rule, without symmetry and without order […]” See also Galileo’s letter to F. Cesi of 30 June 1612 (Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, XI, 344): We must not want nature to adapt to what we think would be better disposed and ordered, but we must adapt our understanding to what it has done […] and since she has enjoyed circulating the stars around different centers, we can be sure that this constitution is absolutely perfect and admirable, and that the other would be devoid of any elegance, incongruous and childish. On Bacon, see The Advancement of Learning, Collected Works of Francis Bacon, vol. III, eds. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, with a new introduction by Graham Rees (London: Routledge/ Thoemmes Press, 1996), 396–397. Here Bacon takes the exact opposite view of the Epicurean Velleius: the latter reasons as if there were order and symmetry in nature, and claims that their origin is accidental. But, replies Bacon, there is no such order: And therefore Velleius the Epicurian needed not to have asked why God should have adorned the heavens with stars, as if he had been an Aedilis, one that should have set forth some magnificent shews or plays […] so differing an harmony there is between the spirit of Man and the spirit of Nature. On Mersenne, Gassendi, and La Mothe Le Vayer as readers of Bacon, see Claudio Buccolini, “Mersenne et la philosophie baconienne à l’époque de Descartes,” in Bacon et Descartes: Genèse de la modernité philosophique, ed. Élodie Cassan (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2014), 115–134; see also Natacha Fabbri, De l’utilité de l’harmonie, 30–31. 57 Let us recall that, on the scientific level, Beeckman has many affinities with Kepler, and even so much so that, during the year 1630, learning (via Gassendi) of the financial difficulties in which Kepler was struggling, Beeckman (who had never had any personal contact with the honorary astronomer) set out to find him a teaching position in a university in the Netherlands, “which would be the greatest joy for all of us”; see Beeckman to Mersenne, 30 April 1630, IBJ IV, 189. 58 Gassendi, Exercitationes, OO III, 208b–209a. 59 Kepler, Apologia, GW VI, 393, 36–38. See also Harmonice mundi, IV, GW VI, 212, 10–12; The Harmony of the World by Johannes Kepler, trans. E.J. Aiton,

Gassendi in the Philosophical Debate  189 A.M. Duncan, J.V. Field (Philadelphia, PA: The American Philosophical Society, 1997), 290: “[…] quantity is universally inseparable from the bodies to which it belongs, but can quite well be increased or diminished along with the bodies themselves, and yet is an accident (et tamen accidens est) […].” But the root of this assertion can be found in the introductory part of Mysterium cosmographicum identifying the body with quantity, which is “the form, and at the same time the origin of its definition” (Mysterium cosmographicum, ch. II, in Johannes Kepler, Le Secret du monde, 48 = GW I, 23). Kepler infers this identification of the body with quantity from the fact that creation ex nihilo does not presuppose any pre-existing matter: quantity does not add up to the body, by being incorporated into it, it constitutes the thing itself qua tridimensional body. From this point of view the positions of Descartes in 1630 are not as radically opposed to those of Kepler as is often said: see Descartes to Mersenne, 27 May 1630, AT I, 152; CSMK, 25: “this essence is nothing other than the eternal truths” (so that the so-called “creation of eternal truths” actually refers to the creation simpliciter). This constitutes, in my opinion, a limit to the interpretation of Cartesian positions in Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy, who seems to make a (real) distinction between the creation of bodies and the creation of eternal truths. But ‘eternal truths’ do not precede the creation of bodies, and they are nothing else than the infinity of conceivable relations in the created expanse: the creation of eternal truths presupposes the creation of the “res extensa,” not the contrary. 60 Descartes, Le Monde, AT XI, 36; CSM I, 92: “the quantity of the matter […] does not differ from its substance any more than number differs from the things numbered […] I conceive its extension […] not as an accident, but as its true form and essence.” 61 Cf. Discours de la méthode, V, AT VI, 42; CSM I, 132: “[…] I decided to leave our world wholly for them to argue about […]” For the scriptural reference (Qohelet 3:11), and its significance in this scientific context, see my essay: “Malebranche et les lois de Kepler” in Nouvelles recherches sur La Recherche de la Vérité, eds. Jean-Christophe Bardout, Vincent Carraud, and Denis Moreau (Paris: Vrin, 2020), 279–300.

Bibliography Bacon, Francis. Collected Works, eds. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, with a new introduction by Graham Rees, 12 vols. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1996. Beeckman, Isaac, Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 à 1634, ed. Cornelis de Waard. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1939–1953. Bianchi, Luca. “‘Mirabile e veramente angelica dottrina.’ Galileo e l’argomento di Urbano VIII.” In Il Caso Galileo, una rilettura storica, filosofica, teologica, edited by Massimo Bucciantini, Michele Camerota, and Franco Giudice, 213– 233. Firenze: Olschki, 2011. Bianchi, Luca. “Urbain VIII, Galilée et la toute-puissance divine.” In Galilée en procès, Galilée réhabilité?, edited by Francesco Berretta, 67–90. Saint-Maurice: Éditions Saint-Augustin, 2005. Buccolini, Claudio. “Mersenne et la philosophie baconienne à l’époque de Descartes.” In Bacon et Descartes: Genèse de la modernité philosophique, edited by Élodie Cassan, 115–134. Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2014. Cafiero, Luca. “Robert Fludd e la polemica con Gassendi,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia 19 (1964): 367–410 and 20 (1965): 3–15.

190  Édouard Mehl Caspar, Max. Kepler. Translated by Clarisse Doris Hellman. New York: Dover Publications, 1993. Cusa, Nicolas of. De conjecturis. Translated by Jean-Michel Counet. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011. Darmon, Jean-Charles. “Quelques enjeux épistémologiques de la querelle entre Gassendi et Fludd: les clairs-obscurs de l’Âme du Monde.” In Aspects de la tradition alchimique au XVIIe siècle, edited by Franck Greiner, 63–84. Paris: S.É.H.A./ Milano: Archè, 1998. Descartes, René. Œuvres, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 11 vols. 2nd ed. Paris: Vrin, 1996 (abridged AT). Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings, 2 vols. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1985 (abridged CSM). Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings: The Correspondence. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 (abridged CSMK). Emerton, Norma E. “Creation in the Thought of J.B. Van Helmont and Robert Fludd.” In Alchemy and Chemistry in the 16th and 17th Centuries, edited by Piyo Rattansi and Antonio Clericuzio, 85–101. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994. Fabbri, Natacha. Cosmologia e armonia in Kepler e Mersenne. Contrappunto a due voci sul tema dell’ “Harmonice mundi.”. Firenze: Olschki, 2003. Fabbri, Natacha. De l’utilité de l’harmonie. Filosofia, scienza e musica in Mersenne, Descartes e Galileo. Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2008. Fludd, Robert. Sophiae cum moria certamen. [Francofurti]: [de Bry], 1629. Fludd, Robert. Utriusque cosmi majoris scilicet et minoris, metaphysica, physica atque technica historia. Oppenhemii: Ære Johan-Theodori de Bry, 1617. Galilei, Galileo. Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. A. Favaro, 20 vols. Firenze: Barbèra, 1890–1909. Gassendi, Pierre. Examen de la philosophie de Robert Fludd. Edited and translated by Sylvie Taussig. Paris: S.É.H.A./ Milano: Archè, 2016. Gassendi, Pierre. Mercurius in sole visus, et Venus invisa, anno 1631. Pro voto et admonitione Keppleri… Parisiis: Sumptibus Sebastiani Cramoisy, 1632. Gassendi, Pierre. Opera omnia in sex tomos divisa. Lugduni: Sumptibus Laurentii Anisson, & Ioan. Bapt. Devenet, 1658 (abridged OO). Gingerich, Owen and James R. Voelkel. “Tycho Brahe’s Copernican Campaign,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 29 (1998): 1–34. Gregory, Tullio. Genèse de la raison classique de Charron à Descartes. Paris: PUF, 2000. Hortensius, Martin. Dissertatio de Mercurio in Sole viso et Venere invisa: Instituta cum clarissimo ac doctissimo viro D. Petro Gassendo, Cathed. Ecclesiae Diniensis Canonico, Theologi, Philosopho, ac Mathematico celeberrimo. Lugduni Batavorum: Apud Isaacum Commelinum, 1633. Huffman, William H. Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance. London– New York: Routledge, 1988. Huffman, William H. and Robert A. Seelinger, “Robert Fludd’s ‘Declaratio Brevis’ to James I,” Ambix 25 (1978): 69–92. Inchofer, Melchior. Tractatus syllepticus, in quo, quid de Terrae, Solisque motu, vel statione, secundum S. Scripturam, & Sanctos Patres sentiendum, quaeve certitudine alterutra sententia tenenda sit, breviter ostenditur. Romae: Ludovicus Grignanus, 1633.

Gassendi in the Philosophical Debate  191 Kepler, Johannes. Admonitio ad astronomos, rerumque coelestium studiosos, De raris mirisq; Anni 1631, Phænomenis, Veneris puta et Mercurii in Solem incursu. Lipsiae: Minzelius, 1629. Kepler, Johannes. Gesammelte Werke, eds. Max Caspar, Volker Bialas, Friederike Boockmann, Daniel A. Di Liscia, Walther von Dyck, Franz Hammer, Hella Kothmann, Peter Michael Schenkel, Friedrich Seck, 22 vols. München: C.H. Beck, 1938–2017. Kepler, Johannes. Le Secret du Monde. Translated by Alain-Philippe Segonds. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984. Kepler, Johannes. Pro suo opere Harmonices mundi apologia. Adversus demonstrationem analyticam Roberti de Fluctibus Medici Oxoniensis, in qua ille se dicit respondere ad appendicem dicti operis. Francofurti: Sumptibus Godefridi Tampachii, 1622. Kepler, Johannes. The Harmony of the World by Johannes Kepler. Translated by E.J. Aiton, A.M. Duncan, J.V. Field. Philadelphia, PA: The American Philosophical Society, 1997. La Mothe Le Vayer, François de. Œuvres, 7 vols. Dresde: Chez Michel Groell, 1756–1759. Lenoble, Robert. Mersenne ou la naissance du mécanisme. Paris: Vrin, 1943. Lüthy, Christoph H. “What Does a Diagram Prove that Other Images Do Not? Images and Imagination in the Kepler-Fludd Controversy.” In Image, Imagination, and Cognition: Medieval and Early Modern Theory and Practice, edited by Christoph Lüthy, Paul J.J.M. Bakker, and Claudia Swan, 227–273. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Mehl, Édouard. “Descartes a-t-il critiqué les lois de Kepler?” In Kepler: La Physique céleste. Autour de l’Astronomia Nova (1609), edited by Édouard Mehl, 231–259. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011. Mehl, Édouard. “Kepler’s Second Copernican Campaign: The Search for an Annual Stellar Parallax after the Roman Decree (1616).” In Copernicus Banned: The Entangled Matter of the Anti-Copernican Decree of 1616, edited by Natacha Fabbri and Federica Favino, 191–209. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2018. Mehl, Édouard. “L’Essai sur Robert Fludd (1630),” Libertinage et philosophie au XVIIe siècle 4 (2000): 85–119. Mehl, Édouard. “Malebranche et les lois de Kepler.” In Nouvelles recherches sur La Recherche de la Vérité, edited by Jean-Christophe Bardout, Vincent Carraud, and Denis Moreau, 279–300. Paris: Vrin, 2020. Mehl, Édouard. “Optics, Astronomy, and Natural Philosophy: Beeckman, Descartes, Kepler and the Dutch Connection.” In Knowledge and Culture in the Early Dutch Republic. Isaac Beeckman in Context, edited by Klaas van Berkel, Albert Clement, and Arjan van Dixhoorn, 129–156. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Mehl, Édouard and Pierre Jeandillou. “Bibliothèques, Conservatoires, Observa­ toires. Nouveaux matériaux pour l’histoire de l’astronomie moderne: autour du landgraviat de Hessen-Butzbach,” La Revue de la BNU 18 (2018): 61–71. Mersenne, Marin. Questions inouyes (1634), ed. André Pessel. Paris: Fayard, 1985. Osler, Margaret J. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

192  Édouard Mehl Pantin, Isabelle. “La discussion sur les taches solaires en France: Peiresc, Sizzi, Tarde, Gassendi,” Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences 166 (2016): 353–367. Peiresc, Claude Nicolas Fabri de. Lettres de Peiresc publiées par Philippe Tamizey de Larroque, vol. IV. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1893 (abridged TL). Pizzorusso, Giovanni. “Francesco Ingoli: Knowledge and Curial Service in 17thCentury Rome.” In Copernicus Banned: The Entangled Matter of the AntiCopernican Decree of 1616, edited by Natacha Fabbri and Federica Favino, 157–189. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2018. Rheticus, Georg Joachim. Narratio prima. Wroclaw: Ossolineum, 1982. Rösche, Johannes. Robert Fludd: Der Versuch einer hermetischen Alternative zur neuzeitlichen Naturwissenschaft. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2008. Rothman, Aviva. The Pursuit of Harmony: Kepler on Cosmos, Confession, and Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Sakamoto, Kuni. “The German Hercules’s Heir: Pierre Gassendi’s Reception of Keplerian Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009): 69–91. Sassen, Ferdinand. De reis van Pierre Gassendi in de Nederlanden (1628–1629). Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1960. Schickard, Wilhelm. Briefwechsel, ed. F. Seck, 2 vols. Stuttgart: Frommann Verlag, 2002. Schickard, Wilhelm. Pars responsi ad epistolas P. Gassendi de Mercurio sub Sole viso. Tubingae: Typis Theodorici Werlini, 1632. Taussig, Sylvie. “Gassendi contre Fludd: des choses occultes aux choses inconnues.” In Gassendi et la modernité, edited by Sylvie Taussig, 215–258. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Taussig, Sylvie. “L’examen de la Philosophie de Robert Fludd par ses hors-texte,” Bruniana & Campanelliana XV (2009): 247–340. Van Helden, Albert. Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1985. Villiers, sieur de Chandoux, Nicolas de. Commentaire sur l’amphithéâtre de la Sagesse éternelle de Khunrath, ed. Sylvain Matton. Paris: S.É.H.A., 2013. Yates, Frances A. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London–Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972, 1978, 1986.

7 Gassendi’s Critique of Descartes Antonia LoLordo

7.1 Introduction When Gassendi wrote his Objections to Descartes’ Meditations, he had no reason to think that he was writing the work for which he would be chiefly remembered almost 400 years later. By the time of writing—1641— Gassendi had already developed a substantial reputation as an astronomer and scholar. He had published a number of well-received works, including two astronomical treatises and the Exercitationes, an attack on Aristotelian logic and metaphysics. Descartes, four years his junior, had a reputation more as a mathematician than a philosopher, and indeed Gassendi knew him mainly for his Geometry.1 Gassendi and Descartes had quite a lot in common—to the extent that one might have expected them to have been on good terms. They were both members of the Mersenne circle; indeed, it was at Mersenne’s suggestion that Gassendi undertook to write a set of Objections. Both Gassendi and Descartes (like Mersenne himself) were great admirers of the Galilean sciences of matter and motion. They were both committed to overthrowing the reigning scholastic orthodoxy with something new, although they did not share a vision of what that something new should be. They were familiar with each other’s work, and just as Gassendi admired Descartes’ mathematics, Descartes admired Gassendi’s astronomy: in a letter of January 1630, he wrote to Mersenne that he knew of none other’s observations in which he could have greater confidence.2 Thus, one might have expected that the exchange between Descartes and Gassendi would have been relatively cordial. But this was not the case. The tone of Gassendi’s Objections is unsympathetic. Gassendi pokes fun at the meditator’s description of himself as “in a strict sense only a thing that thinks,”3 and throughout the Objections he prefixes his direct addresses to Descartes with “O Mind.”4 Descartes’ Replies are, in turn, hostile. Descartes complains that Gassendi “seem[s] to misunderstand completely what the use of rational argument involves”5 and “employ[s] rhetorical tricks rather than reasoning.”6 Turning the tables, he calls Gassendi “O Flesh,”7 claiming that his mind is “so immersed in the senses DOI: 10.4324/9781315521732-10

194  Antonia LoLordo that [it shrinks] from all metaphysical thoughts.”8 He asked Mersenne to publish the Objections and Replies before Gassendi saw the latter, believing the Fifth Set of Objections to “contain so little good argument that I doubt if he will want to allow them to be printed, once he has seen my reply.”9 Gassendi was so infuriated by what he saw as the dismissive tone of Descartes’ Replies that he wrote an entire book in response, the 140-folio page Disquisitio metaphysica (written at the end of 1641, but not published until 1644). There, he expresses his disappointment that a skilled mathematician like Descartes “paraded such spurious arguments as demonstrations.”10 He clearly felt that Descartes had failed to see the force of his objections. In the Disquisitio, he devotes a great deal of time— often more than really seems necessary—to explaining exactly how Descartes has failed to respond to various points. At the same time, however, he expands significantly upon his original Objections and sometimes goes well beyond them. Descartes apparently did not think much of the Disquisitio, and he did not offer a direct reply. When the first French edition of the Meditations, Objections, and Replies was published in 1647, Descartes asked that Gassendi’s Objections be left out. To take their place, he wrote a brief note “Avertissement de l’auteur touchant les cinquièmes objections,” wherein he explained that he had read the Disquisitio and Objections together, and had “not been able to discover a single objection which those who have some slight understanding of my Meditations will not, in my view, be able to answer quite easily without any help from me.”11 Claude Clerselier, who handled the publication, did not do quite what Descartes had requested: he published the “Avertissement” in place of the Fifth Set of Objections and Replies, but then included the same set as an appendix anyway. They were followed by Descartes’ Letter to Clerselier in which Descartes replied to the main points of the Disquisitio (which he had asked his friends to summarize for him). The exchange stops here, as although Gassendi surely knew of the letter, he did not respond publicly. However, it is said that the two were reconciled in 1647 or 1648, at a Paris dinner party or shortly thereafter.12 Why did things go wrong between the two men? It seems unlikely that the root cause was some personal animosity. As far as we know, Descartes and Gassendi were on good terms when Mersenne asked Gassendi to write his Objections. And although Descartes often had problems getting along with people, Gassendi did not. He maintained close ties with a large intellectual network throughout his life; despite what could easily have been seen as heterodox views, he had increasingly powerful patrons and avoided any significant trouble with religious authorities. The root of the disagreement, it seems, must have been purely philosophical. The Objections and Disquisitio touch on virtually all the main points of the Meditations, but there is one issue that Gassendi returns to again

Gassendi’s Critique of Descartes  195 and again, and which undergirds most of his other objections.13 This issue is proper 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 on the basis of interrogating 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. Thus, Descartes is trapped in “the prison of [his] intellect,” unable to connect with “the theater of nature.”14 From Descartes’ point of view, Gassendi had simply failed to grasp the overarching point of the Meditations, namely that we must begin the search for truth by withdrawing from the senses and focusing on the intellect and its innate ideas. In some places in the Replies, it looks as though he thinks Gassendi is willfully refusing to see the point. In others, he seems to attribute Gassendi’s failure to understand the Meditations to sheer stupidity. Ultimately, the exchange did not bring out the best in either philosopher.

7.2 Clear and Distinct Perception The Fifth Set of Objections opens with apparently modest intentions. Gassendi tells us that his aim is not to refute Descartes but “simply to uncover the reasons that gave rise to [his] doubts” about Descartes’ arguments, and that his misgivings “do not concern the actual results which [Descartes has] undertaken to prove, but merely the method and validity of the proof.”15 The results Gassendi has in mind are the advertised conclusions of the Meditations, the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. Gassendi disagreed with a number of Descartes’ substantive conclusions as well, including his verdict about the nature of the mind, the distinction between intellect and imagination, the structure of space, and the nature of life.16 However, throughout the Fifth Set of Objections and the Disquisitio, Gassendi plays devil’s advocate, objecting even to arguments whose conclusions he ultimately accepts and insisting on objections he dismisses elsewhere. For instance, he argues that Descartes is not entitled to assert that the essence of the mind is thought, proposing instead a chemical investigation to discover the essence of the mind.17 But this is not the procedure he himself uses elsewhere, nor is he the sort of materialist this recommendation might suggest. One focus of Gassendi’s methodological critique is what has come to be called the truth rule, the principle according to which the perceiver can say everything I clearly and distinctly perceive is true. In the later Syntagma philosophicum, Gassendi outlines a history of logic, broadly understood. There he describes the Meditations as Descartes’ logic and asserts that the truth rule is Descartes’ main principle of logic.18 He sees Descartes’ commitment to the truth rule as deriving in large part from his theory of the human cognitive faculties. Thus, his attack on the truth

196  Antonia LoLordo rule turns out to be an attack on virtually all aspects of Descartes’ theory of cognition. To assess the truth rule, we first need to understand what clear and distinct perception amounts to exactly. What, Gassendi asks, is required for a perception to count as clear and distinct? Are clarity and distinctness their own mark, that is, sufficient measures of themselves? In other words, is it impossible to be wrong about whether you are perceiving something clearly and distinctly? Or can there be perceptions that are only apparently clear and distinct? Gassendi argues that whichever answer Descartes adopts, he faces insuperable difficulties. Suppose that there is a distinction between genuinely clear and distinct perceptions and those that merely appear clear and distinct. If so, we need an account of how we can determine which, if any, of our apparently clear and distinct perceptions are genuinely clear and distinct: What you should be working on is not so much confirming this rule, which makes it so easy for us to take the false for the true, but instead proposing a method to guide us and teach us when we are mistaken and when not, in the cases where we think we clearly and distinctly perceive something.19 According to Gassendi, Descartes’ failure to give any such account renders his method all but useless. Although we are guaranteed that whatever we perceive clearly and distinctly is true, we cannot be certain whether we are genuinely perceiving something clearly and distinctly, or merely seeming to do so. So, the truth rule cannot help us. Suppose, on the other hand, that clarity and distinctness are their own mark. In other words, suppose that we do not need a criterion to tell us whether an apparently clear and distinct perception is genuinely clear and distinct, because it is impossible to be mistaken about whether you are perceiving clearly and distinctly. If this is Descartes’ view, Gassendi argues, then it cannot be the case that all clear and distinct perceptions are true. For different people—all of whom are honest, all of whom have thought about the matter carefully—report that they perceive different, incompatible things clearly and distinctly.20 Gassendi recognizes that someone might doubt the veracity of such reports, but he thinks such doubts can be dismissed. If clarity and distinctness are their own mark, then the only way people could falsely report a clear and distinct perception is if they are simply lying. However, there are cases where the possibility of lying can be ruled out: “the fact that men go to meet death for the sake of some opinion seems to be a perspicuous argument that they perceive it clearly and distinctly.”21 Moreover, you do not need to listen to other people’s reports of their perceptions to find conflicts: you can just recall your own experiences.

Gassendi’s Critique of Descartes  197 As a youth, Gassendi explains, he clearly and distinctly perceived that two lines continually approaching each other more closely must meet. Later he learned about asymptotes and came to perceive, with equal clarity and distinctness, that they need not meet. Still later, after considering the nature of mathematical propositions and adopting a form of skepticism about mathematics, he abandoned that belief.22 Hence Descartes cannot maintain that all clear and distinct perceptions are true and deny that we need a mark or criterion by which to determine if a perception is genuinely clear and distinct. It’s important to be clear about the work that disagreement is doing here. When Gassendi reports disagreement between his own apparently clear and distinct perceptions at different times, or between the apparently clear and distinct perceptions of different individuals, he is following the pattern of the Ten Modes, ancient skeptical tropes whereby one could come to see the existence of equally strong evidence on both sides of a question and then suspend judgment.23 The Ten Modes always involve actual disagreement, either between two perceivers at the same time or between the perceptions of the same perceiver in different circumstances or at different times. The honey tastes sweet to me but bitter to you, the tower looks square from close up but round from a distance, and so on. In the face of such disagreement, we have no reason to prefer one side over the other. As a result, we suspend judgment. This is not a normative claim, but simply a report on how human beings behave in the face of conflicting, and equally strong, evidence. Descartes was impatient with this line of objection, replying You say […] that what we should be working on is not so much a rule to establish the truth as a method for determining whether or not we are deceived when we think we perceive something clearly […] I maintain that I carefully provided such a method in the appropriate place, where I first eliminated all preconceived opinions and afterwards listed all my principal ideas, distinguishing those which were clear from those which were obscure or confused.24 Those who have not properly meditated and freed their minds of preconceived opinions cannot tell, just by introspection, whether their perceptions are clear and distinct.25 But this is irrelevant, because Descartes proposes the truth rule as something for use specifically by the meditator. Hence, it’s enough for someone to have properly meditated. The need for a criterion for clarity and distinctness is thereby removed, and the examples Gassendi has provided of conflict among clear and distinct perceptions are irrelevant. Gassendi’s response is straightforward: it is impossible to free your mind of preconceived opinions using the tools Descartes has provided, namely, the three skeptical hypotheses of the first Meditation.

198  Antonia LoLordo

7.3 Skepticism and the Reasons for Doubt Outlined in the First Meditation Gassendi sees the skeptical hypotheses outlined in the first Meditation as operating very differently from the Ten Modes. Only the deceiving senses argument, the first and weakest level of doubt in the first Meditation, involves actual disagreement. You may consider the possibility that you are asleep and dreaming as much as you like, but it will still always seem to you as though you are awake, sitting in front of your fire. More generally, Gassendi argues, There are some preconceived opinions that can be changed and some that cannot […] because every judgment refers to some object as it appears to the mind, if the object always appears the same way—as the sun always appears round and shining, or as the meeting of two straight lines always appears to form two right angles or two angles equal to two right angles—then we always make the same judgment.26 It doesn’t matter whether you can rule out the possibility that you are being deceived by an evil demon: still, if it always appears to you that the meeting of two straight lines forms two angles equal to two right angles, you will believe accordingly. Thus, Descartes’ skeptical hypotheses can at best give rise to a “merely verbal” doubt.27 Two things are worth noting here. First, Gassendi is not making a normative claim. His claim is not that the evil demon argument shouldn’t make us suspend judgment: it is rather that, as a matter of fact, it doesn’t. Gassendi’s main reason for thinking this is experiential: he himself has tried to meditate and clear his mind of all preconceived opinions by considering the possibility of an evil demon intent on deceiving him, but he has not succeeded in doing so. Moreover, he also uses his theory of cognition to explain why this is impossible: due to the way judgments are stored in the memory, “judgments already made persist so strongly by habit […] that it is not in our power to avoid or erase them at will.”28 Secondly, Gassendi assumes that the first Meditation’s skeptical hypotheses are intended to make us actually renounce our belief—that when we suspend judgment we are not just postponing a belief temporarily, but actually ceasing to have it. For unless we actually cease to have the beliefs acquired through the senses, we cannot tell whether some of our intellectual beliefs still depend upon them. Gassendi contends that if Descartes’ method for clearing the mind of all preconceived opinions were in fact successful, it would make us abandon not only all the beliefs we’ve acquired through the use of the senses but also all the ideas we’ve acquired through the use of the senses: we cannot do the former unless we also do the latter. As long as you retain

Gassendi’s Critique of Descartes  199 the idea of a triangle, for instance, it will not be possible to give up the belief that triangles have three sides. Gassendi thinks his theory of cognition, in which judgment is an act of the intellect rather than the will, can explain why it is impossible to give up the belief that triangles have three sides. But in claiming that we cannot doubt what Descartes wants us to doubt using his method, Gassendi is not relying on this theory of cognition. Rather, his justification for thinking that Descartes’ skeptical hypotheses do not make it possible for us to doubt that triangles have three sides is simply that they haven’t worked for him. Thus, he concludes that Descartes’ method is not effective. Gassendi provides a diagnosis of why Descartes goes so wrong in his use of skepticism. His claim is that Descartes has simply failed to understand one of the crucial distinctions of the ancient Pyrrhonists—the distinction [...] between ta phainomena, ‘the things which appear to the senses,’ like the heat of fire, the sweetness of honey, and others; and ta noumena, ‘the things which are understood by the mind,’ like […] internal and proximate natures and causes, and the properties of those same things. And then, although they considered the latter kind of things uncertain, they still allowed the first kind except when their state of mind made it pleasant to take on the insolence of the dogmatists.29 Gassendi devotes so much time and text to explaining how Descartes deviates from ancient skepticism that it can be hard for twenty-first century readers to see the point. Descartes is not trying to do what the ancient skeptics did. He is articulating a new kind of skeptical argument and using it for new purposes. So, the fact that what he is doing is not historically accurate seems somewhat irrelevant to today’s reader. Gassendi is issuing a humanist complaint against someone who is careless with valuable ancient texts and ideas—and this he regards as important—but that is not all he’s doing. He is also concerned to show that Descartes’ failure to grasp the workings of ancient skepticism leads him to propose ineffective arguments. Had Descartes understood that skepticism relies on actual disagreement, he would not have tried to animate his system with rhetorical ruses like “imagining a deceiving God or some evil demon who tricks us.”30

7.4 Innate Ideas and the Eternal Truths Throughout the Disquisitio, Gassendi presents Descartes’ arguments in syllogistic form. This is not merely an attempt to uncover their hidden assumptions, but an overt rejection of the Cartesian notion of intuition. For Gassendi argues elsewhere that all reasoning is necessarily discursive:

200  Antonia LoLordo [W]hen someone says, e.g., every animal senses, therefore man senses, he infers the conclusion for no other reason than that he also understands that man is an animal […] if this did not happen, there would not even be an imperfect syllogism but a random inference, as if anything at all followed from anything else, e.g. as if one said, the moon is in the sky, therefore man senses.31 He recognizes, of course, that we aren’t always conscious of thinking in syllogistic form, indeed that we are seldom conscious of such patterns of thinking. However, he insists that this is just because the premises and inferences involved are so familiar that they pass by quickly, without our attending to them. Thus, Gassendi parodies Descartes’ attempt to isolate the innate ideas of the intellect: He who, having previously known things, considers himself in a state of ignorance as a result of his pursuit of the divestment of ideas, readily recognizes innate ideas, i.e. those which we would have in a state of ignorance. Now I, having previously known things, consider myself in a state of ignorance as a result of my pursuit of the divestment of ideas. Therefore I readily recognize innate ideas, i.e. those which I would have in a state of ignorance.32 The problem with this argument, according to Gassendi, is that the major premise is just plain false. Only if you are genuinely in a state of ignorance—that is, only if you have actually given up all the ideas acquired through the senses—will you have an infallible way of telling whether an idea is innate. This shows us a second unfortunate consequence of the failure of Descartes’ method for clearing the mind of all preconceived opinions: it fails to give us a way to tell which, if any, of our ideas are genuinely innate. Gassendi’s attack on innate ideas goes alongside his attack on the true and immutable natures he takes them to represent, and the eternal truths that flow from those true and immutable natures. Like many readers, Gassendi objects to Descartes’ claim that the eternal truths are divinely created.33 But for him this is a minor issue. Much more problematic is the way Descartes “speciously and Platonically” insists that there are eternal truths in the first place.34 A robust commitment to eternal truths runs parallel with a commitment to true and immutable natures.35 If it is an eternal truth that triangles have three sides, there must be something that makes it true. And what can that something be? For Gassendi, the answer is only the true and immutable nature of the triangle. If there are eternal truths there must be true and immutable natures. It works the other way around too: if there are true and immutable natures, there must be eternal truths. The

Gassendi’s Critique of Descartes  201 eternal truth that triangles have three sides thus emerges out of the true and immutable nature of a triangle. Descartes denies, as faith demands, that “the essences of things, and the mathematical truths which we can know concerning them, are independent of God.”36 But he maintains “that they are immutable and eternal, since the will and decree of God willed and decreed that they should be so.”37 According to Gassendi’s view, Descartes is contradicting himself here. If true and immutable natures or eternal truths depend on God, then God could change them, and God could have created different ones—in which case they cannot be either immutable or necessary. Nor can they be eternal since what is created is created in time. So, there cannot be true and immutable natures that depend on God. And since it’s clearly not acceptable to say that true and immutable natures are independent of God, there is only one way out: [I]t seems better to recognize that there is nothing beyond God the thrice great except that which is created by him, that which exists, that which is particular, and to think that things which have not yet been created and do not exist but are merely possible, have no reality or truth. Or, if they are thought to have some reality and truth, it should be understood as future reality and truth. And so it is not so much that they actually have reality (since they do not exist and hence do not have anything) as that they will have reality at some time (since they will exist at some time).38 Thus, there are no true and immutable natures and no eternal truths.39 Gassendi sees here also further reason to doubt that there are any innate ideas. The main role of innate ideas in Descartes’ system is to represent true and immutable natures; if there are no such natures, there is no real work for innate ideas to do.

7.5 The Immaterial Intellect So far, we’ve seen two problems with Descartes’ distinction between intellect and imagination. First, Gassendi argues that Descartes has no way to determine which of his ideas are innate and hence no reason to believe that there are any innate ideas. If this is right, then there is no content built into the intellect for it to think with. This does not preclude the existence of an intellect, but it does rather diminish the role it could play. Secondly, Gassendi argues, there are no true and immutable natures, and so there are no special objects for the intellect to cognize. Again, this diminishes the role of the intellect without showing that it does not exist. Gassendi’s third reason for doubting Descartes’ distinction between intellect and imagination is more straightforward: the chiliagon argument, by which Descartes purports to establish the existence of an

202  Antonia LoLordo intellect that is distinct from the imagination is, for Gassendi, a failed argument. Reference to the chiliagon establishes only that there is a difference in degree—not the difference in kind that Descartes needs: It does not follow from this that you have reason to add more than one kind of internal cognition. It is only accidental and a matter of degree whether you contemplate a certain figure distinctly or confusedly, intently or absent-mindedly. And indeed, when we attempt to run through the heptagon, octagon, and other figures all the way up to the chiliagon or miriagon, and always continually attend to the distinctness or lack thereof, we will not be able to say where, or with what figure, imagination stops and only intellect remains.40 Instead, Gassendi suggests an alternative technique that may actually have a chance of establishing that intellect and imagination are two distinct faculties: If, after brain damage or some injury to the imaginative faculty, the intellect remained as before, performing its proper functions all unimpaired, then we could say that the intellect was as distinct from the imagination as the imagination is distinct from the external senses. But since this doesn’t happen, there is surely no ready way of establishing the distinction.41 Gassendi is suggesting an alternate methodology, one far more dependent on experience of the world. Descartes, unsurprisingly, was unwilling to engage with the suggestion, replying merely that “[t]he things you say here, O best of Flesh, seem to me to amount to grumblings more than objections, and so they require no answer.”42

7.6 The Cogito, the Essence of Mind, and the Essence of Body Gassendi articulates three separate objections to the cogito argument. Firstly, he complains that nobody who actually doubted everything, as the first Meditation demands, would be capable of arriving at the conclusions the meditator claims to reach. If, per impossibile, you had put aside all the beliefs and ideas acquired through the senses, you would have no store of concepts left to work with. A person in such a situation could make no progress: unable to advance beyond simply repeating to themselves, “I, I, I […].”43 Second, Gassendi regards the cogito as trivial: [W]hen I got to this passage in which I hoped to find a truth which had not been heard before now and which was the source of all truths […] I said, good God, is that the new thing which had to be searched for with so much apparatus and effort, that you exist!44

Gassendi’s Critique of Descartes  203 Gassendi’s third argument is that the cogito fails to establish anything about the nature of the mind. This is the reason for his regarding it as trivial. Gassendi reads the sixth Meditation’s real distinction argument as relying on premises about the natures of mind and body, the essence of the mind having allegedly been established via the cogito and what follows.45 However, Gassendi contends that the cogito doesn’t succeed in showing us anything about the nature of the mind. When Descartes tells us that the mind is a thinking thing, he has said something that is true, but that has no real explanatory value. He has simply identified a power of the mind without discovering the underlying, categorical features by virtue of which it has that power. Again, Gassendi suggests an alternative methodology: Since you are looking for knowledge of yourself which is superior to common knowledge […] it is certainly not enough for you to announce that you are a thing that thinks and doubts and understands, etc. You should carefully scrutinize yourself and conduct something like a chemical investigation of yourself, if you are to succeed in uncovering and explaining to us your internal substance.46 The problem is that “knowledge of the existence of a thing has no necessary connection with knowledge of its essence,” for if it did, “we would know the nature, essence, and inner depths of anything […] whose existence we knew of in any way at all.”47 Descartes’ method cannot be right, for it makes knowledge of essences easy to acquire when any plausible theory would recognize the difficulty involved in the acquisition of such knowledge: If this method of philosophizing of yours was appropriate, what […] nature […] would then remain hidden? And if anyone took pains to explore or investigate the nature of the magnet, wouldn’t he be absurd, since he should think himself satisfied with this little formula of yours, that the whole nature of the magnet consists in the fact that it attracts iron and points toward the poles?48 That magnets attract iron and point toward the poles is how we distinguish them; it’s something like their Lockean nominal essence. More broadly, we categorize things in terms of the surface features we grasp through the senses. But the genuine essence of the magnet is that feature by virtue of which it has the power to attract iron, its inner corpuscularian structure. We do not know the inner corpuscularian structure of the magnet or anything else and hence, according to Gassendi’s view, we do not have knowledge of the essence of the magnet or any other body. Thus, Gassendi and Descartes conceive of the order of knowledge in opposing ways. For Descartes, knowledge of existence follows knowledge

204  Antonia LoLordo of essence. For Gassendi, knowledge of existence must come first. Knowing that a thing exists can be had just by looking at it. When you perceive a collection of accidents you thereby “conceive that there is something that is the subject of the accidents” and thus come to know that a certain thing exists.49 Knowledge of essence or underlying substance is more difficult to acquire, since it “requires a certain complete internal examination”; so, “essence does not become known except by bringing to light every inner depth.”50 That the cogito fails to show us the essence of the mind is not, then, an isolated problem. Gassendi argues that Descartes’ general methodology cannot show us the essence of any actual thing—only what our ideas represent as the essence. The wax argument, for instance, fails because we have no grasp at all on what the wax is, once we subtract the characteristics we know through the senses: Besides the color, the shape, the fact that it can melt, etc. we conceive that there is something that is the subject of the accidents and changes we observe, but what this subject is, or what its nature is, we do not know. This always eludes us, and it is only a kind of conjecture that leads us to think that there must be something underneath the accidents. So I am amazed at how you can say that once the forms have been stripped off like clothes, you perceive more perfectly and evidently what the wax is. Admittedly, you perceive that the wax or its substance must be something over and above such forms, but what this something is you do not perceive.51 All that Descartes has really shown is that it is part of our idea of wax that it can melt, change colors, etc. He has not shown how it is possible for the wax to do all these things. In other words, he has not shown us the inner corpuscularian structure that gives rise to such powers. The problem is general: he has not “tried to make clear the nature of material things or their powers, properties, and actions through the size, shape, motion, position,” etc. of the atoms from which material things are composed.52 Therefore, he has not shown us the essence of any body. Gassendi seems to take the wax argument as the main way Descartes sought to establish that the essence of body is extension. But what, you might ask, about the fifth Meditation argument concerning the essence of material things? Gassendi is quick to dismiss it, exclaiming, “that all material things are provided with quantity […] shape […] motion and rest [etc.] […] even barbers and the dim-sighted know.”53 This case is parallel to the cogito: to Gassendi, the claims that the essence of mind is thought, and that the essence of body is extension, parade trivial truths as though they were great philosophical discoveries; no one learns anything significant when they learn that material objects are extended. Does Gassendi simply fail to see the role that Descartes’ claim plays in the project of mathematizing nature? Does he simply fail to see that

Gassendi’s Critique of Descartes  205 Descartes is trying to prove that we should do physics by doing math? It would be more accurate to say that Gassendi—despite his great admiration for Galileo and his own excursions into a roughly Galilean science of motion54—finds the claim impossible to take seriously. He insists that “material things are the subject-matter of applied, not pure, mathematics”55 and that mathematical points, lines, and surfaces do not exist in reality.56 He recognizes that Descartes claims that mathematical points, etc. exist as the boundaries of material things but, according to his view, this is irrelevant: boundaries themselves are mental abstractions. This objection plays a surprisingly small role in the Fifth Set of Objections and Disquisitio. However, Descartes picks up on it in his Letter to Clerselier, where he characterizes it as follows: “mathematical extension […] is nothing other than my thought, and hence […] cannot have any subsistence outside my mind, being merely an abstraction which I form from physical bodies.”57 Descartes’ response to this “objection of objections” is scathing: “it follows from this that nothing we can in any way understand, conceive, or imagine should be accepted as true” and so “we must entirely close the door to reason and content ourselves with being monkeys or parrots rather than men.”58 From Gassendi’s point of view, this reply misses the mark. For one thing, it doesn’t address one of the main questions he identifies, namely, whether there are any onedimensional lines in nature. Worse, it misrepresents the objection. Gassendi is not saying that nothing we can conceive is true. What he is saying, rather, is that the mere fact that we can conceive something is no evidence of its truth.

7.7 The Real Distinction Argument If Descartes has not discovered the nature of body, then he cannot have shown that thought is inconsistent with the nature of body, or that extension is inconsistent with the nature of mind.59 Thus he cannot have the sort of clear and distinct perception of mind and body upon which the real distinction argument relies. This is Gassendi’s central objection to the real distinction argument. However, he also identifies several other problems with Descartes’ argument. One is a version of an objection made by Arnauld.60 We can conceive of a triangle whose largest angle subtends its longest side without conceiving of a triangle whose internal angles add up to 180 degrees, and vice versa. Nevertheless, no triangle can have one property without the other.61 Gassendi recognizes that Descartes will find the objection less than compelling, since the mind-body case concerns substances rather than properties. However, he thinks, Descartes is making life too easy for himself by asking whether two complete substances are separable; he should ask instead whether two things that are conceived of separately are thereby guaranteed to be two complete substances.62

206  Antonia LoLordo A second problem is that if the real distinction argument succeeded, it would show that the mind could exist without this particular body, but not that the mind could exist without any body. This is because it leaves open the possibility that the mind is a body in its own right, for instance, a very fine, spiritual body intermixed with the coarser matter of the visible body.63 This conception of the mind is Hellenistic in origin, but as Gassendi points out, it cannot be dismissed as incompatible with faith since it was held by some of the Church Fathers.64 Third, Gassendi argues that Descartes’ efforts to show that mind and body are distinct do not fulfill their intended purpose. Showing that the mind or soul is a substance distinct from body would not guarantee what Descartes ultimately wants to establish, namely that the soul is immortal. Gassendi points out that many people hold that the souls of animals are distinct from their bodies—but nobody infers from this that the souls of animals are immortal.65 Gassendi notes that this is a complaint that has also been made by Arnauld, and should be one, therefore, that Descartes would be willing to take seriously.66 Finally, Gassendi argues that if we follow Descartes in holding that mind and body are distinct substances, this raises two explanatory problems that Descartes’ theory has no resources to solve. Gassendi recognizes that according to Descartes’ theory, human bodies, like other extended things, act by contact alone. But if human minds are essentially thinking and unextended, then bodies cannot come into contact with minds, and hence bodies cannot have any effect on minds. A second problem concerns mental representation. If human minds are simple and unextended, then it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand how they can represent composite things such as bodies: [H]ow […] do you think that […] an unextended thing could receive the semblance or idea of a body that is extended? […] [I]f it lacks parts, how will it manage to represent parts? If it lacks extension, how will it represent an extended thing? […] If it lacks all variation, how will it represent various colors and so on?67 Descartes’ response is brief, but very striking. In the Letter to Clerselier, he says that these two “questions presuppose amongst other things an explanation of the union between the soul and the body, which I have not yet dealt with at all.”68

7.8 God and the Cartesian Circle Gassendi reads the Meditations as containing three distinct arguments for the existence of God: the third Meditation’s version of the cosmological argument, the third Meditation’s argument for the distinctness of the parts of time, and the fifth Meditation’s version of the ontological

Gassendi’s Critique of Descartes  207 argument. Gassendi grants that all three of these arguments are original, but he nevertheless regards all three as failures, and wonders why Descar­ tes has “departed from the open and level royal road that leads to the knowledge of God’s existence,” namely, the standard version of the cosmological argument.69 According to Gassendi’s view, although the three arguments are very different, they share one common feature. They all require the meditator to have a clear and distinct perception of God—that is, to have a positive idea of the infinite.70 Gassendi’s objection, in each of the three cases, is that we lack the sort of idea of God that Descartes’ argument requires. Of course, he does not intend to deny that we have any idea of God, although he thinks there are some atheists who do lack any idea of God. We can think of God by thinking of something with all human perfections, and then augmenting that idea as much as we can. But such an idea cannot capture infinity and hence it cannot represent God “as he is.”71 (CSM II, 200/AT VII, 287/OO III, 323b). Here Gassendi is making what he sees as the commonplace theological point that our finite intellects cannot fully grasp God. Gassendi develops this argument at length in the Disquisitio, and it is one of the few points that Descartes responds to in his Letter to Clerselier. The response is that we cannot possibly deny having some idea of God unless we are willing to say that we simply don’t understand the phrase ‘the most perfect thing we can conceive’ (CSM II, 273/AT IXA, 209). Moreover, here as earlier, he accuses Gassendi of misunderstanding what it is to have an idea: “you are restricting the term ‘idea’ to images depicted in the corporeal imagination; but this goes against my explicit assumption.” In fact, Gassendi is not relying on the assumption that ideas are images, at least if his characterization of his own view is accurate. He explains that when he speaks of ideas as images, it is in the same sense that Descartes says that some of his ideas are, as it were, images of things—he means that they are similitudines, representations, of things. Thus, he extends the term to any representations we experience within ourselves. So, by denying that we have a positive idea of the infinite, Gassendi is not denying that we have any way to think of it. He is just trying to explain the sense in which we can think of the infinite (or the hidden substance underlying the various properties of mind and body, etc.): It is one thing for us to perceive something through a true idea or image, another for us to perceive it through a necessary consequence of something that was previously supposed. For in the first case, we conceive that the thing is such, in the second that it must be some such. And in the first case we understand the thing distinctly and as it is in itself, but in the latter, we know it only confusedly and by analogy.72

208  Antonia LoLordo The second kind of perceiving—which I think of as something like a Berkeleian notion73—tells us only what role something must fulfill, not what kind of thing can fulfill that role. Hence it cannot deliver knowledge of essences or allow for clear and distinct perception. Beyond the general point that we perceive God only obscurely and confusedly, Gassendi also makes some other interesting objections to the Meditations’ various arguments for the existence of God. He argues that even if we clearly and distinctly perceived God, the third Meditation’s version of the cosmological argument would fail. The problem concerns the causal principle upon which Descartes relies, that there must be at least as much formal reality in the cause of an idea as there is objective reality in the idea itself. How could the meditator be certain of this? Descartes says it is known by the natural light—but Gassendi points out that, at this point in the Meditations, he has no right to rely on the natural light. Moreover, for Gassendi, what seems evident by the natural light is that there must be at least as much formal reality in the cause of an idea as there is formal reality in the idea.74 In which case, of course, the causal principle can do no work, for the idea of God has no more formal reality than the idea of a flea. Addressing the fifth Meditation’s version of the ontological argument, Gassendi sees it as a paradigm of Descartes’ flawed methodology— namely, the way in which he systematically conflates what his ideas represent as essential with the essences of the things they represent. Earlier, we saw Gassendi argue that the claim ‘thought is the essence of the mind’ is a mere nominal definition that tells us nothing about the essence of the mind. Similarly, he objects to the claim ‘existence is (part of) the essence of God’ inasmuch as it tells us nothing about God as he is in reality: “you did not investigate by inspecting God himself, whom you did not see as he is in se, but only in the idea of him that you thought you had in the intellect.”75 Moreover, in a line of argumentation often compared to that of Kant, Gassendi claims that Descartes misunderstands the logic of perfections or properties.76 He asks whether something can be deprived of existence (or conceived of as deprived of existence) and still remain some sort of thing (or still be conceived of as some sort of thing).77 The answer is obviously no, and Gassendi thereby concludes that existence is a precondition for having properties or perfections in the first place. As we have seen, all three of Descartes’ arguments for the existence of God require the meditator to have a clear and distinct perception of God. Gassendi objects that we lack any such perception. He also objects, repeatedly, that for Descartes to rely on clear and distinct perception (or the natural light) involves the Meditations in something akin to a vicious circle: “you are certain that God exists and is not a deceiver because you have clear and distinct perception of him, and you are certain that clear and distinct perception is true because you know that there is a God who cannot be a deceiver.”78 This—as Descartes notes, in lieu of explaining

Gassendi’s Critique of Descartes  209 why there is no circle79—is a point also made in earlier Objections, including those of Arnauld.80 Gassendi, like Arnauld, discusses the Cartesian Circle relatively briefly, without the sort of fanfare that later readers tend to think it requires. Arnauld may downplay the objection because he is generally sympathetic to Descartes’ project; perhaps he sees it as a mere slip and not a fatal flaw. In contrast, Gassendi downplays the problem of the Cartesian Circle because he sees it as just one more example of Descartes’ bankrupt methodology. It’s not just that Descartes has no way to argue for the truth of clear and distinct perception without begging the question. It’s worse: in Gassendi’s judgment, Descartes has no way of even identifying a consistent set of clear and distinct perceptions to begin with.

Notes 1 OO III, 275b. 2 CSM III, 18; AT I, 113. 3 CSM II 18; AT VII 27. 4 CSM II, 185; AT VII, 265; OO III, 298a. 5 CSM II, 245; AT VII, 354. 6 CSM II, 243; AT VII, 350. 7 CSM II, 244; AT VII, 352. 8 CSM II, 241; AT VII, 348. 9 Letter of 23 June 1641: CSM III, 184; AT III, 384. 10 OO III, 275b. 11 CSM II, 269; AT IXA, 199. 12 Joseph Bougerel, Vie de Pierre Gassendi (Paris: Imprimerie de Jacques Vincent, 1737), book V, 306–308. The accuracy of Bougerel’s account has been disputed. 13 There are some exceptions, such as Gassendi’s concerns about the relation between will and intellect, and his insistence on the role of final causes within physics. Although these are interesting, they are beyond the scope of this chapter, which instead concentrates on the main line of argument. 14 OO III, 382a. In La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 121, Bloch concurs that this is the heart of the debate; see also idem, “Gassendi critique de Descartes,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 156 (1966): 217–236. Fisher holds the closely related view that the debate is essentially over epistemology; see Saul Fisher, “Pierre Gassendi,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/spr2014/entries/gassendi, section 3 (no pagination). For a dissenting view, in which the debate is primarily about nominalism and voluntarism, see Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and eadem, “Divine Will and Mathematical Truth: Gassendi and Descartes on the Status of Eternal Truths,” in Descartes and His Contemporaries: Meditations, Objections, and Replies, eds. Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 145–158. 15 AT VII, 257; CSM II, 179; OO III, 273b. 16 See Bellis’ and Duchesneau’s chapters in this volume.

210  Antonia LoLordo 7 CSM II, 193; AT VII, 276–227; OO III, 311a. 1 18 OO I, 65b. For more on this, see Antonia LoLordo, “‘Descartes’ One Rule of Logic’: Gassendi’s Critique of Clear and Distinct Perception,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 13.1 (2005): 51–72 and Bernard Rochot, “Gassendi et la ‘logique’ de Descartes,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 141 (1951): 288–298. 19 AT VII, 279; CSM II, 194–195; OO III, 315a. 20 AT VII, 277; CSM II, 193; OO III, 315a. 21 OO III, 317a. 22 AT VII, 278; CSM II, 194; OO III, 314b–315a. 23 Gassendi’s knowledge of ancient skepticism derives from a number of sources, but the two most important are Book IX of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers (the life of Pyrrho) and Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Skepticism (OO III, 99–100). Gassendi’s main interest is in the Ten Modes: he finds the Two Modes largely uninteresting and ineffective, for reasons similar to those according to which he adjudged the first Meditation’s skeptical hypotheses to be ineffective. See OO I, 75b. For more on Gassendi’s relationship with ancient skepticism, see Stewart Duncan and Antonia LoLordo, “Hobbes and Gassendi on Knowledge,” in Knowledge in Early Modern Philosophy: The Philosophy of Knowledge: A History. Volume III, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 27–44; Fisher, “Pierre Gassendi,” section 3; Antonia LoLordo, “Gassendi on Skepticism,” in Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present, eds. Diego Machuca and Baron Reed (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 295–305; and Paganini’s chapter in this volume. 24 CSM II, 250; AT VII, 361–362; cf. CSM II, 260; AT VII, 379. 25 CSM II, 352; AT VII, 518. 26 OO III, 279b. 27 OO III, 280b. 28 OO III, 279a. 29 OO III, 286a. 30 CSM II, 180; AT VII, 258; OO III, 278a. 31 OO I, 112a. 32 OO III, 320a. 33 OO III, 377a. 34 OO III, 378b. 35 By robust, I mean a commitment to eternal truths understood as something more than conditionals of the form if there are human beings, they will be animals. Gassendi thinks it’s clear that Descartes’ commitment is robust because of the way discussion of eternal truths is intertwined with discussion of true and immutable natures in the fifth Meditation. 36 CSM II, 261; AT VII, 380. 37 CSM II, 261; AT VII, 380. 38 OO III, 377b. 39 Osler argues that the core of the disagreement between Descartes and Gassendi is this disagreement about whether there are eternal truths; see Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy; and eadem, “Divine Will and Mathematical Truth.” 40 CSM II, 229; AT VII, 331; OO III, 385b–386a. 41 CSM II, 186; AT VII, 266–267; OO III, 300b. 42 CSM II, 247; AT VII, 357. 43 OO III, 320a. 44 OO III, 289a. 45 OO III, 299b–300a. 46 CSM II, 193; AT VII, 276–227; OO III, 311a. 47 OO III, 290a–b.

Gassendi’s Critique of Descartes  211 8 OO III, 306a–b. 4 49 OO III, 290b. 50 OO III, 311b–312a. 51 CSM II, 189–190; AT VII, 272; OO III, 311a. 52 OO III, 377a. 53 OO III, 376b. 54 In his 1642 De motu and in the 1646 De proportione; for an account, see Carla Rita Palmerino, “Galileo’s Theories of Free Fall and Projectile Motion as Interpreted by Pierre Gassendi,” in The Reception of the Galilean Science of Motion in Seventeenth-Century Europe, eds. Carla Rita Palmerino and J.M.M.H. Thijssen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), 137–164. 55 CSM II, 228; AT VII, 329; OO III, 385a. 56 OO III, 378a. 57 CSM II, 275; AT IXA, 212. 58 Ibid. 59 CSM II, 234; AT VII, 337; OO III, 390b. 60 CSM II, 142; AT VII, 202. 61 CSM II, 232; AT VII, 334–335; OO III, 390b. 62 OO III, 395b. 63 CSM II, 235; AT VII, 339; OO III, 391a. 64 OO III, 392a–b. 65 OO III, 392b. 66 CSM II, 144; AT VII, 204. 67 CSM II, 234; AT VII, 337–338; OO III, 400b. 68 CSM II, 275; AT IXA, 213. 69 OO III, 329b. 70 On the opposition between Gassendi and Descartes concerning God’s idea, see Igor Agostini, L’idea di Dio in Descartes. Dalle Meditationes alle Responsiones (Firenze: Le Monnier, 2010). 71 CSM II, 251; AT IXA, 363–364. 72 OO III, 322b. 73 See George Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge 1.42, in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, eds. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop, 9 vols. (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1948–1957), vol. 2. 74 This is intended as another example of conflicting clear and distinct perceptions. 75 OO III, 382b. 76 For the comparison, see, for example, Fisher, “Pierre Gassendi,” section 3 (no pagination); William Forgie, “Gassendi and Kant on Existence,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.4 (2007): 511–523, at 511; and Larry Nolan and Alan Nelson, “Proofs of the Existence of God,” in The Blackwell Guide to Descartes’ Meditations, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 121. 77 OO III, 381a–b. 78 OO III, 316a. 79 CSM II, 274; AT IXA, 211. 80 CSM II, 150; AT VII, 214.

Bibliography Agostini, Igor. L’idea di Dio in Descartes. Dalle Meditationes alle Responsiones. Firenze: Le Monnier, 2010. Berkeley, George. The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, eds. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop, 9 vols. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1948–1957.

212  Antonia LoLordo Bloch, Olivier René. “Gassendi critique de Descartes,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 156 (1966): 217–236. Bloch, Olivier René. La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971. Bougerel, Joseph. Vie de Pierre Gassendi. Paris: Imprimerie de Jacques Vincent, 1737. Descartes, René. Œuvres, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 11 vols. 2nd ed. Paris: Vrin, 1996 (abridged AT). Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings, 2 vols. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1985 (abridged CSM). Duncan, Stewart and Antonia LoLordo. “Hobbes and Gassendi on Knowledge.” In Knowledge in Early Modern Philosophy: The Philosophy of Knowledge: A History. Volume III, edited by Stephen Gaukroger, 27–44. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Fisher, Saul. “Pierre Gassendi,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2014/entries/gassendi. Forgie, William. “Gassendi and Kant on Existence,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 45 (2007): 511–523. Gassendi, Pierre. Opera omnia in sex tomos divisa. Lugduni: Sumptibus Laurentii Anisson, & Ioan. Bapt. Devenet, 1658 (abridged OO). LoLordo, Antonia. “‘Descartes’ One Rule of Logic’: Gassendi’s Critique of Clear and Distinct Perception,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 13 (2005): 51–72. LoLordo, Antonia. “Gassendi on Skepticism.” In Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Diego Machuca and Baron Reed, 295–305. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Nolan, Larry and Alan Nelson. “Proofs of the Existence of God.” In The Blackwell Guide to Descartes’ Meditations, edited by Stephen Gaukroger, 104–121. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Osler, Margaret J. “Divine Will and Mathematical Truth: Gassendi and Descartes on the Status of Eternal Truths.” In Descartes and His Contemporaries: Meditations, Objections, and Replies, edited by Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene, 145–158. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Osler, Margaret J. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Palmerino, Carla Rita. “Galileo’s Theories of Free Fall and Projectile Motion as Interpreted by Pierre Gassendi.” In The Reception of the Galilean Science of Motion in Seventeenth-Century Europe, edited by Carla Rita Palmerino and J.M.M.H. Thijssen, 137–164. Dordrecht: Springer, 2004. Rochot, Bernard. “Gassendi et la ‘logique’ de Descartes,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger 141 (1951): 288–298.

Part III Gassendi’s Science and Philosophy in Context

8 Gassendi’s Logic Rodolfo Garau

8.1 Introduction In the Ad humanum lectorem dedication to his 1599 Praecognitorum logicorum, the logician Bartholomeus Keckermann claimed that the one disgrace of his time was that logic had lost its preparatory and foundational role among the new generations. For Keckermann, the cause of this had to be found in the excessive number of books on logic that were circulating at the time, such that, as he put it, “there are more dialectics in the world than owls on Athens’s three-drachma coins.”1 Keckermann’s account is confirmed by modern quantitative surveys. In his bibliographic studies, Wilhelm Risse estimated that there were around 5,000 texts on logic published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as “hundreds of disputations and manuscripts,” which represented an ‘unparalleled’ textual output on the topic.2 But if early modern logic was a flourishing discipline, the same cannot be said for the history of early modern logic. Indeed, it is quite the opposite. Despite the presence of such a massive textual corpus and the position occupied by logic in the educational system of the time, “very little work has been done on the logic of the post-medieval period,”3 with the result that this field of study is deemed “fragmentarily known,”4 and “relatively unexplored.”5 The reasons for such historiographical lacunae lie, at least in part, in the conviction that early modern philosophy was essentially ‘hostile to logic,’ and that it provided scarce, if any, original contribution to its development.6 Indeed, starting from the Renaissance, we witness a growing polemic against the sophistication of medieval logic, which culminated in a loss of consensus about the scope and aim of the discipline. To be sure, Aristotle’s logic remained very influential: it was required teaching in many regions of Europe, such as in England and Italy, and abridged versions of the Stagirite’s logical writings were an essential part of the curricula of Jesuit colleges. But the humanistic hostility toward the ‘barbarianism’ of medieval logic, as well as the Ciceronian influence mediated by Valla and other intellectuals, brought about a shift of interest toward ‘dialectics,’ which turned logic from a ‘science’ into an DOI: 10.4324/9781315521732-12

216  Rodolfo Garau ‘art.’7 Added to this, the rise of Ramism in the sixteenth century introduced an emphasis on judgment, which supplemented that on invention that had characterized earlier logical productions.8 But if such an “explosion of entropy” displays the vitality of logic as a discipline in the early modern period, modern historians of logic have disregarded it for reasons of its scarce contribution to the advancement of formal logic and (especially for what concerns the seventeenth century) for its propensity to include elements—psychological and epistemological elements in particular—that they deem foreign to our current idea of logic.9 Yet, recent studies have shown that such preoccupations with epistemology and psychology—which mostly centered on the problem of the origin of ideas in the mind—are in fact an original and characteristic trait of early modern logic, rather than a spurious element. According to Fred Michael, it was precisely Pierre Gassendi (with his Institutio logica, published posthumously as a part of the Syntagma philosophicum in 1658) who inaugurated this new way of understanding the scope of logic, followed in 1662 by Arnauld and Nicole’s Logique.10 Characterized by an attention, unprecedented in humanistic logic, to the nature, origin, and formation of ideas in the mind, these new “logics of ideas” shared the same epistemological concern, but proposed different solutions. Referring to Cartesian philosophy, Arnauld and Nicole saw the origin of ideas, as well as their criterion of truth, in the intellect; inspired by ancient Epicureanism, Gassendi claimed that the origin was rather to be found in the senses.11 Indeed, a central element of Gassendi’s logic is the explanation of how ideas originate from the senses. This led David Norton to regard him as the founder of early modern empiricism.12 The empiricist element goes hand in hand with, and to a certain extent entails, a strong commitment to nominalism, for Gassendi argues that general ideas derive from singular ones.13 These aspects will be extensively treated in the following pages. Section one will be devoted to Gassendi’s criticism of Aristotelian dialectics in the Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (written across the 1610s and 1620s), which represents the background of Gassendi’s later engagement with logic.14 Early in the 1620s, Gassendi was minded, in fact, to replace Aristotelian logic with Epicurean logic; an early logical manuscript (referred to as the Carpentras manuscript after the eponymous French town in whose library it is preserved) is datable to the 1630s, and already shows the influence of Epicurean logic, as well as Gassendi’s continuous engagement with the discipline.15 This will be the subject of section two. The polemic with Descartes is also very important to an understanding of Gassendi’s reflections on knowledge theory in the mid-1640s but will be treated in a separate chapter of this volume.16 Sections three and four will be devoted to Gassendi’s final engagement with logic in the Syntagma philosophicum (1658). I will conclude with some notes on the reception of Gassendi’s logic.

Gassendi’s Logic  217

8.2 The Critique of Aristotelian Dialectics in the Exercitationes (1624) Book II of the Exercitationes was Gassendi’s first written engagement with logic. The first volume was published in 1624 in Grenoble and was reprinted in Amsterdam by the house of Elzevir in 1649, and again in The Hague in 1656. The second volume, which contained a criticism of Aristotle’s dialectics and which Gassendi probably put aside in 1624 (as indicated by a note, probably added by La Poterie at the end of its manuscript) appeared in 1658 in the Opera omnia, and in 1659 as an independent volume. As Rochot highlights, while Gassendi does not present a full-fledged defense of empiricism, he already displays a preference for direct observation and experience over abstract reasoning.17 But while Epicurean empiricism is not fully developed, it is worth noting that the project was originally intended to include a book defending Epicurus’ ethics, and even an Epicurean-inspired cosmological model as an alternative to spherical astronomy. The critique of Aristotelian ‘dialectics’ occupies the entire second book of the Exercitationes, which opens with the unambiguous claim that Aristotle’s method is “of no necessity nor utility.”18 Here, Gassendi’s remarks do not differ, in spirit, from the humanistic criticisms that we have highlighted in the introduction; the ubiquitous references to Cicero testify to the humanistic inspiration of the first half of the book. Take, for example, Gassendi’s rebuttal to the charge of verbosity and sophistry. The artificial Aristotelian logic is not only inferior to natural logic, which is consentaneous to human reason, but it grows so wild that it produces a crop no less useless than difficult to harvest (it is so enormous), and when we see that there is never an end to the formulation and classification of its precepts, then we have good reason for taking up arms for the superiority of nature over the illusion of this dialectical art.19 But the element that Gassendi targeted more closely is the pretension that Aristotle’s method can provide a true knowledge of things. In fact, this is pure delusion, for it appears rather to be the duty of ‘physics’ (though we shall see how Gassendi will qualify this claim) to provide meaningful explanations, a domain in which Aristotelian logic provides less certitude than the senses. This criticism also shows how Gassendi’s preference for empirical knowledge was already present in this phase of his thought. For instance, if we were to learn what the sun—the brightest thing of all—is, [d]o you think that logic will light some lamp by which I will see it better? I am indeed grateful to nature for providing me with the

218  Rodolfo Garau senses by which I perceive its brilliance, its heat, its shape, its size, and other characteristics. […] Is it truly the province of logic to examine, to uncover, and consequently to explain the nature of things, rather than the province of Physics and the other sciences instead? […] [The Aristotelian dialectical method] does not reveal nature to us, but only does the same as the man who promised to discover a treasure and then says ‘Look where it is hidden and you will find it.’20 The same goes for the practice of definition and division: how can logic define an object of which it has no knowledge? What kind of progress can the practice of definition bring to our knowledge of the world? Or perhaps one “imagine[s] that there is no knowledge of things in India because they are ignorant of our logic and all its terms?”21 Concerning division, who would prefer logical division to a direct observation of phenomena? “Suppose for example that man is to be broken down into his component parts. Would you be demented enough to ask this of logic rather than of anatomy?”22 Dialecticians are also mistaken in pretending to provide not only knowledge of, but also a criterion for, truth. It is here that Gassendi’s empiricism appears more glaringly: the criterion for truth cannot be found in dialectics but has to rely on sense experience. He writes, If you should say that experience is the balance in which the truth of any matter is to be weighted, such as whether fire is hot or not, whether the sun is bright or dim, I would not disagree with you by very much. For this is the instrument of judgment, or as the Greeks say the kritêrion, which it seems must be preferred over all the other candidates. But experience belongs to the senses, or natural capacity, not to artificial logic […].23 Accordingly, in Book II, Exercitation II, Gassendi focuses on the criticism of universals and predictables: the mind, Gassendi argues, acquires the knowledge of general things by observing the repeated analogies between individual things, to the extent that universals bear no distinct and autonomous existence.24 Exercitation III targets the Aristotelian categories,25 while IV addresses propositions.26 It is worth noting how, in Exercitation V, Gassendi uses the idea of sense fallibility to criticize the Aristotelian practice of demonstration. In fact, if Aristotle’s demonstration must agree with the sense, “and being [that] the senses [are] much fallible and uncertain, one wonders what can be the certitude of the demonstration, and thus of the science, thereby originated.”27 But another, and perhaps more original, argument is used here—one that appears to draw from Aristotle’s renowned “τόδε τι” argumentation in Metaphysics.28 In order to know a thing “clearly and

Gassendi’s Logic  219 perfectly,”29 Gassendi writes, we need also to know clearly and perfectly every part of its definition, and consequently also its genus. For instance, in order to know what a man is, we need to know that it belongs to the genus ‘animal.’ But this leads to a contradiction, for, if we ask what the genus of ‘animal’ is, and so on, we finally reach an all-encompassing genus—existence—which cannot in turn be defined through a genus. Thus, every definition appears ultimately to lie on shaky foundations, because “[t]he existence cannot be known clearly and distinctly, for we cannot provide of it a perfect definition.”30 The criticism of the Aristotelian notion of difference proceeds along similar lines. If we are to know the difference of a single thing, we paradoxically need to possess in advance an intimate knowledge of everything in the world, for otherwise we could not be sure in claiming that the thing we are to know really differs from others we do not know.31 The criticism of Aristotelian logic culminates in that of syllogism. Gassendi denies any necessity to the syllogistic form of demonstration. First, he argues, if Aristotle maintains that we know a thing when we acquire knowledge of its necessary cause, then it is clear that syllogism is not necessary to acquire such knowledge. For the syllogism “every rational being is capable of laughing; every man is rational; then every man is capable of laughing” is not necessary in order to know that every man is capable of laughing in virtue of his rationality; Gassendi offers an alternative: “Every man is capable of laughing because he is rational,” as a less complex and less contentious formulation.32 Besides, Gassendi argues that other syllogistic forms (and even induction) could be seen as bearing as much necessity (if any) as the demonstrative one.33 Gassendi also claims that the demonstrative syllogism is in fact a hidden form of petitio principii, or a diallelus (that is, a form of circular reasoning). For instance, if we prove that every man is capable of laughter by mean of the proposition ‘every reasonable being is capable of laughter,’ we are indeed saying the equivalent of ‘every man is capable of laughter because every man is capable of laughter.’ To this extent, do not say that with rationality is introduced the cause through which laughing belongs to man; for, since the two things are synonymous and equivalent—or better, being reasonable and being a man do not really differ in anything—neither can exert on the other a causal action.34 This and other critiques bring Gassendi to conclude—with clear Pyrrhonian undertones—that “no knowledge exists, and especially no Aristotelian knowledge.”35 In the conclusive Exercitation VI, Gassendi provides a positive definition of what kind of knowledge can be achieved. To be sure, this definition does not run coherently; it must rather be reconstructed throughout the book. The claim that nothing can be known

220  Rodolfo Garau is in fact to be qualified. First, we can, and indeed do, possess knowledge concerning the matter of faith—but this knowledge is radically different from what the Aristotelian one is supposed to be, because “in it self-evidence is not joined to certitude, and it is not based upon demonstration derived from natural principles, but upon faith alone derived from the revelation and God’s authority.”36 But there is another sense in which the knowledge of things can be achieved. In Gassendi’s words, “a certain knowledge derived from the experience of the appearances of things [noti­ tiam quandam experimentalem et rerum apparentium] should be termed genuine knowledge, for instance when I say that I know that I am now seated rather than standing, that it is day rather than night […] that honey appears sweet to me, not bitter, that fire appears hot, not cold,” etc.37 It is precisely the prejudicial view, conveyed by the Aristotelians, that knowledge—again, scientia—is only “the certain and evident cognition of a thing, obtained through an acquaintance with its necessary cause, or by a proof,” that causes us to believe that the “knowledge through experience or appearances would not merit the name of knowledge.”38 But experimental knowledge possesses true content to the extent that it limits its claim to appearances, for instance, by saying that honey appears to us as sweet; while arguing that such sweetness is due to any real quality opens up to a number of possible confutations.39 These confutations are indeed drawn from the classical repertoire of Skepticism (and in particular from Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism). By way of enumerating some of them, they rest on the fallibility of senses;40 on the relativity of senses (the arguments first that not only man but also animals possess sensibility, and secondly, that this sensibility is clearly different from ours, whose intrinsic relativity we must therefore recognize);41 on the variability of human temperament;42 on the impossibility to know how the majority of people perceive a certain phenomenon, etc.43 Gassendi also insists that the argument according to which claiming that nothing is known entails contradiction (for at least one thing is in this way known) and is based on a fallacy of equivocation, for it is addressed to the Aristotelian understanding of ‘science,’ and not to the “science of appearances.” Though Aristotelian ‘science’ is in truth only ‘opinion,’ we can however claim that […] a basis of knowledge does exist, but for a knowledge of experience and, if I may say, of appearances; for our intellect knows or learns through its experience of numerous appearances. As for “demonstration,” it can be accomplished in various ways, either by pointing with the finger, or by teaching in a lesson, or by some other method. […] If you say that the understanding can draw conclusions concerning much more hidden matters from the things that are encountered in experience or apparent to the senses, I shall answer that it can proceed no farther by reasoning than to things which must be exposed again to experience or which can be conceived by some

Gassendi’s Logic  221 mean of experiences. What we deny is that one can penetrate to the inner nature of things.44 Lastly, it is to be noted how Gassendi prevents objections against the certain, though seemingly not experiential, knowledge derivable from mathematics. Gassendi defends the surprising claim that also mathematics is a “science of appearances,” claiming that when a mathematician proves some proposition you had not known, he accomplishes no more than a man who discloses the content of a casket by writing out a label for it or by opening it up. As he merely shows what was there but all closed up.45 In this way, the demonstration can show properties only a posteriori, and not a priori. So ‘mathematical’ properties (for which Gassendi appears to understand mainly geometrical properties) are indeed derived from a “painstaking observation of one and the same thing,” and, as such, empirical in nature. Moreover, not showing “the cause of the thing’s being,” they cannot be seen as demonstration in the Aristotelian sense: I must add that with the help of mathematics I can become certain that, for instance, the earth is round; this can be made manifest through the eclipses of the moon and the varying height of the poles. But why is the earth round? what is its true nature? is it animate or not? And if it has a soul, what kind does it have? why does it lie motionless in the center, or if it moves, what force impels it? […] Truly, the moment you pass beyond things that are apparent, or fall under the province of the senses and experience, in order to inquire about deeper matters, both mathematics and all other branches of knowledge become completely shrouded in darkness.46

8.3 The Carpentras Manuscript (circa 1636) Even if the project of the Exercitationes was abandoned, Gassendi’s engagement with logic continued over time. The Carpentras manuscript—likely drafted in 1636—was devoted to logic, and was part of a work of larger scope (De vita et doctrina Epicuri) that Gassendi had been planning in those years, but which was never published in that form.47 The manuscript testifies to the development of Gassendi’s engagement with Epicureanism: now the flirtations with experimentalism in the Exercitationes that I highlighted find a more systematic presentation through a return to the proposal of Epicurus’ canons and philosophy. The manuscript is divided into three books (IX, X, and XI), which are numbered according to the place they would have occupied in the larger work originally projected.

222  Rodolfo Garau Book IX provides at first a long historical digression on the use of the word “canonic” in Greek philosophy.48 This digression aims to prepare the ground for an explanation of what Epicurus rejected of traditional logic, with reference to the Stoics especially.49 It deals first with the rejection of the Stoic notion of ‘lekton’ and ‘lekta’ (λεκτὸν καὶ λεκτά). The Stoics believed in a threefold semiotic partition composed by the thing itself, the spoken word referring to it, and their meaning (indeed, ‘lekton’). While they deemed the former two as material, they designated meaning as immaterial. Truth and falsity are therefore located at the immaterial level of meaning and discourse, and not at the material level of the thing or its name. In line with the Epicurean tradition, Gassendi contests the existence of such an immaterial and transcendent layer of meaning.50 As he will then expound in Book X, things, insofar as they are considered in themselves [secundum se] are always true, as they possess, as Epicurus stated, an “existential truth” [veritas existentiae];51 while insofar as they are considered in relation to something else [comparate]— that is, through our language or knowledge—they are liable to be false, their truth being a “truth of judgment or opinion” [veritas iudicii et opinionis].52 Further, Gassendi takes care to clarify that Epicurus was neither hostile to logic as such, nor rejected the existence of criteria of truth: his polemic was rather pointed toward syllogism, which he deemed “useless to those who are versed in the sciences.”53 Epicurus, by contrast, “has replaced [it] with a dialectics capable to provide the tools that are necessary, having cut off the superfluous. For he wanted it to consist of a small number of canons necessary for knowledge to judge the truth.”54 In this way, Gassendi prefixed a canon (which he claims to be derivable from Epicurus’ teaching though not explicitly expounded by him) that prescribes the speaker to use common and clear terms to avoid ambiguities, obscurity, and consequent prolixity, and recommends the listener to do as much.55 Book X is devoted to the discussion of the criteria of truth, by which Gassendi understands the instrument of judgment [organum instrumen­ tumve iudicandi].56 The criteria can indeed be divided into ‘per quod’ (through which), and ‘secundum quod’ (according to which), the former being the faculty employed—for instance, the sense or the intellect—and the second being the function or application of the faculty to the object— in this case, sensing or understanding. But since the former appears to imply the latter, “the controversy essentially revolves around whether that through which the truth is judged is the sense, the spirit, or both, or something else, or nothing.”57 To this, Gassendi adds that among things some are manifest [manifestae], others are hidden [occultae]. He then resumes Epicurus’ partition of hidden things in wholly hidden [penitus occultae], hidden by nature [natura], or in reason of time [ad tempus]. Wholly hidden things (such as the number of stars in the night sky) can never fall under our understanding, and shall thus not be researched,

Gassendi’s Logic  223 while those hidden in reason of time are just temporarily detached from our perception as, for example, the sun when a cloud interposes.58 Things hidden by nature are “those which certainly cannot become evident by their nature or by themselves, but which can make themselves known through something else and thus be seized by us by the spirit,” like the pores on our skin, for example, which are unobservable but whose existence can be inferred by the presence of perspiration.59 The question Gassendi addresses here is whether things hidden by nature or in reason of time can be known through what he—after a long tradition—calls ‘clues’ [indicia] or ‘signs’ [signa], which will be treated in Book XI.60 After a long historico-philosophical digression (listing the philosophers who denied any criterion for truth, the Skeptics’ modes of epoché, and then the philosophers who recognized a certain criterion for truth), Gassendi explicitly endorses the Epicurean view. He explains that Epicurus did not ascribe judgment to a separate organ of the soul; rather, Epicurus endorsed the existence of a criterion secundum quid only. Consequently, judgment arises as a result of the application of sensation, intellection, or affection, understood as activities and not as faculties.61 Book XI is devoted to the treatment of the Epicurean criteria of truth. The first criterion is sense, and it is divided in the following canons: •

The infallibility of sense and the truthfulness of any sensation, including what Gassendi calls after Epicurus ‘phantasy’ (first canon), that is, the lingering mental representations of sense stimuli.62 This canon is based on the Epicurean distinction between simple apprehension [simplex adprehensio] and judgment, the former knowing the thing nakedly, that is, without negating or affirming anything regarding it, and the latter, by contrast, introducing an affirmation or negation. In this regard, simple apprehension cannot be false, as it is identified with a truth of existence. • The consequentiality of judgment to sense and its fallibility (second canon);63 in other words, it is only when I pronounce a judgment on the truth or falsity of a sensorial apprehension that I expose myself to error. This means that the sensation according to which a tower appears round to me from afar cannot per se be false; only the judgment that might be expressed on that sensation is. Falsity is thus not a consequence of sensation, but of judgment. • The truth of any opinion that receives corroboration, or does not receive disconfirmation, from senses (third canon).64 This statement extends not only to the plain example of sense verification concerning manifest things (such as the fact that I can verify through my senses that the tower is square and not round when I approach it), but also encompasses things which are hidden by nature (hence the reprise of the notion of sign), provided they are derived from manifest things. This applies to the famous statement by Epicurus that the

224  Rodolfo Garau

•

existence of the void shall be inferred from that of motion: in this case, a manifest thing cannot provide disconfirmation to a thing hidden by nature, which must then be held as true.65 This implies that evidence is the foundation of all knowledge. Gassendi also adds how, for Epicurus as well as for Aristotle, a truth statement must follow extensive sensorial investigation.66 Conversely, an opinion that is neither disconfirmed nor corroborated by sense experience is false (fourth canon).67

The second criterion concerns the concept of ‘prenotion’ or ‘anticipation,’ with which Gassendi translates the Epicurean concept of prolèpsis. The second criterion is in turn divided in four canons: • The dependence on the senses of all prenotions, as they originate either from direct sensorial encounter [incursione] with their objects, or by mean of their analogy, proportion, or composition (first canon).68 • The necessity of prenotions to any cognitive activity such as researching, doubting, understanding, and confuting (second canon).69 • The need for general prenotions, or notion of general things, in order to judge more surely on individual things (third canon).70 General notions are the result of the repeated experience of individual cases, generalized by mean of induction,71 and identified with the description or definition.72 As is evident, this statement implies a nominalistic stance on the matter of universals. • The knowledge of things which are not evident must be built on that of the prenotion of evident things (fourth canon).73 It is here that the aforementioned notion of sign (and in particular, of demonstrative sign)74 comes into play. Gassendi argues that “demonstration should only be undertaken on the basis of necessary signs.”75 As an example of such an understanding of the notion of sign, Gassendi quotes Epicurus’ notion of vacuum, famously deduced from the evidence of the existence of motion. The Carpentras manuscript does not offer further elements that would allow us to understand how, or if, Gassendi intended to correct or rework Epicurus’ logic at this stage. For sure, they confirm a certain attention to the mechanism of perception: certain passages appear to show that Gassendi intended to establish such schema on a mechanistic understanding of sensation, which he promises to address in the “section on physics.”76

8.4 Logic in the Syntagma Philosophicum and the Institutio Logica (1658) From the time he drafted the Disquisitio metaphysica, Gassendi’s engagement with logic is essentially connected to that with Epicurean

Gassendi’s Logic  225 philosophy. Though not dealing with Epicurus’ logic, in Life and Death of Epicurus (1647), Gassendi defends Epicurus in the face of accusations of his being hostile to dialectics.77 This treatment is provided in the Animadversiones (1649), which contains both a summary of Epicurus’ philosophy (Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri), as well as a commentary of Diogenes Laertius’ book, which also includes a treatment of Epicurean logic.78 It is in Syntagma philosophicum (1658) that Gassendi provides his most elaborate reflections on logic. Logic occupies the first four books of the Syntagma:79 a proemial book devoted to the definition of logic; a second book entitled “On the origin and variety of logic”80 which, as the title suggests, is devoted to a historical survey of the logic of the past; a book entitled “On the end of logic”81 debating the actual possibility of human knowledge and providing a criticism of certain logical doctrines; and finally, the Institutio logica—Gassendi’s own logic, in turn divided into four parts, which will be dealt with shortly.82 Pending a fuller treatment of the Institutio, the following are two of the most relevant elements presented by the 1658 work on logic: (1) Gassendi makes clear from the introduction that he understands logic as an art, rather than as a science. This idea, which was predominant since the Renaissance, was connected with the polemic against medieval logic, according to which logical statements enjoyed autonomous truth content.83 Gassendi argues, by contrast, that logic comprises a set of rules to guide the intellect in the pursuit of truth. In this sense, logic does not deal with the empirical content of knowledge and is therefore distinguished from physics. As he writes in the proemial book, “this art does not deal with the things whose truth is investigated empirically; such is the case rather in physics or natural science. Instead the art of the intellect is engaged in teaching the rules by which the intellect may be directed as it contemplates nature.”84 It is interesting to note that Gassendi’s polemic against the empty rhetorical use of the topics, characteristic, for instance, of the Exercita­ tiones, blends into a more general and broader understanding of the scope of logic, now described as serving not only the attainment of naturalistic knowledge but any intellectual construction in general. As Gassendi continues, “since such rules are general, they can serve the intellect not only in the science of nature, but can also be applied to every cognition in general.”85 The art that Gassendi mentions is what he designates “the art of thinking well” [bene cogitare], which encompasses four distinct operations of the soul, to which he will assign each of the four sections of the Institutio: “forming clear images [bene imaginari], making clear propositions [bene proponere], making clear deductions [bene colligere], and ordering one’s thoughts well [bene ordinare]”.86 In other words, Gassendi understands logic as an art that guides the formation of simple ideas from sense apprehension;

226  Rodolfo Garau the composition of propositions; the drawing of right logical inferences; and lastly, the application of different argumentative structures to diverse aims, such as, for example, research and teaching. As such, logic is conceived as a nested structure: as one proceeding by composition from the elements constituting the previous one—ideas from the senses, propositions from ideas, syllogisms from propositions and, lastly, method from syllogisms. This mirrors precisely the structure that he assigned to the Institutio. (2) A relevant understanding of the history of logic, comprising an almost total obliteration of medieval logic (whose main interpreters are recalled in a few lines in OO I, 56a, where it is also defined as a “great farrago of useless subtleties”) with the exception of Llull, and the extension of the history of logic to Bacon and Descartes.87 This aspect is particularly significant because it is symptomatic of the way early modern philosophers looked at the history of logic. Among the philosophers of his time, Gassendi is surely the one who paid most attention to history.88 Gassendi’s historical reconstruction encompasses Zeno and the Eleatic logic, Euclid and the Megaric, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicurus, Llull, Ramus, Bacon, and Descartes. It is however worth noting the greater interest in the Institutio not only for the philosophy of Epicurus (of which here Gassendi provides an articulate reconstruction), but also for those of Llull, Ramus, Bacon, and Descartes,89 which were absent in earlier drafts on logic. This testifies to Gassendi’s continuous engagement with the discipline.

8.5 The Institutio Logica As mentioned above, Gassendi’s own logic develops around the description of the four fundamental operations of the mind. Each of the four sections articulates what Gassendi, following Epicurus, calls “canons.” The first part, describing how to “imagine well,” focusing on the statement that all ideas originate from senses, either directly or by composition (canons I–III). Here Gassendi argues that in the first place all ideas are by origin singular, for they derive from the exposition of senses to a single object. In the second place, from the ideas thereby derived, and now present in the mind, others are formed in various ways, such as by augmentation, diminution, composition, etc. (canon III).90 This understanding paves the way for Gassendi to conclude that general ideas derive from individual ones by means of accumulation and repetition (IV–V): individual but repeated exposures to the object of sensibility forms what Gassendi names aggeries91—literally, ‘piles’ or ‘bunches’—thus ensuing the formation of general ideas. Such ideas may have their origin either in direct observation—which provides ideas endowed with a high degree of certitude—or in secondhand reports—which makes them less reliable (canon X).

Gassendi’s Logic  227 The lesser or greater perfection of an idea is described on the basis of how many parts or adjuncts (that is, accidents) it comprises (VII), that is to say, in how much detail it represents the external object. In the end, this coincides with the agreement with the external object of understanding (VIII). Sensorial testing of empirical data is invoked as an instrument to validate the truthfulness of ideas (XI). Here, Gassendi refers to classic examples, such as those of the tower appearing round from afar but being in fact square, and of a straight stick which, partially immersed in water, appears bent. Since we can thereby be induced to form wrong ideas, Gassendi argues for empirical validation: [t]hus in order to investigate, for instance, whether the thing that appears to be gold is orichalcum, we use a Lydian stone; to investigate whether the tower is round, we approach closer to it; to investigate whether the stick is bent, we take it out of water; and similarly for other things.92 The first part of the Institutio culminates in the strongly nominalist conclusion that the essence of a thing amounts to its definition, and that the definition in turn coincides with the description of the idea of the thing as we have it in our mind. Thus, greater or lesser perfection of the definition reflects the greater or lesser perception of the idea it describes.93 This is perhaps Gassendi’s final word on the Stoic notion of ‘lekton’ which, although not mentioned here, had given him much to think about in his earlier years, as was highlighted before. In general, this shows Gassendi’s own understanding of the semiotic relations between the external object, the idea of it, and its definition. Here the influence of Ramism is shown by the image of the series that Gassendi includes as a corollary to canon VI: “It is useful to keep in mind a certain series of ideas (or of things of which there are ideas) from the singular and most specific to the most general ones.”94 This image has thus the function of providing the reader with a pre-tested structure of logical relations between individual inter-specific and inter-generic concepts (Figure 8.1). This represents a significant departure from previous versions of Gassendi’s ‘logics,’ which looked almost exclusively to ancient philosophies and debates. The second part (“to make clear propositions”) is devoted to the composition of propositions from the individual names apprehended by the senses. Here, it is worth noting the treatment of the loci, or bases of the arguments, following canon XVI, which displays Gassendi’s pedagogical attitude in this section of the Syntagma.95 The third part (“making clear deductions”) unfolds the mode of argumentation, with special emphasis on the use of syllogistic reasoning.

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Figure 8.1 Gassendi’s ‘series idearum,’ from OO I, 94. Courtesy of the Library of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.

The presence of this element might be seen as a very strong rethinking of the nature of logic and of the usefulness of its instruments, which, as seen, Gassendi had first harshly criticized in the Exercitationes. One can argue, however, that Gassendi’s criticism of syllogism was based on its ungrounded pretension to be the sole instrument of truth, disregarding the attainment of true ideas from sensorial data. Here, by contrast, once the attainment of true ideas from senses is secured, and the nature of general ideas clarified, the rules of syllogistic inference can recover their validity as an instrument of truth. What is more, in the Syntagma, Gassendi argued that all thinking is syllogistic in essence: […] as a proposition is formed from simple notions, so, from propositions, is formed what is considered to be the highest form of cogitation, which is called ‘syllogism.’ Indeed, every time the mind sees that

Gassendi’s Logic  229 two notions agree with a third, which is formed by a twofold proposition, it immediately connects them and affirms that they agree reciprocally […]. A syllogism therefore is nothing but a cogitation, or an internal discourse [internave oratio], from which, given two propositions, a third one is necessarily deduced.96 As Fred Michael has observed, one of the most noteworthy features here is that Gassendi proposed an original and simplified refashioning of the Aristotelian absolute syllogism by reducing the three Aristotelian figures to two, namely, the conjoined and the disjoined ones.97 The former is said to be connected, conjoint, and affirmative, for in it all parts connect or are conjoint—the subject with the medium, the medium with the attribute, the subject with the attribute—and in this way three propositions, or enunciations, are produced, all of which are affirmative. The latter, by contrast, is said to be disconnected, disjoint, and negative: for even if in it the subject connects with the medium, the medium however is disjoint with the attribute and the subject from the attribute itself, so that three propositions are produced, of which, while the first may be affirmative, the others are however negative.98 Each figure encompasses three modes: general, particular, and mixed.99 Gassendi’s pedagogical interest is here confirmed by the fact that he provides two figures for clarifying the functioning of these simplified syllogisms (Figures 8.2 and 8.3):

Figure 8.2 Gassendi’s representation of the conjoined syllogism. From OO I, 108. Courtesy of the library of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.

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Figure 8.3 Gassendi’s representation of the conjoined syllogism. From OO1, 109. Courtesy of the library of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.

The fourth part (“to order well”) treats the method. This part is in turn divided into three distinct ‘methods’: the method of inventions, devoted to the discovery of truth (and especially natural ones); the method of judgment, which deals with the judgment of the validity of assumptions or statements; and the method of learning, which can perhaps be better appointed as the “method of teaching,” since it is devoted to the best way of unfolding teaching material to the benefit of students. The method of discovery ought in theory to convey Gassendi’s own “scientific method,” though, rather than unfolding the process of inference from empirical observation, it remains anchored to a very general level (that is, one valid for both physical inquiry and general statements), making it hard to see how this method would work in practice.100 The notion of sign, which I have highlighted above, here occupies an important space.101 “The method of discovery,” wrote Gassendi in canon I, “consists in skillfully finding the middle term.” He added, It is necessary, once the question has been posed, that the middle term be discovered, that is to say the argument by which the other part (that is, either an affirmation or a negation) is judged to be true or false. Thus the dog, when it does not see the prey, follows its trail, and sniffs and pursues it until he finds the beast. In this way, if the middle term does not occur at first glance, it is necessary to follow something out, departing either from the subject or from the attribute, that is as it were a trail by which one arrives at a discovery of the middle term that, agreeing with one of the extreme terms, is found also to agree, or not to agree, with the other.102 Here the researcher is confronted with two options: with either recourse to the loci (about which Gassendi treated in the section on propositions), or to look for a ‘sign,’ that is, something already known in advance that could lead us to the knowledge of the hidden thing by revealing a nexus

Gassendi’s Logic  231 between a subject and predicate and thus working as a middle term, either starting from the subject by means of resolution, or from the predicate by means of composition, “in the same way that the trail is a certain sign indicating to the dog which route it is necessary to follow in order to find its prey.”103 Despite this intriguing start, the examples provided here by Gassendi are somehow disappointing as they do not clarify completely how this method would work in practice, nor do they help answering scholarly questions about Gassendi’s own understanding of ‘scientific’ methodology. According to his own example, the statement “man is a substance” can be investigated either starting from the subject or from the predicate. In the former case, we proceed by resolution, using for instance ‘body’ as a middle term, while, conversely, in the latter we proceed by composition by showing how ‘man’ agrees with ‘animal,’ ‘animal’ with ‘body,’ and ‘body’ with ‘substance.104 Interestingly, Gassendi refers to the “method of the geometrician” to provide a perfect exemplification of the method of discovery.105 Resolution and composition are of crucial importance also for what concerns the methods of judgment and of learning. The method of judgment (canon III) is in fact said to proceed either by composition, if the proof is provided by resolution; or by resolution, if the proof is provided by composition. This would however be impossible without the intervention of sensorial or rational validation, for Gassendi specifies that “The method of judgment is brought about by a twofold criterion or instru­ ment of judging, namely, sense and reason” (canon IV).106 When possible, sense validation has priority: since all knowledge is either sensorial, or ultimately derives from senses, “it is necessary to resort to sense and to adhere to the evidence [evidentia] that derives from it.”107 Such sensorial evidence is to be sought even at the cost of removing possible impediments that hinder it—such as distance, which causes big things to appear as small, squared ones as round, etc. By contrast, […] whenever we are dealing with a thing that can be perceived by the intelligence alone, we must resort to reason, which deduces a certain thing that is not perceived by sense from another that is perceived by sense, as when it is asked, “Are there pores in the skin, or not?” It is shown that they exist by means of reason […] since, if they did not exist, no sweat could come out from inside, and its passage through the skin is evidently observed by sense.108 Gassendi however, quoting Aristotle as an authority, clarifies that, should there be a conflict, judgments proceeding from senses trump those proceeding from reason, “since such reasoning may have begun incorrectly, what it yields may only be apparent, while the real reason on account of which the thing appears as such lies open to sense.”109

232  Rodolfo Garau The method of learning prescribes rules to teach in the clearest possible way. It “starts from resolution and proceeds by composition” (canon V), thus ensuring that the students know elementary notions and build up their knowledge upon them.110 Canons VI–XIII deal mainly with appropriately dividing the subject matter, using clear words, and proceeding from definitions of basic concepts, and proceeding from the best-known things to those more obscure. It is to be noted that, by contrast with Descartes, Gassendi’s prescription of order and clarity does not involve the method of discovery, but that of learning only.

8.6 Influence and Reception Compared to its importance for, and influence on, seventeenth-century philosophy and science, the study of the reception of Gassendi’s thought is still inadequate,111 and even more so when it comes to his logic.112 Gassendi’s logic enjoyed at times a more autonomous reception than that of the Opera omnia. For instance, the Institutio was reprinted in 1668 in London (along with the Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri) and the logic in 1718 in Oxford; part of it (and in particular part three of the Institutio) was published alongside Philippe du Trieu’s Manuductio ad logicam, as a replacement for the treatment of deduction that the Manuductio missed.113 The Exercitationes were widely discussed in German universities, and in particular at the University of Rostock, where they were the subject of some ‘disputationes.’ This is also testified, for instance, by the publication, in Leipzig, of De logices ortu et progressu (1698) by Heinrich Engelken.114 In 1666, the Helmstedt professor Heinrich Uffelmann devoted an oratio against Gassendi’s Exercitationes: this seems to point to a wide discussion of the text in the German context.115 In France, early receptions include, for instance, Buffier’s Les Principes du raisonnement exposez en deux logiques nouvéles.116 I am confident that a deeper investigation would show this to be an incomplete list. It is widely known that Gassendi’s logic had a tremendous impact on British empiricism. Walter Charleton also drew from Gassendi’s logic in his Physiologia, otherwise mainly devoted to physics.117 The influence of Gassendi’s logic on that of John Locke’s theory of knowledge was likely very strong.118 The same can be said for the logic of Robert Boyle.119 But again, an overarching study on the depth of the influence of Gassendi’s logic on British empiricism is still a desideratum.120

Acknowledgments This article is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GA n. 725883 ERC-EarlyModernCosmology).

Gassendi’s Logic  233

Notes 1 Bartholomäus Keckermann, Praecognitorum logicorum tractatus III (Hanoviae: Apud Guilielmum Antonium, 1599), 20. 2 Wilhelm Risse, Die Logik der Neuzeit, 2 vols. (Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1964, 1970) vol. 1, 1; see also Wilhelm Risse, Bibliographia logica: Verzeichnis der Druckschriften zur Logik mit Angabe ihrer Fundorte, 4 vols. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1965). 3 Earline Jennifer Ashworth, Language and Logic in the Post-Medieval Period (Dordrecht–Boston, MA: Reidel, 1974), ix. 4 Risse, Die Logik der Neuzeit, vol. 1, 1. 5 Mirella Capozzi and Gino Roncaglia, “Logic and Philosophy of Logic from Humanism to Kant,” in The Development of Modern Logic, ed. Leila Haaparanta (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 78–158. 6 Traditionally, scholars appear to have been mostly interested in reconstructing the history of formal logic, rather than the history of logic per se; see, for example, Robert Blanché, La Logique et son histoire: D’Aristote à Russell (Paris: Armand Colin, 1970). Some scholars, however, have emphasized the role and influence of specific early modern figures, such as Leibniz; see, for example, William Kneale and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 7 On this, Lodi Nauta, In Defense of Common Sense: Lorenzo Valla’s Humanist Critique of Scholastic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 8 On this, see Ashworth, Language and Logic in the Post-Medieval Period; Lisa Jardine, “Humanism and the Teaching of Logic,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600, eds. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 797–807; Earline Jennifer Ashworth, “The Eclipse of Medieval Logic,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, 787–796; Lisa Jardine, “Humanistic Logic,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, eds. Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, and Eckhard Kessler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 173–198; Fred Michael, “Why Logic Became Epistemology: Gassendi, Port Royal, and the Reformation in Logic,” in Logic and the Workings of the Mind: The Logic of Ideas and Faculty Psychology in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Patricia Easton, North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy 5 (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1997), 1–20; Capozzi and Roncaglia, “Logic and Philosophy of Logic from Humanism to Kant.” 9 Capozzi and Roncaglia, “Logic and Philosophy of Logic from Humanism to Kant,” 78. 10 Fred Michael, “La place de Gassendi dans l’histoire de la logique,” Corpus 20 (1992): 9–36; Michael, “Why Logic Became Epistemology: Gassendi, Port Royal, and the Reformation in Logic.” A partial translation of the Syntagma I, “On Logic” limited to the Institutio logica was provided by Jones in Pierre Gassendi’s Institutio Logica (1658), ed. and trans. Howard Jones (Assen: Van Gorcum Limited, 1981). Selected passages of the Syntagma can be also found in Pierre Gassendi, The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi, trans. Craig B. Brush (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972). Antoine Arnauld, La Logique ou l'art de penser, ed. Pierre Nicole, Facsimile of the 1662 edition (Hildesheim: Olms, 1970). 11 Michael also claimed that the Logique followed the Institutio not only by devoting its first part to the description of the origin of ideas, but also in the

234  Rodolfo Garau general structure of the work. Thus, Institutio can be identified as the footprint of the treatment and development of logic in the Logique, which in turn exerted a strong influence on later logical productions; see Michael, “Why Logic Became Epistemology: Gassendi, Port Royal, and the Reformation in Logic,” 13. 12 See David Fate Norton, “The Myth of ‘British Empiricism,’” History of European Ideas 1 (1981): 331–344. Such empiricist character has attracted a number of studies; for example, Tullio Gregory, Scetticismo ed empirismo: studio su Gassendi (Bari: Laterza, 1961) unfolds the development of Gassendi’s understanding of knowledge starting from the Exercitationes, stressing the strong continuity between Gassendi’s scientific enterprise and his epistemology. A similar perspective is adopted by Saul Fisher in his Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy and Science (Leiden: Brill, 2005), which however puts more emphasis on Gassendi’s own experimental practice; see also S. Fisher, “Gassendi et l’hypothèse dans la méthode scientifique,” in Gassendi et la modernité, ed. Sylvie Taussig (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 399–425. The same can be said for Wolfgang Detel’s Scientia rerum natura occultarum: Methodologische Studien zur Physik Pierre Gassendis (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1978). Antonia LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) provides a good synthesis of Gassendi’s logic, as well as philosophy in general. Though mainly focusing on metaphysical and theological issues, Margaret Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) devotes some interesting pages to Gassendi’s understanding of contingency, in turn connected to his understanding of propositions. For a recent analysis of Gassendi’s empiricism, see Maria Seidl, Pierre Gassendi und die Probleme des Empirismus (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2019). 13 On this, see in particular Olivier René Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971). The theme is also central in Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy. 14 See Pierre Gassendi, Exercitationum paradoxicarum adversus Aristoteleos… (Gratianopoli: Ex Typographia Petri Verderii Typog. Regij, 1624); OO III, 97–212; Pierre Gassendi, Exercitationum paradoxicarum adversus Aristoteleos liber alter… (Hagae-Comitum: Apud Adrianum Vlacq., 1659). A French translation and edition of the work was provided by Rochot: see Pierre Gassendi, Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre les Aristotéliciens, ed. and trans. Bernard Rochot (Paris: Vrin, 1959) (hereafter: Rochot). For the dates of composition of the two exercitations, see Rochot in ibid., “Introduction,” vii and xiii; see also Garber’s chapter in this volume. 15 For an edition of the Carpentras manuscript, see Pierre Gassendi, La Logique de Carpentras, ed. and trans. Sylvie Taussig (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012). 16 On this, see LoLordo’s chapter in this volume. 17 Dissertations en forme de paradoxes…, xiii. 18 Selected passages of book II have been included in Brush’s edition (hereafter: Brush). When possible, I quote from there; otherwise, I refer to Rochot’s translation. In addition, I refer to the corresponding passage of OO. Here, see Brush, 30; see also OO III, 149b. 19 Brush, 31; OO III, 149a. 20 Brush, 33–34; OO III, 150a. 21 Brush, 34; OO III, 150b. 22 Brush, 36; OO III, 151a. 23 Brush, 40; OO III, 152a. 24 OO III, 159b–160a.

Gassendi’s Logic  235 5 OO III, 165a–175b. 2 26 OO III, 175b–182a. 27 OO III, 182b. 28 See, for example, Metaphysics VII, iv 1029b–1030a, in Aristotle, Metaphysics, Volume I: Books 1–9, trans. Huge Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 322–323. 29 OO III, 184a: “clare et perfecte.” 30 OO III, 184a. 31 Brush, 68; OO III, 184b–185a. 32 OO III, 190a. 33 OO III, 190a–b. 34 OO III, 190b–191a. 35 Brush, 85; OO III, 192a. 36 Brush, 85–86; OO III, 192a. 37 Brush, 86; OO III, 192a. 38 Ibid. 39 OO III, 192b. 40 Ibid. 41 OO III, 194b. 42 OO III, 195a–b. 43 OO III, 198b–199a. 44 Brush, 104; OO III, 207a–b. 45 Brush, 106; OO III, 208b. For different views on Gassendi’s understanding of mathematics, see Bernard Rochot, “Gassendi et les mathématiques,” Revue d’histoire des sciences et de leurs applications 10 (1957): 69–78; David Sepkoski, “Nominalism and Constructivism in Seventeenth-Century Mathematical Philosophy,” Historia Mathematica 32 (2005): 33–59. 46 Brush, 106; OO III, 209a. 47 See Sylvie Taussig’s ‘Introduction’ in P. Gassendi, La Logique de Carpentras, 13 (hereafter: Carpentras). Sections of this work were incorporated in the Animadversiones and in Syntagma. For the writing of this paragraph, I greatly benefited from Taussig’s introduction, to which I refer the reader for a deeper analysis and contextualization of the manuscript (Carpentras, 7–27). 48 Passages from this section will be taken up in Syntagma, I, 2. 49 Carpentras, 104–105. 50 Carpentras, 105 and 147. On this, see also Ada Bronowski, The Stoics on Lekta: All There Is to Say (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), especially 258. 51 Carpentras, 140–142. 52 Ibid., 142. 53 I hereafter base my English translation on Taussig’s French. Here, see Carpentras, 107. 54 Carpentras, 114. 55 Ibid., 126–127. 56 Ibid., 148. 57 Ibid., 152–153. 58 Ibid., 154–156. 59 Ibid., 154. 60 Ibid., 156. 61 Ibid., 199. 62 Ibid., 230. 63 Ibid., 256. 64 Ibid., 274. 65 Ibid., 276.

236  Rodolfo Garau 6 Ibid., 282. 6 67 Ibid., 284. 68 Ibid., 294. 69 Ibid., 302. 70 Ibid., 308. 71 Ibid., 310. 72 Ibid., 312. 73 Ibid., 318. 74 Here Gassendi refers to the Greek distinction between “semeion” and “endeiktikon,” the former being a sign that can leave space to doubt, the latter a “demonstratorium,” demonstrative sign; see Ibid. 8. 75 Ibid., 322. 76 Ibid., 222. As Bloch showed, this connection between epistemology and sensorial mechanism (with particular reference to vision) is a general trait of Gassendi’s approach to the question of knowledge; see Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi, 6–29. 77 Pierre Gassendi, Vie et mœurs d’Épicure. Vol. II, ed. and trans. Sylvie Taussig (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2006), 206–209; OO V, 228a–b. 78 The treatment of the canonic in Animadversiones is very concise and does not present noteworthy differences compared to that of the Carpentras manuscript; so, I will not treat it here. 79 OO I, 31–90. 80 “De origine et varietate logicae.” 81 “De logicae fine.” 82 As I write this chapter, I am working toward the publication of the first book of Syntagma philosophicum with Justin E. H. Smith, which shall appear in 2023 for Oxford University Press. I will quote directly from the translation we are preparing, providing the corresponding page numbers of OO I. 83 There is a wide literature on this; see, for example, Ashworth, Language and Logic in the Post-Medieval Period; eadem, “The Eclipse of Medieval Logic”; Michael, “La place de Gassendi dans l’histoire de la logique”; idem, “Why Logic Became Epistemology: Gassendi, Port Royal, and the Reformation in Logic.” 84 OO I, 31a. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., 33a. 87 On Gassendi and Bacon, see Élodie Cassan, “The Status of Bacon in Gassendi’s Syntagma Philosophicum History of Logic,” Society and Politics 6 (2012): 80–89; Rodolfo Garau, “Who Was the Founder of Empiricism After All? Gassendi and the ‘Logic’ of Bacon,” Perspectives on Science 29 (2021): 327–354. 88 On Gassendi’s approach to history, see Lynn Sumida Joy, Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 4–5. 89 Interestingly, in the Tours manuscript 706, fol. 50, on the basis of which the editors put together Syntagma philosophicum, one can clearly see that the whole part devoted to Descartes (and indeed to the criticism of his philosophy) is struck through as if it was Gassendi’s intention, at some point of time, to expunge it from the final manuscript. However, a side note, apparently written by Gassendi’s hand, adds that “Il faut mettre [to]ut cecy qui est rayé,” “It must be added all that it has been here cancelled.” This testifies once more to Gassendi’s controversial and changeable relationship with Descartes. I thank M. Palumbo and E. Pasini for helping me to decipher these marginalia.

Gassendi’s Logic  237

90 OO I, 92b–93a. 91 OO I, 93a. 92 OO I, 96b. 93 OO I, 95a. 94 OO I, 94a. 95 OO I, 104b–106b. 96 OO I, 106a. 97 Michael, “La place de Gassendi,” 27. 98 OO I, 108b. 99 See canon VI in OO I, 110b. It is to be noted that despite this innovation, Gassendi’s understanding of the essence and scope of demonstrative, hypothetical, inductive, as well as their discussion, remain substantially in line with the tradition; see OO I, 112a–120b. 100 Fisher, Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy and Science shows how Gassendi’s method might work with reference to his own experimental activity. 101 For an analysis of Gassendi’s notion of sign, see Jean-Charles Darmon, “Sortir du scepticisme: Gassendi et les signes,” in Le Scepticisme au XVIe et au XVIIe siècle. Volume II: Le Retour des philosophies antiques à l’Âge classique, ed. Pierre-François Moreau (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001), 222–238. 102 OO I, 120b. 103 OO I, 121a; see also canon II, ibid. 104 See ibid. 105 OO I, 121b. 106 OO I, 122a. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid. 110 OO I, 122b. 111 A great exception is of course Thomas M. Lennon, The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655–1715 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 112 I here refer to Gassendi’s logic, and not to his empiricism in general. On this, I provide some bibliography in note 12 above. 113 Pierre Gassendi, Institutio logica; et, Philosophiæ Epicuri syntagma (Londini: Ex officina Johannis Redmayne, 1668); Pierre Gassendi, Logica in quatuor partes distributa (Oxoniae: E Theatro Sheldoniano, 1718); Philippe du Trieu and Pierre Gassendi, Manuductio ad logicam… (Oxoniae: Typis & impensis Guil. Hall, 1662). 114 See, for instance, Heinrich A. Engelken, De logices ortu et progressu ad nostra usque tempora… (Lipsiae: Typis Scholvinianis, 1698). 115 Heinrich Uffelmann, Oratio adversus Exercitationes paradoxicas Petri Gassendi (Helmaestadi: Typis Henningi Mulleri, 1666). 116 Claude Buffier, Les Principes du raisonnement exposez en deux logiques nouvéles… (Paris: Chez Pierre Witte…, 1714). 117 Walter Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltonia or a Fabrick of Science Natural Upon the Hypothesis of Atoms (London: Tho. Newcomb for Thomas Heath, 1654). I wrote on Charleton’s reception of Gassendi in “Taming Epicurus: Gassendi, Charleton, and the Translation of Epicurus’ Natural Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century,” in Translating Early Modern Science, eds. Sietske Fransen, Niall Hodson, and Karl A.E. Enenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 233–257. 118 Rolf W. Puster, Britische Gassendi-Rezeption am Beispiel John Lockes (Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1991); see also Richard

238  Rodolfo Garau W.F. Kroll, “The Question of Locke’s Relation to Gassendi,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984): 339–359. 119 See, for example, Richard Kroll, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 159–160. 120 See Clericuzio’s chapter in this volume.

Bibliography Aristotle. Metaphysics, Volume I: Books 1–9. Translated by Huge Tredennick. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933. Arnauld, Antoine. La Logique ou l’art de penser, ed. Pierre Nicole, Facsimile of the 1662 edition. Hildesheim: Olms, 1970. Ashworth, Earline Jennifer. Language and Logic in the Post-Medieval Period. Dordrecht–Boston, MA: Reidel, 1974. Ashworth, Earline Jennifer. “The Eclipse of Medieval Logic.” In The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, edited by Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, 787–796. Cambridge–New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Blanché, Robert. La Logique et son histoire: D’Aristote à Russell. Paris: Armand Colin, 1970. Bloch, Olivier René. “Gassendi critique de Descartes,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 156 (1966): 217–236. Bronowski, Ada. The Stoics on Lekta: All There Is to Say. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Buffier, Claude. Les Principes du raisonnement exposez en deux logiques nouvé­ les… Paris: Chez Pierre Witte…, 1714. Capozzi, Mirella and Gino Roncaglia. “Logic and Philosophy of Logic from Humanism to Kant.” In The Development of Modern Logic, edited by Leila Haaparanta, 78–158. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Cassan, Élodie. “The Status of Bacon in Gassendi’s Syntagma Philosophicum History of Logic,” Society and Politics 6 (2012): 80–89. Charleton, Walter. Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, or, A Fabrick of Science Natural, Upon the Hypothesis of Atoms Founded by Epicurus Repaired [by] Petrus Gassendus. London: Tho. Newcomb for Thomas Heath, 1654. Darmon, Jean-Charles. “Sortir du scepticisme: Gassendi et les signes.” In Le Scepticisme au XVIe et au XVIIe siècle. Volume II: Le retour des philosophies antiques à l’Âge classique, edited by Pierre-François Moreau, 222–238. Paris: Albin Michel, 2001. Detel, Wolfgang. Scientia rerum natura occultarum. Methodologische Studien zur Physik Pierre Gassendis. Berlin, New York: W. de Gruyter, 1978. du Trieu, Philippe and Pierre Gassendi. Manuductio ad logicam… Oxoniae: Typis & impensis Guil. Hall, 1662. Engelken, Heinrich A. De logices ortu et progressu ad nostra usque tempora… Lipsiae: Typis Scholvinianis, 1698. Fisher, Saul. “Gassendi et l’hypothèse dans la méthode scientifique.” In Gassendi et la modernité, edited by Sylvie Taussig, 399–425. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Fisher, Saul. Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy and Science: Atomism for Empiricists. Leiden: Brill, 2005.

Gassendi’s Logic  239 Garau, Rodolfo. “Taming Epicurus: Gassendi, Charleton, and the Translation of Epicurus’ Natural Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century.” In Translating Early Modern Science, edited by Sietske Fransen, Niall Hodson, and Karl A. E. Enenkel, 233–257. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Garau, Rodolfo. “Who Was the Founder of Empiricism After All? Gassendi and the ‘Logic’ of Bacon,” Perspectives on Science 29 (2021): 327–354. Gassendi, Pierre. Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre les Aristotéliciens. Edited and translated by Bernard Rochot. Paris: J. Vrin, 1959. Gassendi, Pierre. Exercitationum paradoxicarum adversus Aristoteleos liber alter… Hagae-Comitum: Apud Adrianum Vlacq., 1659. Gassendi, Pierre. Exercitationum paradoxicarum adversus Aristoteleos libri sep­ tem… Gratianopoli: Ex Typographia Petri Verderii Typog. Regij, 1624. Gassendi, Pierre. Institutio logica, et philosophiæ Epicuri syntagma. Londini: Ex officina Johannis Redmayne, 1668. Gassendi, Pierre. La Logique de Carpentras. Edited and translated by Sylvie Taussig. Turnhout: Brepols, 2012. Gassendi, Pierre. Logica in quatuor partes distributa... Oxoniae: E Theatro Sheldoniano, 1718. Gassendi, Pierre. Opera omnia in sex tomos divisa. Lugduni: Sumptibus Laurentii Anisson, & Ioan. Bapt. Devenet, 1658 (abridged OO). Gassendi, Pierre. The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi. Translated by Craig B. Brush. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972. Gassendi, Pierre. Vie et mœurs d’Épicure. Edited and translated by Sylvie Taussig. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2006. Gregory, Tullio. Scetticismo ed empirismo. Studio su Gassendi. Bari: Laterza, 1961. Jardine, Lisa. “Humanism and the Teaching of Logic” In The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600, edited by Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, 797–807. Cambridge–New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Jardine, Lisa. “Humanistic Logic.” In The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, and Eckhard Kessler, 173–198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Joy, Lynn Sumida. Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Keckermann, Bartholomäus. Praecognitorum logicorum tractatus III. Hanoviae: Apud Guilielmum Antonium, 1599. Kneale, William and Martha Kneale. The Development of Logic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Kroll, Richard W.F. The Material Word: Literate Culture in Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Kroll, Richard W.F. “The Question of Locke’s Relation to Gassendi,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984): 339–359. Lennon, Thomas M. The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655–1715. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. LoLordo, Antonia. Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

240  Rodolfo Garau Michael, Fred. “La place de Gassendi dans l’histoire de la logique,” Corpus 20 (1992): 9–36. Michael, Fred. “Why Logic Became Epistemology: Gassendi, Port Royal, and the Reformation in Logic.” In Logic and the Workings of the Mind: The Logic of Ideas and Faculty Psychology in Early Modern Philosophy (North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy 5), edited by Patricia Easton, 1–20. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1997. Nauta, Lodi. In Defense of Common Sense: Lorenzo Valla’s Humanist Critique of Scholastic Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Norton, David Fate. “The Myth of ‘British Empiricism’,” History of European Ideas 1 (1981): 331–344. Osler, Margaret J. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Puster, Rolf W. Britische Gassendi-Rezeption am Beispiel John Lockes. Stuttgart– Bad Cannstatt: Fromann-Holzboog, 1991. Risse, Wilhelm. Bibliographia logica: Verzeichnis der Druckschriften zur Logik mit Angabe ihrer Fundorte, 4 vols. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965. Risse, Wilhelm. Die Logik der Neuzeit, 2 vols. Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1964, 1970. Rochot, Bernard. “Gassendi et les mathématiques,” Revue d’histoire des sciences et de leurs applications 10 (1957): 69–78. Seidl, Maria. Pierre Gassendi und die Probleme des Empirismus. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2019. Sepkoski, David. “Nominalism and Constructivism in Seventeenth-Century Mathematical Philosophy,” Historia Mathematica 32 (2005): 33–59. Uffelmann, Heinrich. Oratio adversus Exercitationes paradoxicas Petri Gassendi. Helmaestadi: Typis Henningi Mulleri, 1666.

9 Gassendi’s Theory of Space and Time Delphine Bellis

9.1 Introduction Alexandre Koyré once formulated an ambivalent assessment of Gassendi’s contribution to the history of thought: while bringing nothing to the new science of his time, he acknowledged that Gassendi “provided [the new science] with the ontology, or rather with the complement of ontology it required.”1 What Koyré had in mind, first of all, was Gassendi’s theory of space and time. Indeed, departing from Aristotle’s philosophy, Gassendi elaborated a new ontology of space and time which can be seen as more innovative than that of Descartes: Gassendi conceived space and time as neither substance nor accident, but as physical entities whose existence was independent of bodies, thus anticipating Newton’s theory of absolute space and time.2 Even if Koyré tended to reduce Gassendi’s ontology of atoms and the void to its Epicurean source, Gassendi’s theory of space and time was shaped and precisely evolved according to physical requirements linked to the new science and to his scientific researches in cosmology, mechanics, or chemistry. I will show that Gassendi’s philosophy of space and time was elaborated at the crossroads of his scientific interests and of his humanist erudition. The latter referred not only to his wellknown aim of reviving Epicurus’ philosophy—especially Epicurus’ theory of the void—but also involved numerous other sources, including Scholastic notions which were given new conceptual import within what can be seen as an original combination of the old and the new.

9.2 A New Ontology of Space and Time Gassendi’s dissatisfaction with Aristotle’s theory of space and time was clear in his early anti-Aristotelian work, the Exercitationes. Soon, the project to revive Epicurus’ philosophy offered him alternative conceptual resources for a more satisfactory theory, especially as far as space was concerned. Already in 1624, Gassendi had accepted the idea of the void. In the preface to the Exercitationes, he announced that in Book III on

DOI: 10.4324/9781315521732-13

242  Delphine Bellis physics “Aristotelian place is replaced by the space of the ancients, reinstated from its exile. The void is established, or rather reintroduced, in nature.”3 Later in the work, he proposed the idea that time was independent from motion4 and from our thought,5 and that it was not possible to fit everything into Aristotle’s categories.6 But he had not yet come to the idea that, in addition to substance and accident, another ontological category should be created for space and time. He would gradually elaborate this new ontology of space and time and offer his readership his full-fledged theory in his posthumous Syntagma philosophicum. Geoffrey Gorham has convincingly shown that the notion of absolute space—that is, ontologically independent of bodies—was more easily adopted among the forerunners of Gassendi than the notion of absolute time.7 Gassendi was one of the first, in the early modern period, to reject the Aristotelian notion of time as the number of motion and to model the characteristics of time on those of space conceived as independent of any other physical entity.8 He did this through the proposal of some analogy or parallelism between space and time. This parallelism appeared first in Book XIV of De vita et doctrina Epicuri written around 1636–1637,9 and was then more systematically developed in the Animadversiones10 and in the Syntagma philosophicum. Gassendi’s reflections on space and time led him to a final radical revision of the traditional Aristotelian ontological categories: since space and time could not be considered either as substance or as accident, this meant that substance and accident were not the only modes of being, but that space and time should be added to the divisions of being. Gassendi fiercely rejected the Aristotelian determination of space and time as corporeal accidents attributed to the genus of quantity: […] because it seems to us that, even if there were no bodies, there would however remain an immovable space and a flowing time; for that reason it seems that space and time do not depend on bodies and are not in fact corporeal accidents. But they are not on that account incorporeal accidents, as if they inhered in some incorporeal11 substance the way accidents do, but they are incorporeal entities of a different kind than those that are usually called substances or accidents. From this it follows that being, considered in the most general way, cannot adequately be divided into substance and accident, but that place and time should be added as two particular members to the division, as if one said that every being is either substance, or accident, or place in which all substances and accidents are, or time by which all substances and accidents endure. And this is truly so because there is no substance or accident which is not somewhere or in some place, and sometime that is in some moment, so that, even if such substance or such accident perished, the place would no less continue to subsist and the time to flow.12

Gassendi’s Theory of Space and Time  243 Yet, space and time were not entia rationis, but rather real beings:13 From this it follows that place and time must be considered as true things or as real beings. For, although they are not like what is usually considered as substance or accident, still they actually do exist, and they do not depend on the intellect like chimeras, since, whether the intellect thinks about them or not, the place will remain and the time will continue to flow.14 Place (or space) was defined as follows: […] place is quantity or a certain extension; it is indeed space or the three-dimensional interval consisting of length, [breadth15] and depth into which a body can be received or through which a body can pass. But one has to say, at the same time, that its dimensions are incorporeal and that in fact place is an incorporeal interval or space, that is, an incorporeal quantity.16 In order to make his readership understand why, in addition to bodily dimensions, spatial dimensions must be conceived, Gassendi relied on a thought experiment of annihilation of the world: God could reduce to nothing the matter comprised in the sublunary sphere and preserve this sphere void of any body. The dimensions of the sublunary sphere would nevertheless remain. If, by hypothesis, God had created an infinitely extended world—which actually he has not—he could, step by step, reduce all its parts to nothing and an infinitely extended void would remain. This should lead us to think that, independently of bodies, some incorporeal immense dimensions constitute the underlying framework of the material finite world created by God.17 This led Gassendi to identify the following objective properties of space and time: (1) the absence of boundary or infinity, that is, immensity and an anteriority to the creation of the world and a posteriority to the annihilation of the world; (2) immobility (for space) or flowing character (for time) independent of bodies, that is, indifference to their content, and homogeneity; (3) incorporeality, that is, coincidence between their dimensions and those of bodies or motions in the world, and continuity, that is, impossibility to separate their contiguous innumerable parts; and (4) indifference to one another, that is, each part of space is identical in every time and each portion of time is identical in every place: As place, considered in itself, is totally unbounded, so time, considered in itself, has neither beginning nor end. And, as any particular moment of time is the same in all places, so any portion of space remains the same at all times. Likewise, as space remains the same and motionless whether something exists in it or not, so time always

244  Delphine Bellis elapses at the same rate whether anything endures in it or not, whether it is in motion or at rest, and whether it moves faster or slower. And, as space cannot be broken in two by any force, but remains continuous, the same, and motionless, so time cannot be stilled and suspended by any force, but proceeding unimpeded always flows without variation.18 Space was therefore distinguished from the Aristotelian notion of place as the superficies of the surrounding body (Physics, IV, 4, 212a5–7) which was two-dimensional,19 as well as from the Scholastic notion of imaginary spaces existing beyond the boundaries of the finite world and which were conceived as non-dimensional to reflect God’s immensity.20 While Gassendi relied on the Scholastic notion of imaginary spaces, he reshaped it in order to support the reality of an extramundane infinite void space which, unlike the imaginary spaces of the Scholastics, was endowed with three-dimensionality. For Gassendi, characterizing spaces as imaginary did not mean that they were exclusively mental spaces but that “we imagine their spatial dimensions as being like the bodily dimensions that we are used to observing in corporeal things.”21 This is very similar to the definition of imaginary spaces that could be found in the Commentary to Aristotle’s Physics of the Jesuits of Coimbra.22 But since Gassendi endowed his imaginary spaces with three-dimensionality, he operated a physicalization of space that was foreign to the Scholastics.23 Moreover, Gassendi rejected the distinction between imaginary and real spaces and claimed that there were no other spaces than those labeled ‘imaginary’ by the Scholastics.24 Gassendi would also apply this characterization of the imaginary to time conceived as independent of bodies and minds.25 As Karl Schuhmann noticed, even if they were explicitly excluded from the categories of substance and accident, space and time fell rather on the side of substance because they were independent of any mind or body and were rather a condition of possibility of the latter.26 However, their ontological status remained ambiguous: because Gassendi was keen to except space and time from creation and to preserve their independence in relation to God, he was forced to espouse the claim that space and time were “nothing positive” contrary to creatures,27 despite being entia realia.28

9.3 Space and the Void As we have already seen, Gassendi was quick to adopt the Epicurean conception of the void as a model to conceive space. Space was essentially equated with void.29 But Gassendi’s theory of space was not confined to the recovery of this ancient source and to its arguments in favor of the existence of void space independent of body. Gassendi did not limit himself to the traditional Epicurean argument according to which the void

Gassendi’s Theory of Space and Time  245 was necessary to make motion possible.30 But Gassendi’s theory of space was soon related to his research in cosmology, mechanics, and chemistry. From what can be read in his early texts, the possibility cannot be excluded that Gassendi was first a proponent of an Epicurean- or Brunianinspired cosmology, with innumerable worlds in infinite space.31 By that time, Gassendi was also a supporter of the heliocentric system, but he was deeply affected by Galileo’s condemnation in 1633. This led him to rethink his cosmological conceptions, so that he ended up explicitly supporting the Tychonian system.32 Of course, it was not a priori impossible to conciliate a Tychonian cosmology with an infinitely extended universe. But Galileo’s condemnation and Bruno’s unfortunate fate will have made Gassendi not only more cautious, but aware of the theological implications involved in cosmological issues. This led him to empty the Epicurean universe of its multiplicity of worlds and to put forward instead the conception of a finite, though very extended, world with the Earth at its center; this unique world surrounded by an immense (infinite) void.33 Unsurprisingly, Gassendi’s first reflections on extramundane void space appear only after 1633. He thus dropped the Epicurean model for a more Stoic cosmological model.34 Gassendi’s acceptance of void space in nature was reinforced, moreover, by his adoption of Galilean mechanics in the 1640s, as can be seen in De motu (published 1642) and De proportione (published 1646).35 In those texts, Gassendi needed to distinguish the motion of a projectile both in relation to air and to a stable frame of reference that is space: “First, it will not be difficult for you to imagine that air is one thing, and that the space in which air is, is another thing. Indeed, air is a mobile body, space an incorporeal and immobile place.”36 Gassendi developed the idea of an immobile space because he needed to conceive a frame of reference for motion. Space was thus becoming a mind-independent entity, assimilated to void. It was not only a condition of possibility for motion, but could be inserted into a cosmological structure that distanced itself from Brunianism.37 Void space could also find experimental support, and Gassendi indeed was progressively led to refine his conception of the void in the face of new experimental data. Owing to his acceptance of the Aristotelian principle of the horror vacui, by 1642, Gassendi had not yet conceived of the possibility of large intramundane void spaces.38 In De apparente, he evoked only interstitial invisible voids39 and extramundane void. In his treatment of the former, however, he went beyond the mere Epicurean argument of the void being required to allow for motion in general. Indeed, Gassendi reported some experimental results based on observations of light rays going through some glass panes of various thickness. This was ostensibly intended to show that there were always some passages to allow for the sun’s rays to go through the glass in straight line but, as Rochot suggested, it was more an attempt to provide

246  Delphine Bellis sensible support to an otherwise philosophical argument than a deduction on the nature of void drawn from experiments.40 Published in 1649, the Animadversiones presents two important new departures from Gassendi’s previous writings: first, in addition to interstitial and extramundane void, the Animadversiones introduces a third type—namely, accumulated void—created by artificial means; secondly, the book presents explanations of new experiments which were used to show the existence of interstitial and accumulated void. Gassendi maintained that there was no great difficulty in conceiving of the separate extramundane void, but that it was more “controversial” to establish the existence of small interstitial void spaces because they were not sensible.41 This was indeed a problem for an empiricist like Gassendi: how could the existence of void be proved if it was not visible? An experiment on the dissolution of salt within water, that he himself performed and for which he reported results, testifies to the importance he attributed to experimental support for his conception of void spaces within bodies.42 The fact that it was not possible to dissolve more than a certain quantity of salt in a given quantity of water was, for Gassendi, a clue that there was a determinate number of small void spaces in water. These pores had different shapes, which explained why a quantity of water that seemed to be saturated with common salt could still dissolve alum, for example. The parts of common salt had filled cubic pores in water, while the particles of alum could fill the remaining octahedral voids. Thus, the theory of void was also linked to Gassendi’s theory of matter and investigations of chemical properties. The Animadversiones section entitled “On a recent experiment about accumulated void,”43 introduces this third type of void for the first time. Coacervate or accumulated void could be created artificially and was visible (contrary to interstitial void). In support of the existence of this third type of void, Gassendi referred to the findings of new experiments involving a tube containing mercury: those of Torricelli (1643)44 and the experiments conducted in Rouen by Petit and Pascal (1646).45 For Gassendi, the importance of these experiments rested on the fact that they “demonstrate” the existence of accumulated void “more broadly” and “more evidently” than the instruments of Hero of Alexandria (like the clepsydra, perennial fountains, or bombards).46 Establishing the existence of a quantity of void that was large enough to be perceived by the senses might have appeared, to an empiricist like Gassendi, as a kind of mundane sample of the immense extramundane void that existed outside the world.47 But at first he did not “dare affirm in a straightforward way that this space is thoroughly void, like the void that is conceived to be outside the world or like the void that would be in the world if a divine or another force were to expel every body from any space,”48 and he seemed to use the word inane in a purely descriptive fashion.49 Though he did not yet dare affirm it, this was what he inclined toward in his analysis

Gassendi’s Theory of Space and Time  247 of those experiments. The implication was that there was no substantial difference between the different types of void. Establishing by experiment the existence of one type was thus a means to confirm the existence of all types of void in general. But experimental support was still needed for the claim that the top of the tube containing mercury in these investigations was indeed void. Gassendi sought to demonstrate this by admitting air or water into this space; the speed of ingress—it entered impetuously or “with avidity” (avide)—gave an indication that there was no air content to be displaced.50 This experiment was also a proof against the Aristotelian principle of the horror vacui, giving it a lesser, merely metaphorical significance.51 Gassendi replaced the Aristotelian principle of the horror vacui with the Torricelian principle of air pressure or resistance and considered that the cause of gravity was terrestrial attraction.52 The top of the tube could not be understood as perfectly void, however, because light could go through it, and light, for Gassendi, was a corporeal thing.53 He recalled, moreover, that there were corporeal things that we could not see, like the magnetic particles.54 Nevertheless, these experiments were taken to provide sufficient evidence that a relative void (at least a void of air) was possible. Finally, in an appendix to volume II of the Animadversiones entitled “On a new experiment made on the void,” and deliberately added by Gassendi just before it was published, he discussed the results of the experiment performed at the Puy-de-Dôme in 1648. Note that Gassendi himself would perform this experiment in Toulon on 5 February 1650 and would report it in the Syntagma philosophicum.55 In this appendix, Gassendi explained the results of the Puy-de-Dôme experiment by linking air pressure to gravity. He distinguished between two types of void, “one that is disseminated among things, in small quantity and in small insensible parts […] the other that is accumulated in great quantity and is sensible.”56 We know that Gassendi did not reject the idea of extramundane void, since he took up the thought experiment of the annihilation of the world in the Animadversiones57 (and he would come back to it in the Syntagma philosophicum). One can therefore assume that, in his view, the accumulated sensible void and the extramundane void could be considered to partake of the same nature, and that the former was some kind of empirical proof of the existence of the latter. Gassendi integrated the new experimental elements presented in the Animadversiones into the book on space and time in the Syntagma philo­ sophicum and had therefore to modify the structure of De vita et doctrina Epicuri upon which this part of the Syntagma was based. Between chapter I of this book of the Syntagma (space and time are neither substance nor accident) and chapter VI (on space as an interval), he introduced chapters II to V (II on extramundane void, III on disseminate void, IV on accumulated void, and V on the experiments with the tube containing mercury). In a more coherent way than in the Animadversiones—where one of the

248  Delphine Bellis three types of void was often confused with another—in the Syntagma philosophicum, Gassendi finally established that there were three types of void: separatum, disseminatum, and coacervatum.58

9.4 Time: The “Twin-Brother of Space”59 As in his conception of space, Gassendi intended to develop a conception of time that would overcome a merely subjective or conventional approach and establish it as an immutable entity, independent of other changing or subjective entities, like moving bodies or human minds. This involved a rebuttal of two ancient conceptions of time: namely that of Aristotle, according to which time was the number or measure of motion (Physics, IV, 11, 219b), and that of Epicurus which made time an accident of accident, that is, something following from motion or rest which are not ontologically independent (contrary to body or void), but which happen to things consistent by themselves.60 While Gassendi rejected Aristotle’s conception of time early in his philosophical career,61 his approach to Epicurus’ notion of time was more complicated. As Olivier Bloch has shown, in Book XIV of De vita et doctrina Epicuri, Gassendi had not yet reached a stabilized conception of time: he still relied here, to some extent, on Epicurus’ conception of time as an accident, but had already laid the foundations for his later conception of time as an entity independent of minds and bodies.62 This is especially visible in the way he presented the Epicurean position. In De vita et doctrina Epicuri as well as in the Syntagma philosophicum, Gassendi went so far as to wonder whether the Epicurean conception of time did not amount to making time an ens rationis, thereby bringing Epicurus dangerously close to the Aristotelians.63 In his earlier text, Gassendi contemplated the possibility of considering time “almost as a super-added accident”—while admitting, however, that time was not in fact such.64 More importantly, he responded to the possibility that his reader might consider Epicurean time as an ens rationis: he denied that Epicurus ever explicitly stated that time consisted only in a figment of reason and instead interpreted Epicurus’ conception of time as being a “very general and sui generis accident” which accompanies all other accidents and, through the latter, all substances.65 In so doing, Gassendi made Epicurus’ conception closer to the one he would eventually adopt. In the Syntagma philosophicum, by contrast, Gassendi distanced himself more clearly from Epicurus’ conception and explicitly endorsed the interpretation of Epicurean time as being an ens rationis, thus associating it with what he deemed to be Aristotle’s conception of time.66 Moreover, in the Syntagma philosophicum, Gassendi did not ascribe to Epicurean time the same kind of specificity and generality as he had in De vita et doctrina Epicuri, thus increasing the gap between Epicurus’ conception of time and his own.67

Gassendi’s Theory of Space and Time  249 As Bloch has shown, Book XIV of De vita et doctrina Epicuri is to some extent mired in inconsistencies: in chapter 8 (“How time should be conceived and especially through a parallelism with space or place”68), in a way that rather contradicts what he had written in chapter 6 where space and time were excluded from the categories of substance and accident,69 Gassendi came back to the Epicurean definition of time as an accident of accidents, and even applied the same characterization to space: because of the analogy between the two, they were “almost (quasi) parallel and very general attributes of all things or, as Epicurus says, συμπτωμάτων συμπτώματα, accidents of accidents.”70 While this parallelism was hardly compatible with Epicurus’ conception of space and time—for the Epicurean void or space was considered a natura, that is, a substance, and not an accident71—it was endorsed by Gassendi’s own approach in 1637, when he projected onto Epicurus’ theory of time the analogy he himself had already conceived between space and time. This incoherence does not seem to have struck him, but manifests an attempt to reconcile Epicurus’ theory with his own—an attempt which would be abandoned by 1649 in the Animadversiones.72 While preserving the parallelism between space and time, in the Syntagma philosophicum, Gassendi explicitly rejected the Epicurean characterization of time as an accident of accidents.73 He also explicitly rejected the Epicurean conception of time as an accident dependent on existing things or thinking minds and instead favored the Stoic theory—obviously closer to his own in this respect—according to which time is conceived as being by itself.74 The need for a stable and objective temporal framework was explicitly invoked by Gassendi as a reason to distance himself from the Epicurean conception which reduced time to subjective duration: “Moreover it does not seem that Epicurus is right to say that the day or the night is long or short relying only on a time that we devise in our thought, for they are long or short instead in relation to a time which flows by in the meanwhile whether we think about it or not.”75 So the manuscript of De vita et doctrina Epicuri represents a transitional phase of Gassendi’s thought on space and time. Bloch explains this transitional dimension as a function of Gassendi’s work on Galileo’s mechanics in the 1640s. Even if the notion of time as being independent of bodies and minds already emerged in Gassendi’s texts in 1636–1637, Bloch contends that the clear watershed between Epicurus’ conception of time and that of Gassendi appeared only in the 1640s as a sequel to Gassendi’s reflections on the Galilean law of free fall which required an independent temporal frame of reference. Book XIV of De vita et doctrina Epicuri would initiate this switch— albeit in a somewhat incoherent and convoluted way—from an Epicurean conception of time as an accident of accidents to time conceived as something independent.76 Only later, starting in January 1644 with his letter to Sorbière and then in the Animadversiones and the Syntagma philosophi­ cum, would Gassendi’s ontology be clarified in such a way as to definitely

250  Delphine Bellis break with Epicurus’ conception of time and to integrate those newly conceived objects that were space and time.77 Therefore, contrary to Čapek’s claim in relation to Philosophiae Epicuri syntagma,78 Gassendi was not still maintaining a relativist and subjectivist theory of time—time being superadded to things by the operation of our mind—as late as 1649.79 The Philosophiae Epicuri syntagma was indeed no more than a compendium of Epicurus’ opinions on diverse matters, and did not reflect Gassendi’s positions on the same topics. Alongside this rejection of Epicurus’ theory of time, Gassendi also opposed Aristotle’s definition of time as the number or measure of motion. In this respect, his position did not change. However, as we shall see, he managed to distort and integrate some elements of the Aristotelian tradition on this topic, so as to nourish his own conception of time.80 In the Aristotelian tradition, the definition of time was related to the motion of the outermost sphere of the heavens within a geocentric cosmology. This amounted to referring the time of things in the world to some specific physical entity considered as a stable point of reference. However, the new heliocentric cosmologies emerging by the end of the sixteenth century could have constituted, among other things, a threat to this definition of time.81 Remarkably, Gassendi contrived to elude this vexed question and instead based his criticism of the Aristotelian notion of time on other arguments, without any reference to the cosmological issue. In the Syntagma philosophicum, Gassendi criticized Aristotle’s definition of time as the number or measure of motion first because of its presupposing the presence of someone to count: “Nor may Aristotle say that time is the measure of some motion which would not exist without a measurer, for in the last analysis whatever the time is, it elapses and has its before and after whether it is being measured or not.”82 Gassendi also rejected the dependence of Aristotelian time on motion because this dependence carried with it the risk of multiplying time frames: “time does not therefore depend upon the motion itself or its parts, whether numbered or not, for the very good reason that it has existed before the motion of the heavens and we perceive most clearly that time is not multiple while celestial motions are. Nor would there be several times if several worlds and several celestial motions were created by God.”83 Note, however, that for Suárez, for example, the Aristotelian definition of time did not imply that time was something purely dependent on the human mind. Suárez deemed time to be not so much something external to the thing on which it was predicated as something internal to it, an intrinsic denomination.84 He distinguished between intrinsic duration and extrinsic time.85 This was a way to circumvent the subjective threat, as well as the relativist approach, potentially weakened by recent alternative cosmologies. While intrinsic duration was defined as the successive existence of individual movements, Suárez circumscribed time as measured by the motion of the

Gassendi’s Theory of Space and Time  251 heavens to what he called ‘extrinsic time’ and he identified this notion with Aristotle’s conception of time.86 Gassendi was perfectly aware of these Scholastic distinctions, which he mentioned only to dismiss.87 His aim precisely consisted in overcoming a subjective and relativistic conception of time (based on an arbitrarily chosen system of coordinates), not by ascribing it to things in time themselves, but by raising time to an independent and immutable ontological status.88 Be that as it may, Gassendi did not shy away from appropriating another Scholastic notion in order to make his own conception of time more explicit: namely, that of imaginary time. Gassendi appropriated the notion of imaginary time, just as he had done with space:89 Those philosophers who make a distinction and recognize the existence of time they call imaginary […] grant that before the creation of the heavens a certain time flowed by within which they admit that the world could have been made before it was, a time which flows during the existence of the world and will continue to flow when the world ceases to be.90 Time existed before the creation of the world and those times should not be considered imaginary in the sense of fictitious.91 Imaginary time was traditionally conceived, within a theological context, as the time preceding the creation of the world. It was labeled ‘imaginary’ to distinguish it from the ‘real’ time associated with motion in the created world.92 However, the notion was progressively given more philosophical substance. Hence the introduction by Suárez of the notion of imaginary time as a mental representation of succession, apprehended as infinite, to a portion of which intrinsic time or duration could be referred.93 But, for Gassendi, just as there is no other space than that usually labeled ‘imaginary,’ there is no other time than imaginary time conceived independently of created things. Subverting the Scholastic distinction between imaginary and real time, Gassendi identified as the only real time the one called imaginary by the Scholastics: But because of their preconceived notions they proceed too far and declare that in addition there exists a certain time which they call true and real, for example like the one defined by Aristotle, which had its beginnings with the motion of the heavens, which stands still when the motion is interrupted and ceases when it stops. I say because of their preconceived notions since if we look at the matter seriously, it does not seem that there is any other time than the one they call imaginary and one that is necessary only in order for them to grant that it flowed when, while the heavens once stood still, Joshua fought for a time against the kings of the Amorites.94

252  Delphine Bellis By conflating imaginary time with real time (while they were sharply distinguished in Suárez), Gassendi removed from physical objects the reality of time; he overcame the mainly mental dimension of Suárez’s imaginary time and transformed the latter into a real mind-independent entity. Indeed, as we have seen, for Gassendi ‘imaginary’ did not mean only mental but meant that we imagine the dimensions of imaginary space and time by analogy with the dimensions we observe in bodies.95 But if it is not too difficult a task to understand how we could conceive the simultaneous dimensions of space by analogy with bodily dimensions, how should we conceive imaginary time in that respect? It seems that Gassendi’s original application of the Scholastic notion of the imaginary to time is less straightforward than with space. Actually, the analysis of time is obtained by a twofold derivation: time is conceived through a parallelism with space, which is itself conceived by analogy with bodies. From this it follows that just as space has no boundary, time has no beginning nor end, it is homogeneous, its regular flow remains unaffected and unimpeded by created things.96 Just as the three dimensions of space coincide with those of bodies distributed in those portions of space, the successive dimensions of time are equivalent to the motions of bodies.97 But time is imaginary in the sense that we can conceive its dimensions according not to those of bodies’ extension but to those of their motions: Hence, perhaps it will be sufficient if, when we imagine corporeal things like incorporeal ones, we say that just as there are, in corporeal things, two diffusions, extensions or quantities, one permanent, namely magnitude, the other successive, namely motion, there are as well, in incorporeal things, two diffusions, one permanent, which is place or space, the other successive, which is duration or time.98 Just like for space, this position echoes what can be found in Fonseca’s twofold conception of time.99 By comparison with space, Gassendi had nevertheless to acknowledge the difficulty involved in analyzing an incorporeal and successive entity like time, except by way of metaphor or analogy.100 For that reason, Gassendi compared time to the flame of a lamp and to the flow of water in a stream in order to express the succession of its parts.101 But Gassendi imposed limits on the use of analogy: if incorporeal things have to be imagined according to the model of corporeal ones, the latter have to be chosen properly: Therefore, when it is objected that time is nothing on the grounds that while it is said to consist of past, present, and future, the past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist, and the present is totally evanescent, one may answer that this is just as if it were objected that a flame is nothing on the grounds that whatever existed before it no

Gassendi’s Theory of Space and Time  253 longer exists, whatever will follow it does not yet exist, and whatever it is at present is evanescent. The error in logic is apparent, for they consider heterogeneous things as if they were homogeneous, or successive things as if they were permanent, when they are totally distinct in kind, and worlds apart.102 Just as Gassendi had rejected the idea that space was an accident dependent on body, he conceived of time, not as an accident, but as an incorporeal successive quantity independent of the existence of any created thing.103 Time is not dependent on the existence of the created world and was not created at the same time as the world. It is anterior to the creation of the world and would subsist should the world be destroyed.104 As he had done for space, Gassendi recurred to the same thought experiment of the annihilation of the world by God: time would continue to flow between the annihilation of the world and its recreation by God105 and it would be one and the same time if several worlds existed.106 This allowed Gassendi to put paid, once and for all, to Aristotle’s definition of time as the measure of motion, that is, as depending on the motion of some bodies. Gassendi’s adoption of Galileo’s analysis of free fall led him to reverse the relation established by Aristotle between time and motion. Gassendi dismissed the Scholastic conceptions of time as dependent on the motion of the first mobile, and as not really distinct from it.107 Time does not depend on motion, he insisted. On the contrary, various motions can be referred to the timeframe: In fact time is a certain flux, as I have already said many times, that is no less independent of motion than of rest, with which not only several but indeed innumerable diverse motions may coexist. And it is so far from the truth that time is the measure of celestial motion that celestial motion is rather the measure of time if only for the reason that the measure ought to be better known than the thing being measured.108 In De vita et doctrina Epicuri, Gassendi had already conceived of time as independent of motion and rest and as merely indicated by them.109 Therefore, even if Gassendi, from an ontological perspective, rejected and reversed Aristotle’s definition of time, from an epistemological point of view, he still relied on the connection between time and motion.110 But motion became a conventional and pragmatic instrument to measure time, rather than being that which was measured by time: Still it is true that men do make use of motion, relate to it, and measure it, especially the motion of the heavens, in their designation, discrimination, and partition of time’s divisions. But time does not therefore depend upon the motion itself or its parts, whether

254  Delphine Bellis numbered or not, for the very good reason that it exists before the motion of the heavens […].111

9.5 God in Space and Time: Immensity and Eternity While space and time, for Gassendi, were at the same time uncreated and independent of God,112 they were nevertheless quantities. Immensity and eternity were the two attributes by which God had a relation to space and time.113 Space was conceived as infinite because God was infinite and present in some place corresponding to his immensity.114 If Gassendi took into account the attempts of Plato and Boethius to distinguish time and eternity, he parted company with them insofar as he did not endorse a presentist conception of eternity according to which eternity is only an immobile present characterized by a complete simultaneity, without past or future.115 Did he then endorse a conception of eternity as sempiternity, that is, as an infinite flow of successive instants?116 Distinguishing between eternity and what is eternal, that is, God, Gassendi acknowledged that there was no succession in God (because God was immutable), but claimed that this was not the case for eternity.117 Even if there was no proportion (mathematical or quantitative) between the duration of human lives and the duration of God’s life,118 Gassendi did not seem to admit a difference in nature between eternity and time. He indeed claimed that “time and eternity do not differ in any other respect than the fact that eternity be infinite duration, and time, as the word is commonly used, some determinate part of this duration.”119 But it was only in the common use of the word that time was considered as limited. In itself it was infinite and, by the end of the chapter on time, the equivalence between eternity and “time flowing without interruption” had become clear under Gassendi’s pen.120 The parallelism between space and time applied to the relation of both entities with God. Gassendi tried to link the immensity of extramundane void space with the immensity of God. This he did on the basis of an analogy with God’s eternity which implied that God existed in any time, and so should exist also in any place.121 But this remained at the level of an imperfect analogy and certainly manifested, for Gassendi, the limits of our cognitive capacities, and particularly as this pertained to our knowledge of God.122 For Gassendi, God was in space because of his immensity. The notion of immensity involved analytical inclusion in being in space.123 So this immensity was conceived as if of extension. But Gassendi did not want to imagine the divine substance as extended through space like bodies were. Does that mean that God was not extended through space? Or that God could be extended through space but in a way different from that of bodies? How could God be present in that space, since God was not dimensional, while void space was dimensional for Gassendi? Gassendi’s position on the matter remains indeterminate.124

Gassendi’s Theory of Space and Time  255

9.6 Conclusion Gassendi’s theory of space and time is both the product of his humanist— at times critical—reading of ancient sources (Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics) and of his reflections on scientific matters. Space, for Gassendi, just like time, was the necessary condition for anything material to exist.125 These two entities were something objective, and not minddependent. But contrary to previous conceptions, they were clearly distinguished from bodies and motions. This gave rise to an original conception of space and time, precisely insofar as it overcame the traditional dichotomy identified by Grant according to which space—but this could also apply to time—was either “God-created, independent, separate” or else was “God-filled, dependent.”126 But this conception of space and time as being both uncreated and independent of God seemed to threaten God’s omnipotence: how could something independent of God exist without having been created by him? This was a problem Gassendi’s disciples inherited and with which they had to contend. As Lennon has shown, this led to two diverging interpretations of space and time: either space and time were deemed independent of God and reduced to nothing specific (this was Bernier’s position)127 or they were objective and positive entities and were to some extent assimilated to God (this was Launay’s position in his Essais physiques).128 As is well known, the second path was that soon to be followed by Isaac Newton.129

Acknowledgments Research for this chapter was made possible by the GASSENDI project funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-19-CE27-0004).

Notes 1 Alexandre Koyré, “Gassendi et la science de son temps,” in Actes du congrès du tricentenaire de Pierre Gassendi (4–7 août 1955), ed. Comité du tricentenaire de Gassendi (Paris: PUF, 1957), 175–190, esp. 176 (my translation). 2 Bernard Rochot was one of the first to retrace this lineage between Gassendi and Newton, through the mediation of Barrow: see “Sur les notions de temps et d’espace chez quelques auteurs du XVIIe siècle, notamment Gassendi et Barrow,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 9 (1956): 97–104. Charleton also played a pivotal role in acquainting Newton with Gassendi’s thought: see Richard Westfall, “The Foundations of Newton’s Philosophy of Nature,” British Journal for the History of Science 1 (1962): 171–182; James E. McGuire, “Existence, Actuality, and Necessity: Newton on Space and Time,” Annals of Science 35 (1978): 463–508; Clericuzio’s chapter in this volume. 3 The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi, trans. Craig B. Brush (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972), 24 (modified), OO III, 102. 4 OO III, 131b: “quasi vero sine motu tempus esse non potuisset?” 5 OO III, 140a.

256  Delphine Bellis 6 OO III, 132a. 7 Geoffrey Gorham, “‘The Twin-Brother of Space’: Spatial Analogy in the Emergence of Absolute Time,” Intellectual History Review 22 (2012): 1–17. 8 Telesio and Patrizi also rejected the Aristotelian definition of time and started to give it some ontological independence: see Karl Schuhmann, “Zur Entstehung des neuzeitlichen Zeitbegriffs: Telesio, Patrizi, Gassendi,” Philosophia naturalis 25 (1988): 37–64. 9 This work was never published by Gassendi and has remained mostly in manuscript; see De vita et doctrina Epicuri, bibliothèque municipale de Tours, MS 709, f. 209v. According to Pintard, book XIV of De vita et doc­ trina Epicuri was written in 1636–1637: see René Pintard, La Mothe le Vayer, Gassendi, Guy Patin. Études de bibliographie et de critique suivies de textes inédits de Guy Patin (Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1943), 42. In his letter to Peiresc of 28 April 1631 (TL, 251–252), Gassendi sketched out the table of contents of the book on Epicurus upon which he was working. He had then already written the chapter entitled “De natura incorporea, hoc est inani seu loco.” Void was not yet explicitly identified with space, nor linked to a cosmological structure of the universe. In 1631, Gassendi might easily have been described as just a Copernican who, besides, had adopted the Epicurean theory of void. Time was treated in a separate chapter entitled “De tempore, quod nonnulli volunt coelestis motus esse consequens.” This means that, by this time, in all probability, Gassendi had not yet conceived of a parallelism of space and time. Time was certainly not conceived as an important philosophical notion, nor one that might give rise to a requirement for any modifications of the traditional ontological categories. 10 Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii (Lugduni: Apud Guillelmum Barbier, 1649), 610. But note that, in the Animadversiones, Gassendi first proposed a brief analysis of time, before introducing an analysis of place and space based on this analogy, and then returning to time. 11 Later, Gassendi specified that “incorporeal,” when applied to space and time, did not mean spiritual: OO I, 183b. 12 OO I, 182a, my translation. 13 OO I, 179a. Fonseca built a similar reasoning in order to establish that space is neither substance nor accident. But while Gassendi concluded that it was necessary to think of a third type of being, Fonseca claimed that space was not an ens: see Pedro da Fonseca, Commentariorum…In libros Meta­ physicorum…Tomus secundus (Francofurti: Impensis Ioannis Theobaldi Schonwetteri, 1599), 701. That space or place is neither substance nor accident is also to be found in Nicole Oresme (Questiones super Physicam, IV, qu. 6) and Francesco Patrizi. However, Patrizi’s theory of space, instead of leading to a renewed ontology, induced even more confusion, for Patrizi claimed that space was “an incorporeal body, and a corporeal non-body” (Nova de universis philosophia (Ferrariae: Apud Benedictum Mammarellum, 1591), 65). Gassendi acknowledged Patrizi as one of his sources: OO I, 246a. On this, see Karl Schuhmann, “La doctrine gassendienne de l’espace,” in Pierre Gassendi 1592–1655: Actes du colloque international Digne-lesBains, 18–21 mai 1992 (Digne: Société scientifique et littéraire des Alpes-deHaute-Provence, 1994), 233–244. Note that all of these predecessors of Gassendi applied their analysis only to space, not to time. 14 OO I, 182a, my translation. 15 “Latitudinis” is an addition in the second edition of Gassendi’s Opera omnia (Florentiae: Apud Joannem Cajetanum Tartini, & Sanctem Franchi, 1727). 16 OO I, 182a, my translation.

Gassendi’s Theory of Space and Time  257 17 OO I, 182b–183a. On the use of the hypothesis of the annihilation of the world by Gassendi and the latter’s influence on Hobbes, see Gianni Paganini, “Le néant et le vide. Les parcours croisés de Gassendi et de Hobbes,” in Gassendi et la modernité, ed. Sylvie Taussig (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 177–214. Cees Leijenhoorst has emphasized that the annihilatio mundi was a widely spread way of reasoning in late Aristotelianism: see The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism: The Late Setting of Thomas Hobbes’ Natural Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 109. See also Tiziana Suarez-Nani, “L’espace sans corps. Étapes médiévales de l’hypothèse de l’annihilatio mundi,” in Lieu, espace, mouvement: physique, métaphysique et cosmologie (XIIe – XVIe siècles), eds. Tiziana Suarez-Nani, Olivier Ribordy, and Antonio Petagine (Barcelona: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 2017), 93–107. See also OO I, 189b–190a where the existence of uncreated extramundane void space is justified by God’s power to create new worlds not contiguous to ours, and OO VI, 158a. 18 Selected Works, 395; OO I, 224b. On space, see also OO I, 183a–b. 19 OO I, 217a–b. 20 See Edward Grant, Much Ado About Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 108–181; Frederik A. Bakker, Delphine Bellis, and Carla Rita Palmerino, eds., Space, Imagination and the Cosmos from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (Cham: Springer, 2018). 21 OO I, 189b. OO I, 183b, my translation. 22 Conimbricenses, In octo libros Physicorum…, vol. 2 (Coloniae: Sumptibus Lazari Zetzneri, 1596), 519. 23 For a more detailed analysis of the reinterpretation of the Scholastic notion of imaginary spaces by Gassendi, see Delphine Bellis, “Imaginary Spaces and Cosmological Issues in Gassendi’s Philosophy,” in Space, Imagination and the Cosmos, 233–260. 24 OO I, 183b, my translation: But it is certain that, by these words ‘space’ and ‘spatial dimensions,’ we do not conceive anything but those spaces that are commonly called imaginary and of which the greatest part of the Church Doctors admit as existing beyond the world. 25 See OO I, 224a, 225a, and section 3 of this chapter. 26 Schuhmann, “La doctrine gassendienne de l’espace,” 239. 27 OO I, 183b–184a, my translation: […] with space and its dimensions, the word ‘incorporeal’ does not denote anything but the negation of body or of corporeal dimensions; and it does not denote any positive nature to which the faculties and the actions [of space] would belong, since […] space can neither act or be acted upon, but it only has the [non-]resistance that allows other things to pass through it or to occupy it. For that reason, one also has to remove the scruple that may arise from the possibility to infer that space, as described, is neither produced by God, nor dependent on him. And since it has been said that space is something or another, it would seem to follow that God would not be the author of all things… But [the Doctors of the Church] are not deterred because of the inconvenience there would be to say that these spaces are neither produced by God nor dependent on him, since they are nothing positive, that is to say they are neither substance nor accident, two words which include any thing that was produced by God.

258  Delphine Bellis 28 This tension was pointed out by Gianni Paganini already in the Animadversiones: see Paganini, “Le néant et le vide,” 204–207. 29 OO I, 131b, my translation: “Let us call void a space which is occupied by no body.” 30 This Epicurean argument was mentioned by Gassendi: see, for example, Animadversiones, 171–172. 31 Exercitationes, OO III, 102; Gassendi to Galileo, August 1625, OO VI, 4b. 32 OO I, 149a. See Barry Brundell, Pierre Gassendi: From Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy (Dordrecht–Boston, MA: Reidel, 1987), 30–47, and Sakamoto’s chapter in the present volume. However, Gassendi’s stand on heliocentrism was far from being unambiguous. Indeed, in De motu (1642), he based his explanation of the tides on the double motion of the Earth, while the modified theory of tides he introduced in his Syntagma philosophicum still presupposed the motion of the Earth: see Carla Rita Palmerino, “Gassendi’s Reinterpretation of the Galilean Theory of Tides,” Perspectives on Science 12 (2004): 212–237. 33 OO I, 131b, my translation: “Space is in itself infinite, and is also conceived as extending beyond the limits of the world.” OO I, 141a–144b. 34 OO I, 186b. 35 See Palmerino’s chapter in the present volume. 36 De motu, OO III, 502b, my translation. 37 In the Syntagma philosophicum, Gassendi mentioned Bruno in the margin as an example of those who espoused the thesis of infinite worlds, and then refuted this position: OO I, 140a. 38 De apparente, OO III, 437a: “Nolo porro imaginere spatia quaedam inania grandiuscula, sensibiliave: talia enim sunt, quae natura dicitur vulgo exhorrere […].” 39 OO III, 437a–b, 473b–475a. 40 OO III, 476a; Bernard Rochot, Les Travaux de Gassendi sur Épicure et sur l’atomisme 1619–1658 (Paris: Vrin, 1944), 113. 41 Animadversiones, 169. 42 Ibid., 174. 43 Ibid., 424–444. 44 Ibid., 425–426. See also OO I, 204a–205a. 45 Animadversiones, 426–427. On Torricelli’s and Pascal and Petit’s experiments, see Cornelis de Waard L’Expérience barométrique, ses antécédents et ses explications (Thouars: Imprimerie Nouvelle, 1936), 110–123. 46 Animadversiones, 424. 47 On Gassendi’s research of experimental proofs in favor of Epicurus’ theory rather than that of Aristotle, see Lynn Sumida Joy, Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 184–190. 48 Animadversiones, 428, my translation. 49 Ibid., 426: “sicque Inanem partem tubi superiorem reliquerit”; 427: “interceptum spatium fuerit pari modo effectum Inane […].” 50 Ibid., 429. 51 Ibid., 431. 52 Ibid., 434. 53 Ibid., 428. 54 Ibid., 428. Gassendi even refused to exclude the possibility that a subtle matter penetrated into the glass tube: ibid., 430. 55 OO I, 205–220. The report in the Syntagma philosophicum is based on a letter to Bernier of 6 August 1652, OO VI, 319a–b.

Gassendi’s Theory of Space and Time  259 56 Animadversiones, II, iiii, my translation. 57 Ibid., 612–613, 615. 58 OO, I, 186a. 59 It is Charleton who insightfully labeled time in such a way: see Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana or a Fabrick of Science Upon the Hypothesis of Atoms (London: Tho. Newcomb for Thomas Heath, 1654), 75. 60 Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Math. X 219, quoted by Gassendi, De vita et doc­ trina Epicuri, 208v, Animadversiones, 606, and Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 221b. 61 Exercitationes, OO III, 102. 62 See Olivier René Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matéri­ alisme et métaphysique (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 172–201. I here rely on Bloch’s comments and bring additional textual analysis converging with his interpretation. 63 De vita et doctrina Epicuri, XIV, MS 709, 209v; OO I, 222b. 64 De vita et doctrina Epicuri, XIV, 209v: “Quare seu istud concipiamus, quasi super-additum quoddam accidens, cùm tamen non sit […].” 65 Ibid., 209v: Diceres velle Epicurum Tempus nihil esse aliud, quam Ens rationis, vt vulgo vocant […]. Verumtamen, cùm Epicurus censuerit Tempus esse quidpiam intellectu solo perceptibile, vt-puta incorporeum: nunquam tamen adseruit intellectu solo constare, sed voluit esse accidens quoddam sui generis, ac generalissimum; quod omnibus nempe alijs accidentibus, & per accidentia substantijs indiuiduè conueniat, quatenus non deficiunt sed in sua natura perstant. 66 OO I, 222b: Ex quibus sane sequitur idem sentire Epicurus cum Antiphane, & aliis, qui censuere apud Stobaeum Tempus esse […] quidpiam quod non re, sed cogitatione constet; sitque adeo, quod vulgo dicunt, Rationis ens, extrinsecaque denominatio, &, vt Aristoteles definit, Numerus, qui absque ratione numerante est nullus. The same passage can be read in the Animadversiones, 607. 67 The characteristics of Epicurean time mentioned in De vita et doctrina Epicuri as “very general and sui generis” are not to be found in the Animadversiones either, where Gassendi however remarked that Epicurus’ time was, “as it were, the first of events” (quasi Euentorum praecipuo) or “that which happens, as it were, to every thing” (omnibus quasi superueni­ ens Euentum) (Animadversiones, 605, my translation). 68 De vita et doctrina Epicuri, XIV, 209v, my translation. 69 Ibid., 206v: At, inquies, mens nostra nihil capit, quod non vel Substantia, vel Accidens sit: sed nego, quoniam capit duo, quae vt generalissima, ita exclusissima sunt a vulgaribus categoriis. Vnum est Locus, in quo Substantiae, et accidentia constituuntur; alterum Tempus, quo tam Substantiae, quam accidentia perdurant […]. 70 Ibid., 210r, Gassendi’s emphasis, my translation. 71 De vita et doctrina Epicuri, XII, 158r. 72 Animadversiones, 622–625. 73 OO I, 221b–222b, 223b. 74 OO I, 222b:

260  Delphine Bellis Videntur porro Stoïci melius, quam ipse Epicurus sensisse, reputantes Tempus tale incorporeum, quod per se esse intelligatur, non tale quod accidat rebus, eo sensu, vt Tempus non foret, si res non essent, quae eo durarent, aut nisi etiam nostra mens durare ipsas cogitaret. 75 Selected Works, 393 (modified); OO I, 223b. 76 De vita et doctrina Epicuri, XIV, 210r: Est enim Tempus nescio quis fluxus non minùs a motu, quàm a quiete independens […]. Hoc etiam vulgò subolfaciunt, quotquot distinguunt, & agnoscunt Tempus, quod vocant Imaginarium. Admittunt enim ante coelum conditum fluxisse Tempus, juxta quod concedunt potuisse Mundum fieri; priusquàm factus sit: quod fluat exsistente Mundo; & quod fluxurum adhûc sit cùm Mundus esse desierit. At praeoccupati illicô excurrunt, ac volunt praetereà esse quoddam Tempus, quod verum, & reale dicunt; vt putà istud definitum Aristoteli, quod cum coeli motu fluere coeperit, quod interrupto motu consistat, & deficiente desinat. Et verò re seriò spectata, non aliud esse videtur Tempus, quàm dictum istiis Imaginarium […]. 77 OO VI, 178b–179a; Animadversiones, 613, 622; OO I, 179a. On Gassendi’s criticism of Descartes’ conception of time in the Disquisitio metaphysica (OO III, 346b–348b), see Michael Edwards, Time and the Science of the Soul in Early Modern Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 128–137. 78 OO III, 24a–b. 79 Milič Čapek, “The Conflict between the Absolutist and the Relational Theory of Time before Newton,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 595–608, esp. 599–601. Emily Thomas uncritically followed Čapek on this point: see Absolute Time: Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 60 n. 2. 80 Gassendi’s strategy regarding time is very close to the one he adopted for space. On the latter, see Bellis, “Imaginary Spaces.” 81 See Stephen H. Daniel, “Seventeenth-Century Scholastic Treatments of Time,” The Journal of the History of Ideas 42 (1981): 587–606. 82 Selected Works, 393; OO I, 223b. 83 Selected Works, 393 (modified); OO I, 223b. 84 Disputationes metaphysicae, L, sect. XII, 8–9, in Opera omnia, vol. 26 (Parisiis: Apud Ludovicum Vivès, 1861), 968. 85 Disputationes metaphysicae, XL, sect. IX, 10, in Opera omnia, vol. 26, 586. 86 Disputationes metaphysicae, L, sect. X, 11, in Opera omnia, vol. 26, 961. See also Fonseca, Commentariorum…In libros Metaphysicorum…Tomus secundus, 732; Eustachius à Sancto Paulo, Summa philosophiae quadripar­ tita, Tertia pars: Physica, prima pars, tertius tractatus, tertia disputatio, qu. 2 (Parisiis: Apud Carolum Chastellain, 1609), 95: external time is the duration of heavenly motion which is taken to measure the duration of sublunary things, while internal time is the proper duration of the thing itself and the intrinsic duration of its motion. Internal time is not really distinct from the motion of which it is the measure, but it is only formally distinct from this motion. On this distinction, see Edwards, Time and the Science of the Soul, 34–64. 87 OO I, 224b; Selected Works, 394: Perhaps, as usually is done, you would distinguish internal time from external. For example, you say that the motions of the lower beings have an internal time of their own, and in addition an external common time would also apply to them, the time of the primum mobile; thus you will

Gassendi’s Theory of Space and Time  261 say that a particular time applies to each of them and a general time to all of them. But you would not be able to designate this general time since there exists no general motion which would be regarded as the standard of before and after […]. See also De vita et doctrina Epicuri, XIV, 210r; Animadversiones, 609–610. 88 This is precisely what Bernier would reject in the doubts he expressed on Gassendi’s theory of time in his Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi (Paris: Fayard, 1992), vol. II, 317–320. Just as for space, Bernier refused to attribute to time a specific ontological status independent of bodies and motion, and serving as a frame of reference to measure the duration of existing things. Without motion (e.g., if there were one single immobile thing in nature), for Bernier, there would be no time. Gassendi’s disciple did not shy away from labeling as a “chimera” his master’s notion of time conceived as an “eternal and uniform flux” (Abrégé, vol. II, 319). 89 See Bellis, “Imaginary Spaces.” 90 Selected Works, 394 (modified); OO I, 224a. This argument would recur under Clarke’s pen in his correspondence with Leibniz about Newton’s conception of absolute space and time: see Clarke’s fourth reply. 91 OO I, 225a. Fonseca had also distinguished between a fictitious being (ens fictum) depending only on the mind and having no correspondent in reality (like a chimera), and a being depending on the intellect (rather than on the imagination like for Gassendi) but having some correspondent in reality (which Fonseca called an ens rationis): Commentariorum… In libros Metaphysicorum…Tomus secundus, 467–468. Gassendi replaced apprehension by the intellect with apprehension by the imagination, which led him to reject the label of ens rationis for time and space. 92 See Conimbricenses, In octo libros Physicorum…, vol. 2, 130–131; Eustachius à Sancto Paulo, Summa philosophiae, Tertia pars: Physica, prima pars, tertius tractatus, tertia disputatio, qu. 2, 94–95. 93 Disputationes metaphysicae, LX, sect. IX, 10 in Opera omnia, vol. 26, 586: “Alio modo potest considerari illa duratio motus per comparationem, et quasi coexistentiam ad successionem imaginariam, quam nos ut infinitam apprehendimus […].” 94 Selected Works, 394–395 (modified); OO I, 224a. 95 OO, I, 189b. 96 OO I, 224b. 97 OO I, 224b. 98 OO I, 220b, my translation. 99 Commentariorium…In libros Metaphysicorum…Tomus secundus, 733–734: Ex his colligimus, duo esse tempora vniversalia, quibus mensurantur omnia, quae temporibus subsunt; vnum reale, quod est idem re cum motu primi mobilis […] alterum, quod dici solet imaginarium, vt Chimaera, aut sphinx, sed quia nihil reale est, sed sola capedo, vt ita dicam, motuum omnium […]. 100 OO I, 222b–223a. On the method elaborated by Gassendi in order to gain knowledge of incorporeal entities in metaphysics, on the basis of an empiricist theory of knowledge, see Delphine Bellis, “Comment penser l’âme humaine et Dieu? Gassendi et la redéfinition de la métaphysique,” Libertinage et philosophie à l’âge classique 18 (2021): 65–81. 101 OO I, 223a.

262  Delphine Bellis 02 Selected Works, 391–392; OO I, 223a. 1 103 OO I, 220b. 104 OO I, 220b, 222b; De vita et doctrina Epicuri, XIV, 210r. 105 OO I, 222b. 106 OO I, 223b. 107 Suárez, Disputationes metaphysicae, L, sect. IX, 1; sect. XI, 5, in Opera omnia, vol. 26, 951, 962; Conimbricenses, In octo libros Physicorum…, vol. 2, 136. Gassendi also relied on the Bible’s passage in which Joshua is said to have led his army to victory while God stopped the course of the sun in the heavens (OO I, 224a). Supporters of the heliocentric theory, like Galileo (and Gassendi himself), usually considered that this biblical passage should not be seen as providing any cosmological information, but merely as describing celestial appearances for those not versed in astronomy. It is therefore striking—though not surprising, for this biblical passage was often referred to in Scholastic textbooks dealing with time—to see here Gassendi make philosophical use of this passage to support his conception of time as being independent of celestial motions. 108 Selected Works, 394 (modified); OO I, 224a. 109 De vita et doctrina Epicuri, XIV, 211r; Selected Works, 396, OO I, 225a: From these considerations it is apparent that time is not something dependent upon motion or posterior to it, but is merely indicated by motion as something measured is by its measure. For otherwise it would be impossible to know how much time we spend doing something or not doing it. 110 Gassendi to Sorbière, 30 January 1644, OO VI, 179a: “time is not the measure of motion […] but motion is rather the measure of time.” 111 Selected Works, 393; OO I, 223b. 112 OO I, 183b–184a. 113 OO I, 224b: “ac idcirco ipsi duo illa insignia attributa competent, Immensitas, quâ omni loco adsit, & Æternitas, quâ omni tempore perseueret.” 114 OO I, 218. 115 OO I, 225b. 116 Osler criticized LoLordo’s interpretation of Gassendi’s conception as reducing eternity to sempiternity: see Antonia LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 127; Margaret J. Osler, “The Search for the Historical Gassendi,” Perspectives on Science 19/2 (2011): 212–229, esp. 224–225. But Osler ignored the distinction made by Gassendi between eternity and what is eternal and his interpretation of Plato and Boethius as actually referring to God and not to eternity itself: see OO I, 225b–226a. 117 OO I, 226a. 118 OO I, 227b. 119 OO I, 226b, my translation. 120 OO I, 228a, my translation: “Æternitate, seu Tempore perpetuo fluente […].” 121 OO I, 191a, trans. Milič Čapek, in The Concepts of Space and Time: Their Structure and Their Development, ed. Milič Čapek (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976), 94: But indeed, we conceive in God, beyond an infinity of perfection in His essence, an infinity of duration also, which we call eternity, by which we hold that he shall always exist. And beyond this, we conceive an infinity as if of extension, which we call immensity, by which we hold that he is everywhere. But, I say, as if of extension, lest we imagine that the divine substance were extended through space like bodies are.

Gassendi’s Theory of Space and Time  263 122 Note that Suárez put forward a similar line of reasoning to explain that we conceive God’s immensity on the mode of spatial extension: Disputationes metaphysicae, XXX, sect. VII, 37, in Opera omnia, vol. 26, 107. 123 OO I, 191a, trans. Čapek, in The Concepts of Space and Time, 94: since it follows from the perfection of the divine essence that it be eternal and immense, all time and all space are therefore connoted, without which neither eternity nor immensity could be understood. Therefore, God […] necessarily exists in all time and in every place […]. That God be in space is thought to be a characteristic external to His essence, but not with respect to His immensity, the conception of which necessarily involves the conception of space. 24 OO I 191a: “sic diuina [substantia] quasi extensa habetur […].” 1 125 OO I, 220a: “Spatium, siue Interuallum, non modo est locato prius, sed omni etiam ab aeuo est.” 126 Grant, Much Ado About Nothing, 117. 127 Abrégé, vol. II, 262–267, 317–320. 128 See Thomas L. Lennon, The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655–1715 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 117–137. 129 That being said, there is likewise no agreement among scholars as to whether Newton regarded space and time as attributes of God, or rather as a consequence of God’s existence.

Bibliography Manuscript Sources Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale: ­MS 709, fols. 147–500: autograph of De vita et doctrina Epicuri, books XII–XX (Physics: XII “De Vniverso, seu natura rerum”; XIII “De atomis”; XIV “De Inane, seu Loco, et de Tempore”; XV “De Principiis, seu Elementis”; XVI “De Caussis, Fortuna, & Fato”; XVII “De ortu et interitu”; XVIII “De Motu et Mutatione”; XIX “De rerum qualitatibus”; XX “De mundo”).

Printed Sources Bakker, Frederik A., Delphine Bellis, and Carla Rita Palmerino. Space, Imagination and the Cosmos from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period. Cham: Springer, 2018. Bellis, Delphine. “Comment penser l’âme humaine et Dieu? Gassendi et la redéfinition de la métaphysique,” Libertinage et philosophie à l’âge classique 18 (2021): 65–81. Bellis, Delphine. “Imaginary Spaces and Cosmological Issues in Gassendi’s Philosophy.” In Space, Imagination and the Cosmos from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, edited by Frederik A. Bakker, Delphine Bellis, and Carla Rita Palmerino, 233–260. Cham: Springer, 2018. Bernier, François. Abrégé de la philosophie de M. Gassendi (2e édition revue et augmentée par l’auteur), 7 vols. Lyon: Anisson, Posuel et Rigaud, 1684/revised edition by Sylvia Murr and Geneviève Stefani. Paris: Fayard, 1992.

264  Delphine Bellis Bloch, Olivier René. La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971. Brundell, Barry. Pierre Gassendi. From Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht–Boston, MA: Reidel, 1987. Čapek, Milič, ed. The Concepts of Space and Time: Their Structure and Their Development. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976. Čapek, Milič. “The Conflict between the Absolutist and the Relational Theory of Time before Newton,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 595–608. Charleton, Walter. Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, or, A fabrick of Science Natural, Upon the Hypothesis of Atoms Founded by Epicurus Repaired [by] Petrus Gassendus. London: Tho. Newcomb for Thomas Heath, 1654. Conimbricenses. Commentariorum Collegii Conimbricensis Societatis Iesu, in octo libros Physicorum Aristotelis Stagiritae, secunda pars. Coloniae: Sumptibus Lazari Zetzneri, 1596. Daniel, Stephen H. “Seventeenth-Century Scholastic Treatments of Time,” The Journal of the History of Ideas 42 (1981): 587–606. De Waard, Cornelis. L’Expérience barométrique, ses antécédents et ses explica­ tions. Thouars: Imprimerie Nouvelle, 1936. Edwards, Michael. Time and the Science of the Soul in Early Modern Philosophy. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Eustachius à Sancto Paulo. Summa philosophiae quadripartita… Parisiis: Apud Carolum Chastellain, 1609. Fonseca, Pedro da. Commentariorum…In libros Metaphysicorum…Tomus secundus. Francofurti: Impensis Ioannis Theobaldi Schonwetteri, 1599. Gassendi, Pierre. Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii, qui est De vita, moribus, placitisque Epicuri. Lugduni: Apud Guillelmum Barbier, 1649. Gassendi, Pierre. Opera omnia in sex tomos divisa. Lugduni: Sumptibus Laurentii Anisson, & Ioan. Bapt. Devenet, 1658 (abridged OO). Gassendi, Pierre. Opera omnia in sex tomos divisa curante Nicolao Averanio… Florentiae: Apud Joannem Cajetanum Tartini, & Sanctem Franchi, 1727. Gassendi, Pierre. The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi. Translated by Craig B. Brush. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972. Gorham, Geoffrey. “‘The Twin-Brother of Space’: Spatial Analogy in the Emergence of Absolute Time,” Intellectual History Review 22 (2012): 1–17. Grant, Edward. Much Ado About Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Joy, Lynn Sumida. Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Koyré, Alexandre. “Gassendi et la science de son temps.” In Actes du congrès du tricentenaire de Pierre Gassendi (4–7 août 1955), edited by Comité du tricentenaire de Gassendi, 175–190. Paris: PUF, 1957. Leijenhoorst, Cees. The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism: The Late Setting of Thomas Hobbes’ Natural Philosophy. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Lennon, Thomas M. The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655–1715. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. LoLordo, Antonia. Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Gassendi’s Theory of Space and Time  265 McGuire, James E. “Existence, Actuality, and Necessity: Newton on Space and Time,” Annals of Science 35 (1978): 463–508. Osler, Margaret J. “The Search for the Historical Gassendi,” Perspectives on Science 19/2 (2011): 212–229. Paganini, Gianni. “Le néant et le vide. Les parcours croisés de Gassendi et de Hobbes.” In Gassendi et la modernité, edited by Sylvie Taussig, 177–214. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Palmerino, Carla Rita. “Gassendi’s Reinterpretation of the Galilean Theory of Tides,” Perspectives on Science 12 (2004): 212–237. Patrizi, Francesco. Nova de universis philosophia. Ferrariae: Apud Benedictum Mammarellum, 1591. Peiresc, Claude Nicolas Fabri de. Lettres de Peiresc publiées par Philippe Tamizey de Larroque, vol. IV. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1893 (abridged TL). Pintard, René. La Mothe le Vayer, Gassendi, Guy Patin: Études de bibliographie et de critique suivies de textes inédits de Guy Patin. Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1943. Rochot, Bernard. Les Travaux de Gassendi sur Épicure et sur l’atomisme 1619– 1658. Paris: Vrin, 1944. Rochot, Bernard. “Sur les notions de temps et d’espace chez quelques auteurs du XVIIe siècle, notamment Gassendi et Barrow,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 9 (1956): 97–104. Schuhmann, Karl. “La doctrine gassendienne de l’espace.” In Pierre Gassendi 1592–1655: Actes du colloque international Digne-les-Bains, 18–21 mai 1992, 233–244. Digne: Société scientifique et littéraire des Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, 1994. Schuhmann, Karl. “Zur Entstehung des neuzeitlichen Zeitbegriffs: Telesio, Patrizi, Gassendi,” Philosophia naturalis 25 (1988): 37–64. Suárez, Francisco. Disputationes metaphysicae in Opera omnia, vol. 26. Parisiis: Apud Ludovicum Vivès, 1861. Suarez-Nani, Tiziana. “L’espace sans corps. Étapes médiévales de l’hypothèse de l’annihilatio mundi.” In Lieu, espace, mouvement: physique, métaphysique et cosmologie (XIIe – XVIe siècles), edited by Tiziana Suarez-Nani, Olivier Ribordy, and Antonio Petagine, 93–107. Barcelona: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 2017. Thomas, Emily. Absolute Time: Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Westfall, Richard S. “The Foundations of Newton’s Philosophy of Nature,” British Journal for the History of Science 1 (1962): 171–182.

10 Pierre Gassendi and the New Science of Motion Carla Rita Palmerino

10.1 Introduction In his Galileo Studies, Alexandre Koyré attributed to Gassendi “the everlasting glory of having been the first to publish—if not the first to state— a correct formulation of the principle of inertia.”1 In Koyré’s view, Gassendi achieved this result thanks to his “deep understanding of Galileo” and of the “ontology which constituted the infrastructure of the new science.”2 Gassendi explicitly rejected the notion of impetus. In addition, his interpretation of gravity as a phenomenon external to the physical body, and the geometrization of space, enabled him to “break through the barriers which had held back” Galileo and Kepler and “to imagine in the empty space a real body in perpetual rectilinear motion, never either accelerating or slowing down its motion.”3 And yet, when in 1953 Koyré was asked to deliver a talk on Gassendi the scientist at the Journées Gassendistes organized by the Centre International de Synthèse, he accepted the invitation with some reluctance. In his lecture, which was the shortest of all, Koyré emphasized that Gassendi occupied a minor place in the history of science, having remained extraneous to the “spirit of modern science, and notably to the spirit of mathematization.”4 True, Gassendi was a good experimenter, he offered a correct formulation of the principle of inertia, made an intelligent use of atomism, and managed to provide the new science with a philosophical and ontological foundation. In spite of this, Koyré wondered, however, whether Gassendi’s application of experimental notions was really useful; and even whether Gassendi managed, like others did, to draw from Democritean concepts the necessary foundations for the new physics […]. It seems as if Gassendi’s mistrust for mathematics prevented him from harmonizing his own theories; this is why his physics seem to be made of bits and pieces. The hypotheses he proposes are, each time, adapted to the chapter with which he is dealing; he does not try to figure out how his different hypotheses could be DOI: 10.4324/9781315521732-14

Pierre Gassendi and the New Science of Motion  267 reconciled; this is the reason for the inferiority of Gassendi’s science, and also of his philosophy.5 Over the last couple of decades, Gassendi’s contribution to the history of science has been reassessed and reevaluated, but there still seems to be a kernel of truth in Koyré’s seemingly ambivalent judgment. Gassendi did indeed have a deep understanding of Galileo’s science and contributed in a crucial way to its dissemination. In his De motu impresso a motore translato (1642) and in the Epistolae de proportione qua gravia decidentia accelerantur (1646), Gassendi integrated in an interesting and original way the content of the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems with that of the Two New Sciences, thereby bringing to light the close connection between Galileo’s endorsement of the Copernican cosmology and his new science of motion.6 It is however also true that Gassendi’s attempt to provide the new science of motion with a new ontological foundation produced idiosyncratic results. As this chapter will try to show, Gassendi was at pains to reconcile Galileo’s law of falling bodies with a mechanistic explanation of gravity and with an atomistic theory of the composition of the continuum. Equally problematic was Gassendi’s simultaneous endorsement of Galileo’s theory of the tides, on the one hand, and of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion on the other. However, Gassendi was partially aware of these difficulties, and tried to solve some of them by modifying his theories over the course of his career. In the present chapter, I will first provide an overview of Gassendi’s engagement with Galileo’s mechanics and cosmology. Then, I will focus on three specific themes, namely Gassendi’s account of free fall and projectile motion, his alleged formulation of the principle of inertia, and his reinterpretation of Galileo’s theory of the tides.

10.2 Gassendi’s Engagement with Galileo’s Mechanics and Cosmology: from the De Motu to the Syntagma Philosophicum In the second day of the Dialogue, which is devoted to the physical objections against the motion of the Earth, Galileo spokesman, Salviati, selfconfidently claims to be “sure without experiment” that a ball dropped from the top of the mast of a moving ship would fall at the foot of the mast just as it would do on a ship at rest.7 In October 1640, on a trireme off the coast of Marseille, Gassendi verified the validity of Salviati’s claim and sent an account of his experiment to his friend and mentor François Luillier. Luillier read Gassendi’s letter (which is no longer extant) to a group of erudite friends, among whom was Pierre Dupuy, librarian for the president of the Parliament of Paris. Having heard that Dupuy had expressed some doubts concerning the experimental report, Gassendi wrote him two long letters, in which he

268  Carla Rita Palmerino provided empirical and theoretical arguments in support of the Galilean principle that “whatever moves, impresses its motion to all the things that rest on it.”8 The letters, published in 1642 under the title De motu impresso a motore translato epistolae duae, clearly separate the description and analysis of the behavior of falling bodies and projectiles (epistola prima) from the discussion of the cosmological implications of Galileo’s new science of motion (epistola secunda). In the first letter, Gassendi instructs his readers to perform experiments on foot, on horseback, on a coach, and on a ship, in order to verify the Galilean principle of the relativity of motion; he subsequently offers a geometrical description of the semiparabolic trajectory of the ball dropped from the mast of a moving ship; then he individuates the two forces which, in his view, are jointly responsible for free fall; and, finally, he formulates the mathematical law that rules upon naturally accelerated motion. The second letter spells out the cosmological implications of the principle of Galilean relativity. Gassendi first answers the traditional objections against the diurnal and annual motions of the Earth and then puts forward a somewhat modified version of the Galilean theory of tides. The publication of the De motu triggered what Paolo Galluzzi has called the “second affaire Galilée of the laws of motion,” a lively international debate among opponents and supporters of the new science. Gassendi himself played a major role in this debate, as he engaged in a polemic with the Jesuit Pierre Le Cazre and with the astrologer and mathematician Jean-Baptiste Morin. In November 1642, Pierre Le Cazre sent to Gassendi a short letter in which he criticized the interplay of atomism, Copernicanism, and theory of motion in the De motu. Gassendi drafted a long answer, which he sent to the Jesuit in a private letter, but which was later published as the third of the Epistolae tres de proportione qua gravia decidentia accelerantur. A few months later, Jean-Baptiste Morin, who was an old acquaintance of Gassendi’s, published a booklet with the significant title Alae telluris fractae (The Broken Wings of the Earth), where he violently attacked the interpretation and defense of Galileo’s science contained in the De motu. In August 1643, Gassendi reacted with a long letter, which was printed in Lyon in 1649 together with Galileo’s Copernican letters, and later inserted in the Opera omnia as the third Epistola de motu.9 Both Cazre and Morin put special emphasis on the dangerous implications of the Copernican theory and on its incompatibility with Scripture. Gassendi’s answer to this point, which was clearly inspired by Galileo’s letters to Benedetto Castelli and Cristina of Lorraine, called upon the claim that the main goal of the Holy Scripture is not to teach physical truths, but rather to show the road to salvation. For this reason, it is not a requirement that all passages of the Bible must be interpreted literally.10

Pierre Gassendi and the New Science of Motion  269 Gassendi also noticed that the condemnation of Galileo was a sententia ad personam, with no general validity, and that prominent Ecclesiastic figures, interpreters of the Scripture, and religious doctors (“Ecclesiae Proceres, Scripturae sacrae Interpretes, et Religiosos Doctores”) supported the Copernican opinion.11 Given Gassendi’s unwillingness to apply theological considerations to the scientific discourse, Cazre and Morin changed their polemical strategy, shifting their attention to other aspects of De motu.12 In 1645, in the Physica demonstratio, qua ratio, mensura, modus, ac potentia accelerationis in naturali descensu gravium determinantur, Cazre attacked Gassendi’s support of Galileo’s “pseudoscience” of motion, whereas Morin reacted to the publication of Gassendi’s Apologia in 1649 with a Dissertatio de atomis et vacuo contra Petri Gassendi philosophiam Epicuream.13 Gassendi personally responded to Cazre’s Physica demonstratio, while delegating to his pupil Bernier the task of answering Morin’s Dissertatio.14 As we will see below, in the first and second letters De proportione, written in 1645 in answer to Cazre’s Physica demonstratio and Vindiciae demonstrationis physicae, Gassendi presented new arguments in favor of Galileo’s law of falling bodies and also recognized and corrected an important mistake in the analysis of the cause of free fall in the De motu. The contents of the Epistolae de motu and de proportione were partially integrated in the Syntagma philosophicum. In the Pars Physica, Section I, Book V, called De motu et mutatione rerum, Gassendi devotes special attention to Galileo’s theories of free fall and projectile motion, which he inserts—as is usual for the Syntagma—into a broad historical context. Gassendi begins his historical excursus with Aristotle, Simplicius, and Hipparchus, then jumps to the early modern period, discussing Michel Varro’s theory of acceleration, which postulates the proportionality between the speed of fall and the space traversed; Gassendi finally dwells at length on Galileo, the first to have understood that the speed of falling bodies grows in proportion to the time elapsed. A peculiarity of the Syntagma with respect to the Epistolae is the fact that the analysis of motion of compound bodies (res concretae) is grounded in a theory of atomic motion. The interplay between the two levels of analysis is problematic, however, as the microscopic and macroscopic worlds are governed by different laws. While atoms have an intrinsic tendency to motion, macroscopic bodies are indifferent to motion and rest. We will deal with this tension in the section devoted to Gassendi’s alleged formulation of the principle of inertia. Galileo figures prominently also in the chapter of the Syntagma entitled De aestu, seu fluxu et refluxu maris (Section II, Book I, chapter III). As we will see below, here too there is a conflict between Gassendi’s endorsement of the Tychonic theory on the one hand, and, on the other, his attempt to improve Galileo’s Copernican theory of the tides.

270  Carla Rita Palmerino

10.3 Free Fall and Projectile Motion Galileo’s Dialogue was certainly the chief source of inspiration for the Epistolae de motu, but Gassendi also integrated into his analysis some crucial elements from the Two New Sciences, thereby realizing a synthesis between Copernican cosmology and theory of motion “which had been in Galileo’s mind since 1609, but which the anti-Copernican sentence of 1633 had prevented him from achieving.”15 In the opening pages of the Epistola prima, Gassendi offers a brief account of the results he has obtained in replicating the ball-dropping experiment from the mast of a moving ship as described by Salviati in the Dialogue. Convinced as he is that a “naked account” (nuda historia) is not enough to persuade the reader, he first reveals the general cause of what he has seen, namely that a “moving mover” (motor translatus) impresses its horizontal motion on all the objects placed on it, and then instructs Dupuy to personally carry out some experiments walking on the terrace of his library, on a coach riding outside the city walls, and in a boat carried by the Seine’s current. These experimental variations are useful to ascertain that the general cause remains valid no matter whether an object is dropped or thrown, and whether the person who performs the experiment moves by themselves [= walking] or is moved by something else [= coach or ship].16 This fact is particularly significant, because it undermines the Aristotelian distinction between violent and natural motion. Gassendi emphasizes both the mechanical and optical import of Galilean relativity. He points out that the horizontal motion of the sailing ship and the vertical motion of the ball dropped from the top of the mast do not hinder one another, but rather combine to produce a mixed motion. However, a passenger on the ship will only perceive the vertical motion, whereas a person at rest on the shore will be able to observe the real trajectory of the ball.17 But what is that trajectory? In order to answer this question, Gassendi tells us, one needs to consider two important Galilean principles: the first states that, in a naturally accelerated motion, the spaces traversed in equal and successive intervals of time grow according to the series of the odd numbers starting from unity, or else that the spaces are to each other as the squares of the times in which they are traversed. The second states that the trajectory described in the air by a body obliquely thrown is a parabola.18 While the law of free fall was already formulated in Galileo’s Dialogue, that of parabolic motion was first published in the Two New Sciences. Without the latter work, Gassendi would therefore not have been able to offer a mathematical account of the experiment of the ball dropped from the mast of a moving ship. Gassendi’s representation of both Galilean principles is shown in Figure 10.1, which illustrates the trajectory of a stone thrown upwards

Pierre Gassendi and the New Science of Motion  271

Figure 10.1 Gassendi’s representation of the parabolic trajectory (OO III, 484). Public domain

parallel to the mast of a ship that sails with uniform speed from G to H. The vertical lines represent the successive position of the ship’s mast, and the dotted line the path of the stone which ascends from G to B and then descends from B to H. The figure provides a visual representation of the principles of composition and relativity of motions. The fact that the parabola has the same height as the line BA, which is the vertical distance covered in the upward/downward motion and the same amplitude as the

272  Carla Rita Palmerino line GH, which is the horizontal distance covered by the ship, indicates that the two components do not hinder one another. Gassendi also interprets the symmetry of the curve as an indication that the upward deceleration corresponds exactly to the downward acceleration and hence suggests that the two motions have the same cause. But which cause? In the Dialogue, Galileo had claimed that “the force which moves heavy projectiles upward […] is no less internal and natural than that which moves them downwards,” but had admitted his ignorance concerning the essence of this force.19 Gassendi, by contrast, maintains that the upward and downward motions derive from the same external cause and tries to understand the possible mechanism behind this force: Although there are several ways in which an external cause can produce motion, it appears that they can all be reduced to two chief ones, namely impulsion and attraction. Let’s therefore find out whether the cause of the motion of fall, or perpendicular motion, is impelling, attracting or rather impelling and attracting at the same time.20 In the subsequent pages, Gassendi maintains that natural acceleration is brought about by the joint action of the attractive force of the Earth, which emits chains of magnetic particles that hook into the pores of bodies and carry them downward, and the impelling force of the air, which rushes upward to fill the space left empty by the falling body and pushes it from behind. Gassendi’s recourse to the vis impellens is problematic for two reasons. The first is that the air, which in Galileo’s theory of motion played the role of resisting medium, is now turned into a moving force; the second is that it is not clear why the air should contribute to the acceleration of the downward motion and to the deceleration of the upward motion instead of functioning as a vis impellens in both cases. Gassendi is aware of these difficulties, in fact, but he sticks to his double causal explanation as he thinks that the vis attrahens would not alone be capable of producing an acceleration according to the odd number law: Let us assume that there was only one cause of acceleration, for example attraction; on the basis of what has been said you understand that the magnetic rays, like tightening cords, impress a motion by contact, or an impetus on the stone in such a way that the motion impressed in the first moment does not get deleted, but is conserved in the second moment, in which another similar impetus is added, which is conserved, together with the first one in the third moment, in which yet another similar one is added, and so on, in such a way that the impetus increases thanks to that continuous addition and the motion becomes faster and faster. It will be easy to understand that an increase of speed according to the natural numbers will follow

Pierre Gassendi and the New Science of Motion  273 from this addition, so that in the first moment there will be one degree of speed, in the second one two, in the third one three, in the fourth one four. Hence in the first moment the stone will traverse one fathom, in the second one two, in the third one three, etc.21 While in the Two New Sciences, Galileo had demonstrated that if the degrees of speed acquired in equal and successive moments of times increase according to the series of natural numbers, the spaces traversed in the same moments grow as the odd numbers from unity, Gassendi thinks that the degrees of speed and the space traversed grow according to the same proportion.22 This is why he concludes that two forces are needed to produce an acceleration according to Galileo’s law of free fall. With the help of the diagram shown in Figure 10.2, he explains that in the first moment of time AD the vis attrahens of the Earth imparts the degree of speed ADE to the falling body; this degree is conserved in the second moment of time DF, when also the vis impellens becomes active. From this moment onward, each of the two forces imparts a new degree of speed to the falling body, which also conserves all the degrees previously acquired.

Figure 10.2 Gassendi’s triangle of acceleration (OO III, 498). Public domain

274  Carla Rita Palmerino While some scholars think that Gassendi is here committing a mathematical mistake, I believe that his disagreement with Galileo is due to the fact that he conceives of acceleration as a discontinuous, rather than as a continuous process.23 Gassendi defines the “moment of time” as the “minimum in which one simple push is impressed by attraction, and a minimum space is traversed with a simple motion,” which shows that he regards accelerated motion as the sum of uniform rectilinear motions of increasing speed. Given that, in a uniform rectilinear motion, the space traversed is indeed proportional to the degree of speed, Gassendi needs two forces in order to produce an acceleration according to the odd numbers starting from one. This interpretation is supported by a passage in which Gassendi illustrates the working of the vis attrahens by means of an analogy. He invites the reader to imagine a perfectly round and smooth globe placed upon an equally smooth plane that is put in motion with a small manual push. One will see that the globe moves with perfectly uniform speed (penitus aequabiliter). If one then imparts to the globe a second, a third, and a fourth equal push, the motion will become faster and faster.24 This imaginary experiment makes clear that Gassendi, like other mechanical philosophers, believes that a force acting by contact on a falling body would produce an acceleration in jumps. This was also the point of view espoused by Descartes who, in some letters to Mersenne written between 1639 and 1642, denied the validity of Galileo’s law of falling bodies precisely because it was incompatible with a mechanistic explanation of gravity.25 According to Descartes, bodies are pushed toward the Earth by the rotating vortex of subtle matter, which instantaneously transmits to them a new degree of speed at each successive collision. This means that the acceleration of fall is not only discontinuous, but also non-uniform, because the faster a body moves, the lesser will be the additions of speed produced by the pushes of the subtle matter. The speed of the rotating particles of subtle matter represents the maximum speed that can be reached by the falling body. In this context it is interesting to mention that Galileo probably would have agreed with Descartes’ conclusions. This is at least what is suggested by an epistolary exchange with Bonaventura Cavalieri who, in a letter to Galileo in February 1635, described the plan of a machine in which a turning wheel was made to accelerate by means of successive equal pushes. Like Gassendi, Cavalieri imagined that the speed conferred through each push would be conserved, and that the sum of all pushes would produce an acceleration “similar” to that of bodies falling toward the center of the Earth.26 In a letter no longer extant, Galileo contested the feasibility of the experiment and Cavalieri thanked him for having made clear that if the hand wants to confer a greater speed to the wheel, it must itself possess that speed, that is to say it has to accelerate ad infinitum,

Pierre Gassendi and the New Science of Motion  275 rather than remaining constant in a given degree of speed; I hence understand that my idea of reproducing what happens in the motion of free fall by means of the motion of the wheel was without foundation.27 Galileo’s objection to Cavalieri is interesting for us, because it is also applicable to Gassendi’s imaginary experiment of the hand repeatedly hitting a rotating ball. As we have seen, in the first letter De motu, Gassendi took the validity of Galileo’s law of free fall for granted, without either offering empirical support in its favor, or questioning the possibility of reconciling it with a mechanistic explanation of gravity. In his letter from November 1642 and in the Physica demonstratio (1645), Pierre Le Cazre criticized the Galilean principles on which Gassendi had built his Epistolae, arguing, among other things, that the speed of fall does not grow according to the series of the odd numbers, but rather according to that of everdoubling numbers (1, 2, 4, 8). In the De proportione, written in response to Cazre, Gassendi claimed to have verified, in the presence of witnesses, the validity of Galileo’s law, by letting a ball roll along an inclined glass pipe.28 Gassendi also claimed to have understood that the vis attrahens was by itself enough to make bodies accelerate according to Galileo’s law. The mistake made in the first Epistola—so he claimed— consisted in assuming that the spaces traversed grew in the same proportion as the degrees of speed, without realizing that each degree of speed acquired during a moment of time was enough to traverse two spaces in the following moment.29 In order to clarify this point, Gassendi once again made use of the diagram shown in Figure 10.2, which he now, however, interpreted differently; namely, he distinguished between the spaces traversed, which he identified with the small triangles, and the degrees of speed, represented by the lines parallel to the basis: just as the first time AE is not indivisible, but can be divided into so many instants or ‘timelets’ as there are points or particles in AE (or AD), so also the degree of speed is not indivisible, and acquired all together in one instant, but rather grows continuously during the first time and can hence be represented through all the lines that can be drawn parallel to DE between the points of the lines AD and AE. And just as those lines grow continuously from the point A till the line DE, so also the speed grows continuously since the beginning of motion.30 This means that the instant of speed DE, which was gradually acquired during the time AD and was enough to traverse one interval of space, remains constant in the following instant where it acts “twice as much” and is hence enough to traverse two intervals of space.31 Galileo’s laws of free fall and projectile motion also occupy a prominent role in the Syntagma. In Book V, chapter III (De motus acceleratione in rebus decidentibus), Gassendi argues that if one assumes that the speed

276  Carla Rita Palmerino of fall grows uniformly, then the acceleration cannot but take place according to Galileo’s law. This law can only be represented through a triangle, a figure in which the line comprised between two sides grows continuously starting from the apex, just as the degree of speed of a falling body grows continuously starting from rest. But does the speed of free fall really grow continuously? Does the falling body really pass through infinite degrees of speed? This is an issue which Gassendi does not explicitly address. However, in the opening chapter of Book V, which deals with the question “what is motion and whether it is given in nature,” Gassendi claims that the only way to solve Zeno’s paradoxes of motion is to deny the infinite divisibility of the continuum. It has already been declared before that neither this infinity of parts in the continuum nor mathematical indivisibility exist in nature, but are merely a hypothesis of the mathematicians, and that therefore in physics one should not argue on the basis of things that are not known to nature.32 Gassendi hence endorses Galileo’s law of free fall, without however being willing to accept its infinitist mathematical foundation. In the Syntagma, like in the Epistolae de motu and de proportione, Gassendi also attempts to reconcile Galileo’s law with a mechanistic explanation of gravity. He mentions the vis attrahens and the vis impellens as the possible causes of acceleration, and then discards the latter, while retaining the former. He describes the mechanism of action of the attractive force of the Earth and explains that bodies of different size and material fall with the same speed because they are pulled toward the Earth by a quantity of magnetic rays proportional to their mass.33 Richard Westfall praised the Syntagma’s attempt to devise a physical model of the action of gravity. In his view, “by explicitly examining the dynamics of free fall, Gassendi arrived at a verbal statement of Newton’s second law,” which—we recall—states that the acceleration of a body is directly proportional to the force applied to it and inversely proportional to its mass.34 However, as we have seen, Gassendi did not really manage to derive a law of acceleration from his account of the dynamics of free fall, but rather juxtaposed that account with Galileo’s law of free fall.

10.4 The Principle of Inertia According to Koyré’s famous interpretation, by locating the cause of gravity in a force external to the moving body, Gassendi managed to overcome Galileo’s obsession with circularity and to conceive inertia as rectilinear.35 The first alleged formulation of the principle of rectilinear inertia is found in the following passage of the first letter De motu, where

Pierre Gassendi and the New Science of Motion  277 Gassendi imagines what would happen to a stone located in an imaginary void: You might ask what would happen to that stone which I have imagined to be located in the void space, if it was removed from the rest by being pushed by a certain force? I answer that it would probably move uniformly and indefinitely, slowly or swiftly according to whether the impressed impetus was small or big. I infer this conclusion from the already mentioned uniformity of horizontal motion, which only comes to an end because it is mixed with perpendicular motion; however, given that in those spaces there is no perpendicular addition, the motion, whatever its orientation, once started would remain horizontal and it would not accelerate, nor decelerate, nor would it come to an end.36 In these lines, Gassendi suggests that—in the absence of external impediments—a body once put in motion would perpetually move with a uniform speed along a horizontal line. A similar passage is found in the Syntagma, where Gassendi imagines that a stone projected in an absolute empty space would be carried in a straight line with uniform and perpetual motion. However, “given that the space is not empty, but contains besides the air also terrestrial rays to which hooks are attached,” the projected stone will immediately deviate from the straight line and fall to the Earth describing a semi-parabolic curve.37 However, as Peter Anton Pav has noticed, in his treatment of inertia, as in other chapters of his physics, Gassendi “failed to synthesize consistently or significantly the heaps of ideas he took from his many sources.”38 Pav individuates two main problems. The first is that Gassendi seems to endorse, at one and the same time, a principle of rectilinear inertia and a principle of circular inertia; the second concerns the relation between the behavior of compound bodies which are indifferent to motion and rest, and that of atoms, which are instead self-propelled. As far as the first issue is concerned, Pav points to passages of the Syntagma, in which Gassendi talks about uniform, perpetual, and forcefree motions, which are not rectilinear, but rather circular, like that which God imparted to celestial bodies at the moment of creation.39 If we look at the letters De motu, we see that there also Gassendi seems to subscribe simultaneously to a principle of rectilinear inertia and another of circular inertia. In the first letter, for example, he claims that a stone thrown upwards on a sailing ship moves at the same time horizontally, that is to say circularly (“secundum horizontem, seu circulariter movebatur”) with a natural and uniform motion, and vertically with a uniformly decelerated or accelerated motion. From this, Gassendi concludes that “horizontal motion, whatever its cause may be, is perpetual by its very nature, unless a cause intervenes to deviate the mobile and to disturb its motion.”40

278  Carla Rita Palmerino In a passage of the second day of the Dialogue, which is often quoted as evidence of Galileo’s belief in circular inertia, Salviati claims, in similar terms, that the trajectory of a ball dropped from the mast of a moving ship is composed of two motions, namely “the circular around the center and the straight motion toward the center.”41 Galileo’s scholars, however, have also pointed to another passage of the second day of the Dialogue which seems to contain an implicit statement of the principle of rectilinear inertia. Here Salviati explains to his interlocutors that bodies located on the surface of a rotating Earth would fly off along the tangent, were it not for the fact that their internal gravity was strong enough to counterbalance the effect of the centrifugal force. Maurice Clavelin, like others after him, observed that Galileo’s argument was “greatly superior to that of Copernicus, who simply invoked the natural character of the earth’s rotation to explain the absence of any centrifugal effects.”42 It is interesting to see in De motu that Gassendi, like Copernicus, limits himself to observing that the parts of a rotating Earth would run no risk of flying off “because they always cohere among each other and move with a natural and uniform motion, and therefore behave as if they were at rest.”43 Gassendi, the alleged father of rectilinear inertia, saw no reason why the rotation of the Earth should produce a centrifugal effect.44 The second problem mentioned by Pav consists in the fact that the principle of inertia applies to compound bodies, but not to atoms, which have an internal propensity to motion. As Gassendi explains in the Pars Physica of the Syntagma, the gravity or weight (gravitas seu pondus), which is one of the three essential properties of atoms together with size and figure, is “nothing else than a natural, or internal faculty or force, by which an atom can initiate and maintain its own motion, or rather an inborn, innate, native and ineliminable propensity to motion and a propulsion or impetus from within.”45 Before Pav, Koyré already stressed the problematic implications of the theory of atomic pondus for the motion of compound bodies. Given the innate tendency of atoms to move perpetually and with a maximum speed, the only way Gassendi had to account for the different speeds of compound bodies was to conclude that the latter was the result of an alternation of moments of motion and of rest “which was obviously incompatible with the principles that Gassendi himself had developed.”46 If we look at the Pars Physica of the Syntagma, we see in fact that Gassendi puts forward the hypothesis that God endowed atoms with different forms and dimensions, but with the same speed of one minimum of space per minimum of time.47 All motions of compound bodies, which have an inferior speed, are in fact discontinuous: It seems legitimate to conceive of the motion with which atoms are said to move through the void, or if you prefer the motion attributed

Pierre Gassendi and the New Science of Motion  279 to the first moveable, as being absolutely fast; and of all the degrees which lie between that [fastest motion] and pure rest, as deriving from the intermixture of fewer or more particles of rest. […] Don’t object that in this way their motion will not be continuous. In fact, it will not be continuous in itself, but will be so for the senses.48 Olivier René Bloch has tried to defend the consistency of Gassendi’s account by claiming that inertia is an emergent property that applies to compound bodies, “but it is based […], at the atomic level, on a dynamics where the mobility is primordial and the motion is perpetual.”49 As for the theory of the intrinsic discontinuity of motion, which seems to violate the principle of inertia, Bloch claims that it is only an ad hoc hypothesis invented to account for the paradoxes of movement.50 As a matter of fact, Gassendi not only refers to the intrinsic discontinuity of motion in several passages of the Syntagma, but he also offers a physical justification of that hypothesis when he claims that the imperceptible pauses in the motion of compound bodies are the effect of clashes among the composing atoms, which annul each other’s impetus.51 In the 1684 edition of his Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi, François Bernier formulated a harsh criticism of the hypothesis of the discontinuity of motion: […] it must be ridiculous to imagine that in these different movements there are some intermixed pauses or small moments of rest, and that a slow and a fast motion differ in that there are more [such pauses] in the slow than in the fast one; all the more as there is no reason why a ball, which while gently rolling on a billiard table has been stopped, or put to rest, should not remain at rest until the intervention of a cause which sets it again in motion.52 Bloch was certainly right in claiming that the laws of motion that apply to the second level of reality (the phenomenal level of the res concretae) are founded on those valid at the first level, that of atoms, but this is precisely the reason why inertia cannot be regarded as one of the “physical effects of the dynamic reality of matter.”53 As Gassendi himself explicitly states: It occurs not only that motion is universally more natural than rest, but also that every motion is by its very origin natural, for it stems from the atoms, which are moved spontaneously.54 Atomism, which previously enabled Gassendi to provide Galileo’s science of motion with an ontological foundation, leads him now to betray the principles of that very science by affirming the ontological priority of motion over rest.55

280  Carla Rita Palmerino

10.5 The Phenomenon of the Tides In the second Epistola de motu, Gassendi offers what at first sight looks like a short, but faithful summary of the theory of tides contained in the Dialogue. A closer look at the text reveals, however, that Gassendi surreptitiously modifies Galileo’s theory in some crucial points so as to solve or hide inconsistencies and discrepancies with the phenomena under observation.56 In the fourth day of the Dialogue, Galileo put forward his famous proof of the Earth’s motion based on the phenomenon of the tides. While Kepler and other contemporaries correctly identified lunar attraction as the cause of the flux and reflux of the sea, Galileo argued that ebb and flow were brought about by the joint action of the daily rotation and the annual revolution of the Earth. More specifically, Salviati introduced a distinction between the first cause of the tides which produces the daily cycle, and some secondary causes which bring about monthly and yearly variations. The first cause lies in the fact that the diurnal and annual motions of our planet take place for 12 hours in the same direction and for 12 hours in opposite directions. As a consequence, each point of the Earth’s surface undergoes one acceleration and one deceleration a day, and this in turn affects the water contained in the sea basins, producing ebb and flow. Galileo illustrates this phenomenon by means of an analogy. If a barge full of water accelerates, the water ascends at the bow and descends at the stern, while the opposite happens in case of a deceleration. A crucial problem with Galileo’s explanation is that it would entail the occurrence of only one high tide and one low tide a day, instead of two as happens in reality. In order to solve this difficulty, Galileo introduces some secondary causes of the phenomenon “that is the greater or lesser length of the vessels and the greater or lesser depth of the waters.”57 The sea water, due to its proper weight, oscillates like a pendulum before regaining a state of rest with respect to the sea basins. Given that the period and amplitudes of these oscillations depend on the secondary causes, “six hours, then, is not a more proper or natural period for these reciprocations, than any other interval of time, though perhaps it has been the one most generally observed because it is that of our Mediterranean.”58 In the De motu, Gassendi borrows Galileo’s distinction between first and secondary causes of the tides and also the analogies used to illustrate the action of these causes. However, he modifies both the causal account and the analogies so as to try and harmonize them with the observed phenomena. According to Galileo’s explanation of the primary cause, the acceleration of the Earth should every day produce one high tide on the oriental coasts and one low tide on the occidental coasts, whereas the deceleration should bring about one high tide on the occidental coasts and one low tide on the oriental coast. Knowing that Mediterranean waters do not follow this rule, Gassendi claims that both the acceleration and the deceleration

Pierre Gassendi and the New Science of Motion  281 cause a flux of the waters from the Syrian to the Spanish coasts. This is however in contradiction with Galileo’s barge model, according to which the acceleration and the deceleration produce a flux in opposite directions. In order to hide this discrepancy, Gassendi only explains what happens in the case of the acceleration of the barge. He points out that if the barge moves uniformly, the water remains steady, but “if it accelerates a little bit, the water runs from the bow to the stern and once raised it hesitates a bit until, having lost some speed, it returns to the bow because of its weight,” and then moves back and forth again no matter whether the motion of the barge “is the same, slower, or non-existent; and then it flows again under its own weight, if the speed remains the same or augments a little bit.”59 In the De motu, Gassendi correctly notices that the 6-hour period is not peculiar to Mediterranean tides, as stated in the Dialogue, but applies to all sea waters. Being convinced that local differences due to the morphology of the sea basins only affect the size of the tides, Gassendi modifies the pendulum analogy of the Dialogue. While Galileo had used the comparison in order to establish a relation between the depths of the sea basins and the local tidal periods, Gassendi employs it to account for the isochronism of the oscillations within the same basin. He argues that the flux brought about by the acceleration and deceleration of the Earth and the reflux due to the proper weight of the water always have the same duration, just like the oscillations of a pendulum. The analogy is, however, complicated by the fact that the tides occur 55 minutes later every day. This is a phenomenon which Galileo had ignored and which Gassendi correctly mentions, vaguely interpreting it as the effect of the “intrinsic slowness of the water.”60 Having being challenged by Cazre to provide a better explanation of the daily delay, Gassendi in the third Epistola de proportione argues that one must consider the daily motion of the Earth as “being common to the Earth and the Moon.”61 Given that the Earth and the Moon regain the same position with respect to each another circa every 24 hours and 50 minutes, this time interval must be considered as the real duration of the daily motion of the Earth.62 In his letter of November 1642, Cazre was also very critical of Gassendi’s attempt in De motu to hide contradictions in Galileo’s explanation of the yearly and monthly variations of the tidal range, that is to say, the difference in elevation between high and low tides. As far as the annual cycle is concerned, Galileo had argued that the varying inclination of the terrestrial axis with respect to the plane of the elliptic produced a concomitant variation in “the magnitude of the additions and subtractions which the diurnal rotation makes upon the annual motion.”63 By means of a reasoning, the details of which need not concern us here, Galileo had concluded that the additions and subtractions were at their maximum at the solstices and their minimum at the equinoxes. However, as some of Galileo’s contemporaries observed, it is at the

282  Carla Rita Palmerino equinoxes, not at the solstices that the highest tides are observed. Being aware of this problem, Gassendi in the second letter De motu followed Galileo’s explanation, but surreptitiously modified its conclusion, claiming that “the equinoctial tides are stronger than the solstitial ones.”64 Equally problematic is Gassendi’s rendition of Galileo’s explanation of the monthly tidal cycle. In the Dialogue, Galileo argues that the Moon and the Earth are two inseparable bodies which are moved around the Sun by a constant force. He compares the Earth–Moon system to the bob of a pendulum, which “will take a longer time to complete its circuit along a greater circle than along a lesser circle,” and concludes that the revolution around the Sun is faster at New Moon, when the Moon is in conjunction with the Sun, than at Full Moon, when it is in opposition. As Tad Schmaltz noticed, Galileo’s analogy is problematic as he does not provide “a celestial mechanism that is akin to the rod that connects the bob of a pendulum to its pivot.”65 This criticism does not apply to Gassendi, who in his De motu explicitly states that the Earth and the Moon are carried together along the Zodiac by a force that is “like a comma, or a rod stretching from the Sun.”66 However, this does not make Gassendi’s explanation less problematic. An element of inconsistency in the De motu is represented by the selective appeal to the vis attrahens. Gassendi resorts to magnetic cords to account for planetary motion and for the free fall of bodies toward the Earth but denies the existence of an attractive link between the Earth and the Moon, most probably because he does not want to endorse Kepler’s tidal theory. An additional problem, which Tad Schmaltz does not mention in his article, is the fact that Galileo’s explanation of the monthly tidal cycle, just like that of the yearly cycle, is at odds with the observed facts, which show that tidal ranges are at their maximum both at New Moon and Full Moon and at their minimum during the first and last quarter of the lunar cycle.67 Once again Gassendi tries to hide the discrepancy, rather than to solve it. He first observes that the annual motion of our planet along the Zodiac “becomes faster in times of conjunction or new moon and slower in times of opposition or full moon,” and then concludes, with a complete non-sequitur, that the tides are particularly strong both at New Moon and Full Moon because “a special inequality” occurs in the Earth motion.68 Although Cazre put his finger on the incongruous character of the account of the monthly and yearly tidal cycle contained in the De motu, Gassendi did not modify his explanation substantially in the Epistolae de proportione. The only correction consisted in pointing out that in India and in Europe the New Moon tides are stronger than those of the Full Moon, which is neither true, nor in conformity with Galileo’s theory, according to which the opposite should be the case. Apart from the inconsistencies listed above, a major problem with Gassendi’s appropriation of Galileo’s theory of tides was the fact that the latter was not compatible with Kepler’s theory of planetary motion which

Pierre Gassendi and the New Science of Motion  283 was endorsed by Gassendi in the De motu.69 In the chapter De aestu, seu fluxu et refluxu maris of the Syntagma, Gassendi did make an attempt to reconcile the two by suggesting that the variations in the Earth’s orbital speed might be the cause of the yearly tidal cycle. However, Gassendi himself discarded this option, as he recognized that the observed variations in the size of the tides would require the greatest increase in orbital speed to occur both at the aphelion and at the perihelion, and the greatest decrease to occur in the intermediate places. But even if the attempt had worked out, it would not have been enough to vouchsafe the coherence of Gassendi’s tidal explanation. It is in fact ironic that Gassendi appeals to Kepler’s laws in the Syntagma, where he professes his adherence to Tycho’s theory. True, both in the De proportione and in the Syntagma, Gassendi points out that he is presenting Galileo’s account of tides and not his own. However, the various modifications he proposes give rise to a theory that is neither in agreement with Galileo’s, nor with the observed phenomena, and nor with Gassendi’s own cosmological views.70

10.6 Conclusion In this chapter we have seen how, in the letters De motu and De proportione, Gassendi connected the new science of motion and the heliocentric theory more explicitly than Galileo had done. It is however also true that Gassendi did not manage to resolve or conceal some important theoretical tensions. In the De motu, Gassendi endorses Galileo’s law of fall, but proposes a causal account of gravity that is incompatible with that law; he formulates the principle of rectilinear inertia, but speaks at the same time about the conservation of circular motion; he follows Kepler in postulating an attractive link between the Sun and the planets, but denies, like Galileo, the existence of such a link between the Earth and the Moon; he adheres to Kepler’s theory of planetary motion, but defends at the same time Galileo’s account of tides based on the assumption that the orbital motion of the Earth is uniform and circular. During his controversy with Cazre and Morin, Gassendi becomes aware of some of these inconsistencies and tries to eliminate them by modifying his causal account of gravity, and by admitting the existence of an attractive link between the Earth and the Moon. In the Syntagma, Gassendi’s endorsement of Galileo’s new science appears to carry less conviction than in the Epistolae de motu and de proportione. He now explicitly denies the infinite divisibility of continuous magnitudes, which is a theoretical cornerstone of Galileo’s theory of acceleration; he defends a notion of the self-motion of atoms, which is at odds with an inertial physics; and adheres to Tycho’s system, which is of course incompatible with Galileo’s proof of the Earth’s motion based on the phenomenon of the tides.

284  Carla Rita Palmerino These and similar inconsistencies can help us understand why Koyré described Gassendi’s science as being made of bits and pieces, and why Pav saw Gassendi as an eclectic thinker who often lost “the trees of modern science in the forest of presenting the history of others’ thoughts.”71 This is however less true for the Epistolae, where Gassendi engaged in a passionate defense of Galileo’s science, than for the Syntagma, where Galileo figures as just one tree in a vast forest of sources.

Notes 1 Alexandre Koyré, Galileo Studies, trans. J. Mepham (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978), 244–245. 2 Ibid., 244. On Gassendi’s theory of space and time, see Bellis’ chapter in this volume. 3 Koyré, Galileo Studies, 249. 4 Idem, “Le savant,” in Centre International de Synthèse, Pierre Gassendi: Sa vie et son œuvre 1592–1655 (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1955), 60 (my translation). 5 Ibid., 108: Je me demande si l’application gassendiste des notions d’expérience a été vraiment utile; je me demande même si Gassendi a réussi pour lui-même – d’autres l’ont fait – à tirer des conceptions démocritéennes les bases nécessaires à l’ontologie de la physique nouvelle […]. Il semble que la méfiance de Gassendi envers les mathématiques l’empêche d’accorder entre elles ses propres conceptions; et c’est pourquoi sa physique semble faite de pièces et de morceaux. Les hypothèses qu’il propose sont, chaque fois, appropriées et adaptées au chapitre qu’il traite; il ne cherche pas à savoir comment ces différentes hypothèses s’accorderont. C’est là, je crois, une des raisons de l’infériorité de la science et aussi de la philosophie gassendiste. 6 Paolo Galluzzi, “Gassendi and l’Affaire Galilée of the Laws of Motion,” Science in Context 13 (2000): 509–545. 7 Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, trans. Stillman Drake (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), 145. 8 OO III, 478a. 9 OO III, 478–520. In 1645, some of Morin’s friends persuaded Gassendi not to publish the answer to Morin, which should have appeared in Leiden. In 1649, having heard that Morin was claiming victory over Gassendi, Michel Neuré organized the publication of the letter under the title Petri Gassendi Apologia in Jo. Bap. Morini Librum, cui titulus Alae Telluris fractae. Epistola IV De motu impresso a motore translato. Una cum tribus Galilaei Epistolis de conciliatione Scripturae S. cum systemate Telluris mobilis (Lugduni: Apud Guillelmum Barbier, 1649). Neuré referred to the letter as the fourth epistola de motu, because it was written after the first Epistola de proportione. For the history of the publication of the letter, see Recueil de Lettres des Sieurs Morin, De la Roche, De Neuré et Gassend, en suite de l’apologie du Sieur Gassend touchant la question De motu impresso a motore translato (Paris: Chez Augustin Courbé, 1650), preface. For the joint publication of Gassendi’s and Galileo’s letters, see Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 1633– 1992 (Berkeley–Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 77. 10 See OO III, 640a–b, where Gassendi provides examples of universally accepted physical truths, such as the sphericity of the Earth, which are not compatible with a literal reading of the Bible.

Pierre Gassendi and the New Science of Motion  285 11 OO III, 641b. 12 For Gassendi’s views on science and Scripture, see Tullio Gregory, “Gassendi e Galileo,” in Saggi su Galileo Galilei, ed. Carlo Maccagni, 3 vols. (Firenze: Barbèra, 1972), II, 309–323, here at 323. 13 Jean-Baptiste Morin, Dissertatio de atomis et vacuo contra Petri Gassendi philosophiam Epicuream (Parisiis: Apud authorem, 1650). 14 François Bernier, Anatomia ridiculi muris, hoc est Dissertatiunculae J.B. Morini, Astrologi, adversus expositam a P. Gassendo Epicuri philosophiam… (Parisiis: Apud Michaelem Soly, 1651). Morin responded with the Defensio suae dissertationis de atomis et vacuo adversus Petri Gassendi philosophiam Epicuream, contra Francisci Bernieri Andegavi anatomiam (Parisiis: Apud authorem, 1651), to which Bernier in turn replied with the Favilla ridiculi muris, hoc est Dissertatiunculae ridiculae defensae a Joan. Baptist. Morino, Astrologo, adversus expositam a Petro Gassendo Epicuri philosophiam (Lutetiae: E Typographia Edmundi Martini, 1653). Morin had the last word, publishing under the pseudonym Vincentius Panurgius, the Epistola de tribus impostoribus ad clarissimum virum Joan.-Baptistam Morinum (Parisiis: Apud Macaeum Bouillette…et Ioannem Guignard, 1654); see Monette Martinet, “Chronique des relations orageuses de Gassendi et de ses satellites avec Jean-Baptiste Morin,” Corpus 20/21 (1992): 47–64, esp. 61–64. 15 Galluzzi, “Gassendi and l’Affaire Galilée,” 511. For Gassendi’s defense of Galileo’s laws of motion, see also Carla Rita Palmerino, “Galileo’s Theories of Free Fall and Projectile Motion as interpreted by Pierre Gassendi,” in The Reception of the Galilean Science of Motion in Seventeenth-century Europe, eds. Carla Rita. Palmerino and J.M.M.H. Thijssen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), 137–164. 16 OO III, 478b. 17 Ibid., 482b. 18 Ibid., 483 a-b: Unum; corpus suopte decidens motu ea ratione accelerari, ut temporibus aequalibus maiora semper spatia pervadat, iuxta proportionem, quam habent numeri impares inter se, initio sumpto ab unitate. […] Heinc fieri, ut spatia quibuscumque temporibus peracta, sint inter se in duplicata ratione suorum temporum (nempe ut eorundem temporum quadrata) veluti Geometrae loquuntur. Alterum; viam sive lineam, quam imaginamur describi in aëre a corpore oblique proiecto, quamque notum est esse curvam, non esse circularem […] sed parabolicam, ut Geometrae vocant. 19 Galilei, Dialogue, 235. 20 OO III, 489b: Caeterum, cum plures sint modi, quibus causa externa movet, constat tamen omneis ad duos, tanquam praecipuos pertinere, impulsionem et attractionem. Age itaque experiamur, an-non motus rerum cadentium, sive perpendicularis, aliqua esse possit causa seu impellens, seu attrahens, seu potius impellens, et attrahens simul. 21 OO III, 497a: Nam fac unicam esse causam, exempli gratia attractionem; concipies quidem ex dictis sequi, ut quia radij magnetici, quasi stringentes chordulae, continentem motum, sive impetum lapidi imprimunt, talem imprimant in primo momento, qui non deleatur, sed perseveret in secundo, in quo alius similis imprimitur, qui priori iunctus perseveret una cum illo in tertio; in quo alius similis adiungitur, atque ita consequenter; adeo ut impetus ex continua illa adiectione continuo increscat, motusque semper velocior fiat.

286  Carla Rita Palmerino Verum facile erit pervidere consequi ex hac adiectione incrementuum celeritas secundum unitatum seriem; nempe ita ut in primo momento sit unus velocitatis gradus, in secundo sint duo, in tertio tres, in quarto quatuor; & in primo momento, lapis descendat unam v.c. orgyiam, in secundo duas, in tertio treis, in quarto quatuor. 22 Galileo Galilei, Two New Sciences, trans. Stillman Drake (Toronto: Wall & Emerson, 1989), 167. 23 See, for example, Joseph T. Clark, “Pierre Gassendi and the Physics of Galileo,” Isis 54 (1963): 352–370, here at 364; Egidio Festa, “Gassendi interprete di Cavalieri,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 71 (1992): 289–300, at 298–299; Galluzzi, “Gassendi and l’Affaire Galilée,” 250. For a more thorough account of Gassendi’s double causal explanation of gravity, see Palmerino, “Galileo’s Theories of Free Fall,” 154–156. 24 OO III, 496b–497a. 25 See Carla Rita Palmerino, “Infinite Degrees of Speed: Marin Mersenne and the Debate over Galileo’s Law of Free Fall,” Early Science and Medicine 4 (1999): 269–328, esp. 292–295. 26 Galileo Galilei, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. A. Favaro, 20 vols. (Firenze: Barbèra, 1890–1909), XVI, 204–205. 27 Ibid., 230–231 (my translation). 28 OO III, 626a. 29 OO III, 621b: Iam lapsus fuit, quatenus proinde velocitates ut spatia habere se admisi imprudens. Quia enim non satis attendi velocitatis gradum primo momento acquisitum ita integrum manere in secundo, ut ad superandum duo spatia valeret, ipsumque ita habui, quasi solum valeret ad superandum unicum. 30 OO III, 566a: Ut primum tempus AE non est individuum, sed in tot instantia, seu temporula potest dividi, quot sunt puncta particulaeve in ipsa AE (aut AD) ita neque gradus velocitatis individuus est, seu uno instanti, acquisitus totus; sed ab usque initio per totum primum tempus increscit, ac repraesentari potest per tot lineas, quot possunt parallelae duci ipsi DE inter puncta linearum AD, et AE; adeo ut quemadmodum illae lineae continuo increscunt a puncto A in lineam DE, sic velocitas a principio motus continuo increscat. 31 OO III, 608b. 32 OO I, 341b: Declaratum certe est quoque iam ante & infinitatem illam partium in continuo, & insectilitatem Mathematicam in rerum natura non esse, sed Mathematicorum hypothesin esse, atque idcirco non oportere argumentari in Physica ex iis, quae natura non novit. 33 OO I, 351a. 34 Richard S. Westfall, Force in Newton’s Physics: The Science of Dynamics in the Seventeenth Century (London: Macdonald & New York: Elsevier, 1971), 108. 35 See Koyré, Galileo Studies, 244–245. 36 OO III, 495b: Quaeres obiter, quid-nam eveniret illi lapidi, quem assumpsi concipi posse in spatiis illis inanibus, si a quiete exturbatus aliqua vi impelletur? Respondeo probabile esse, fore, ut aequabiliter, indefinenterque moveretur; et lente quidem, celeriterve, prout semel parvus, aut magnus impressus foret impetus. Argumentum vero desumo ex aequabilitate illa motus horizontalis iam

Pierre Gassendi and the New Science of Motion  287 exposita; cum ille videatur aliunde non desinere, nisi ex admistione motus perpendicularis; adeo, ut quia in illis spatiis nulla esset perpendicularis admistio, in quacumque partem foret motus inceptus, horizontalis instar esset, et neque acceleraretur, retardereturve, neque proinde unquam desineret. 37 OO I, 355a. 38 Peter Anton Pav, “Gassendi’s Statement of the Principle of Inertia,” Isis 57 (1966): 24–34, here at 27–28. 39 Ibid., 28. Pav refers to OO I, 345, 355. 40 “Ex quo par est existimare, motum horizontalem, a quacumque causa is fiat, ex sua natura perpetuum fore, nisi causa aliqua intervenerit, quae mobile abducat, motumque exturbet,” OO III, 489a. 41 Galilei, Dialogue, 149. For an analysis of this and similar passages, see Maurice Clavelin, The Natural Philosophy of Galileo: Essay on the Origins and Formation of Classical Mechanics, trans. A.J. Pomerans (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 261ff.; Stillman Drake, “Galileo Gleanings XVII. The Question of Circular Inertia,” Physis 10 (1968): 282–298; José Alberto Coffa, “Galileo’s Concept of Inertia,” Physis 10 (1979): 261–281; Alan Chalmers and Richard Nicholas, “Galileo on the Dissipative Effect of a Rotating Earth,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 14 (1983): 315–340. 42 Clavelin, The Natural Philosophy, 237; see also Coffa, “Galileo’s Concept of Inertia” and Stephen Gaukroger, Explanatory Structures: A Study of Concepts of Explanation in Early Physics and Philosophy (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978), 196. 43 “Tametsi ipsis partibus Terrae nihil subset periculi, quae, quod cohaerant omnes inter se, motusque semper naturali, aequabilique ferantur, perinde se habent, ac si quiescerent,” OO III, 507a. 44 On this point, see Palmerino, “Galileo’s Theories of Free Fall,” 151–153. 45 “Gravitas […] seu pondus […] nihil [est] aliud, quam naturalis, internaque facultas seu vis, qua se per seipsam ciere, movereque potest Atomus; seu mavis, quam ingenita, innata, nativa inamissibilisque ad motum propensio, et ab intrinseco propulsio, atque impetus,” OO I, 273b. Gassendi had already given a similar definition in the second letter de apparente magnitudine solis humilis et sublimis (1640), OO III, 426b. It is important to stress that Gassendi’s atoms, contrary to those of Epicurus, move in all directions, not only downwards; see Fisher’s chapter in this volume. 46 Koyré, “Le savant,” 109; Koyré’s judgment was endorsed not only by Pav, but also by Wolfang Detel, “War Gassendi ein Empirist?,” Studia Leibnitiana 6 (1974): 178–221; Richard Westfall, Force in Newton’s Physics, 103–104; Marco Messeri, Causa e spiegazione: La fisica di Pierre Gassendi (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1985), 88–89; Barry Brundell, Pierre Gassendi: From Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy (Dordrecht–Boston, MA: Reidel, 1987), 79; Thomas M. Lennon, The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1665–1715 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 14. 47 For Gassendi’s interpretation, appropriation, and modification of Epicurus’ notion of atomic pondus, see Jo Coture, “What about a Flat Earth? Pierre Gassendi’s Reconstructions of Epicurus’s Atomic Motion and the Shape of the Earth,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 29 (2022): 147– 167. For the theological underpinnings of Gassendi’s notion of the selfmotion of atoms, see the divergent views of Olivier Bloch, who interprets the dynamism of atoms as an expression of Gassendi’s materialism (Olivier René Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 209–220) and Margaret

288  Carla Rita Palmerino Osler, according to whom mobility and activity are not innate, but were imposed on atoms by God (Margaret Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 191–192). As for Antonia LoLordo, she stresses that atoms are mobile and active because of the internal source and activity that God gave to them. See Antonia LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 144. 48 OO I, 341b: […] ita licere videtur concipere motum, quo Atomi per Inane ferri dicuntur, aut, si mavis motum primo Mobili attributum, esse velocissimum; omneis vero gradus, qui ex illo, ad meram usque quietem sunt, ex intermistis paucioribus, pluribusve quietis particulis esse. […] Neque opponas huiusmodi motum non fore igitur continuum: Siquidem non erit quidem continuus in se; sed erit tamen continuus ad sensum. See also OO I, 335b–336a, 338a–b 49 Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi, 227. 50 Ibid., 226. For a criticism of Bloch’s interpretation, see Messeri, Causa e spiegazione, 88–93. 51 OO I, 343b: Rem paullo altius ut desumamus, non id repeto, quod est ante dictum, omnem vim motricem, quae in rebus concretis est, ab ipsis esse Atomis; observo dumtaxat, cum ipsa nativa Atomorum vis, neque dum res ipsae concretae incipiunt quiescere, pereat, sed impediatur solummodo; neque dum res moveri incipiunt, gignatur, sed libertatem solum acquirat: ideo dici posse iuxta ante supposita, tantum impetus perseverare constanter in rebus, quantum ab usque initio fuit. OO I, 384b: Quippe Atomi quantumvis revinctae, detentaeque in corporibus, mobilitatem tamen suam, ut dictum ante est, non admittunt, sed incessanter connituntur; et vel plures eodem, vel aliae in has, aliae in illas parteis contendunt, sataguntque erumpere; et exinde fit ut quam in partem fuerit plurium connixus, ac impetus, in illam consequatur motus. Quare & vis Motrix, quae in unaquaque re concreta est, originem Atomis debet, neque distincta est reipsa ab illarum pondere, sive impetus. OO I, 385a: “Observo potius, cum Atomorum motus supponatur ex se ut rectus, ita pernicissimus; ea de causa tum deviationem, tum tarditatem, quae in rebus concretis est, aliunde esse non videri, quam ex repercussione, seu repressione multiplici earumdemmet Atomorum.” For a comparison between Gassendi’s theory of the discontinuity of motion and that of other contemporaries, see Carla Rita Palmerino, “The Isomorphism of Space, Time and Matter in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy,” Early Science and Medicine 16 (2011): 296–330. 52 François Bernier, Abrégé de la philosophie de M. Gassendi (2e édition revue et augmentée par l’auteur), 7 vols. (Lyon: Anisson, Posuel et Rigaud, 1684), II, 449–450/revised edition by Sylvia Murr and Geneviève Stefani, “Corpus des œuvres de philosophie en langue française” (Paris: Fayard, 1992), II, 311–312: …il doit être ridicule de s’imaginer que dans ces différens mouvemens il y ait des morules ou des petits repos entre-meslez, et qu’un mouvement lent,

Pierre Gassendi and the New Science of Motion  289 et un viste soient differens en ce que dans le lent il y en ait plus, et dans le viste il y en ait moins; d’autant plus qu’il n’y a aucune raison pourquoy une boule qui en roulant doucement sur un billard aurait une fois estée arrestée, ou mise en repos, ne deust pas ensuite demeurer en repos jusques à ce qu’il intervint une cause qui la remit en mouvement. 53 Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi, 227. 54 “Efficitur denique, ut non modo motus sit universe magis naturalis, quam quies, verum etiam ut omnis motus ex origine sua naturalis sit, quatenus ab Atomis est, quae sponte naturae moventur,” OO I, 343b. 55 Antonia LoLordo has tried to understand the reasons that led Gassendi to endorse at the same time the Epicurean theory of atomic motion and the Galilean theory of the motion of composite bodies. She first identified metaphysical reasons linked to the need to preserve secondary causation (see Antonia LoLordo, “Epicurean and Galilean Motion in Gassendi’s Physics,” Philosophy Compass 3 (2008): 301–314), and later concluded that one should not even ask how the two theories fit together, for they are not part of a single philosophical system (Antonia LoLordo, “Copernicus, Epicurus, Galileo, and Gassendi,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 51 (2015): 82–88.) 56 For a detailed account of Gassendi’s reinterpretation of Galileo’s theory of tides, see Carla Rita Palmerino, “Gassendi’s Reinterpretation of the Galilean Theory of Tides,” Perspectives on Science 12 (2004): 212–237. 57 Galileo, Dialogue, 432. 58 Ibid., 432–433. 59 OO III, 517a: Ut enim, si navicula aequabiliter moveatur, aqua contenta aequabiliter manet; et, si moveatur tantum rapidius, aqua ex prora refugit in puppim, elevataque veluti haeret, donec rapiditate non-nihil remissa, proprio pondere recurrat in proram, refugitura iterum proprio pondere, sive aequabilis sit motus, sive tardior, sive nullus; et recursura iterum proprio pondere, si vel nihil, vel parum augeatur velocitas, ac refugitura, ut prius, si ut prius velocitas, seu rapiditas augescat: ita necesse est accidat in Terra, Marique in eius cavitatibus contento, neque parteis solidiores ob fluxibilitatem, perinde consequi idoneo. 60 OO III, 518a. 61 OO III, 649b. 62 Ibid. 63 Galilei, Dialogue, 457. 64 OO III, 518b. 65 Tad M. Schmaltz, “Galileo and Descartes on Copernicanism and the Cause of the Tides,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 51 (2015): 70–81, at 76. 66 OO III, 518b. 67 Paul Acloque, “Les marées et le mouvement de la Terre,” Revue d'histoire des sciences 36 (1983): 265–283, esp. 270–271. 68 OO III, 518 b. 69 Schmaltz, “Galileo and Descartes,” 76. 70 See Sakamoto’s chapter in this volume. 71 Pav, “Gassendi’s Statement,” 27–28.

Bibliography Acloque, Paul. “Les marées et le mouvement de la Terre,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 36 (1983): 265–283.

290  Carla Rita Palmerino Bernier, François. Abrégé de la philosophie de M. Gassendi (2e édition revue et augmentée par l’auteur), 7 vols. Lyon: Anisson, Posuel et Rigaud, 1684/revised edition by Sylvia Murr and Geneviève Stefani. Paris: Fayard, 1992. Bernier, François. Anatomia riduculi muris, hoc est Dissertatiunculae I.B. Morini Astrologi adversus expositam à P. Gassendo Epicuri philosophiam. Parisiis: Apud Michaelem Soly, 1651. Bernier, François. Favilla ridiculi muris, hoc est Dissertatiunculae ridiculae defensae a Joan. Baptist. Morino, Astrologo, adversus expositam a Petro Gassendo Epicuri philosophiam. Lutetiae: E Typographia Edmundi Martini, 1653. Bloch, Olivier René. La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971. Brundell, Barry. Pierre Gassendi. From Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht–Boston, MA: Reidel, 1987. Chalmers, Alan and Richard Nicholas. “Galileo on the Dissipative Effect of a Rotating Earth,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 14 (1983): 315–340. Clark, Joseph T. “Pierre Gassendi and the Physics of Galileo,” Isis 54 (1963): 352–370. Clavelin, Maurice. The Natural Philosophy of Galileo: Essay on the Origins and Formation of Classical Mechanics. Translated by A.J. Pomerans. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974. Coffa, José Alberto. “Galileo’s Concept of Inertia,” Physis 10 (1979): 261–281. Coture, Jo. “What about a Flat Earth? Pierre Gassendi’s Reconstructions of Epicurus’s Atomic Motion and the Shape of the Earth,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 29 (2022): 147–167. Detel, Wolfang. “War Gassendi ein Empirist?,” Studia Leibnitiana 6 (1974): 178–221. Drake, Stillman. “Galileo Gleanings XVII. The Question of Circular Inertia,” Physis 10 (1968): 282–298. Festa, Egidio. “Gassendi interprete di Cavalieri,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 71 (1992): 289–300. Finocchiaro, Maurice A. Retrying Galileo, 1633–1992. Berkeley–Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2005. Galilei, Galileo. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Translated by Stillman Drake. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967. Galilei, Galileo. Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. A. Favaro, 20 vols. Firenze: Barbèra, 1890–1909. Galilei, Galileo. Two New Sciences. Translated by Stillman Drake. Toronto: Wall & Emerson, 1989. Galluzzi, Paolo. “Gassendi and l’Affaire Galilée of the Laws of Motion,” Science in Context 13 (2000): 509–545. Gassendi, Pierre. Apologia in Jo. Bap. Morini librum, cui titulus Alae Telluris fractae. Epistola IV De motu impresso a motore translato. Una cum tribus Galilaei Epistolis de conciliatione Scripturae S. cum systemate Telluris mobilis. Lugduni: Apud Guillelmum Barbier, 1649. Gassendi, Pierre. Opera omnia in sex tomos divisa. Lugduni: Sumptibus Laurentii Anisson, & Ioan. Bapt. Devenet, 1658 (abridged OO). Gaukroger, Stephen. Explanatory Structures: A Study of Concepts of Explanation in Early Physics and Philosophy. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978.

Pierre Gassendi and the New Science of Motion  291 Gregory, Tullio. “Gassendi e Galileo.” In Saggi su Galileo Galilei, edited by Carlo Maccagni, 3 vols., II, 309–323. Firenze: Barbèra, 1972. Koyré, Alexandre. Galileo Studies. Translated by J. Mepham. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978. Koyré, Alexandre. “Le savant.” In Pierre Gassendi: Sa vie et son œuvre 1592– 1655, edited by Centre International de Synthèse, 59–70. Paris: Albin Michel, 1955. Lennon, Thomas M. The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655–1715. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. LoLordo, Antonia. “Epicurean and Galilean Motion in Gassendi’s Physics,” Philosophy Compass 3 (2008): 301–314. LoLordo, Antonia. “Copernicus, Epicurus, Galileo, and Gassendi,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 51 (2015): 82–88. LoLordo, Antonia. Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Martinet, Monette. “Chronique des relations orageuses de Gassendi et de ses satellites avec Jean-Baptiste Morin,” Corpus 20/21 (1992): 47–64. Messeri, Marco. Causa e spiegazione: La fisica di Pierre Gassendi. Milano: Franco Angeli, 1985. Morin, Jean-Baptiste. Defensio suae dissertationis de atomis et vacuo adversus Petri Gassendi philosophiam Epicuream, contra Francisci Bernieri Andegavi Anatomiam ridiculis muris. Parisiis: Apud authorem, 1651. Morin, Jean-Baptiste. Dissertatio …de atomis, et vacuo contra Petri Gassendi philosophiam Epicuream. Parisiis: Apud authorem, 1650. Morin, Jean-Baptiste [pseud. Vincentius Panurgius]. Epistola de tribus impostoribus ad clarissimum virum Joan.-Baptistam Morinum. Parisiis: Apud Macaeum Bouillette …et Ioannem Guignard, 1654. Osler, Margaret J. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Palmerino, Carla Rita. “Galileo’s Theories of Free Fall and Projectile Motion as Interpreted by Pierre Gassendi.” In The Reception of the Galilean Science of Motion in Seventeenth-Century Europe, edited by Carla Rita Palmerino and J.M.M.H. Thijssen, 137–164. Dordrecht: Springer, 2004. Palmerino, Carla Rita. “Gassendi’s Reinterpretation of the Galilean Theory of Tides,” Perspectives on Science 12 (2004): 212–237. Palmerino, Carla Rita. “Infinite Degrees of Speed: Marin Mersenne and the Debate over Galileo’s Law of Free Fall,” Early Science and Medicine 4 (1999): 269–328. Pav, Peter Anton. “Gassendi’s Statement of the Principle of Inertia,” Isis 57 (1966): 24–34. Recueil de Lettres des Sieurs Morin, De la Roche, De Neuré et Gassend: en suite de l’apologie du Sieur Gassend, touchant la question De motu impresso a motore translato. Paris: Chez Augustin Courbé, 1650. Schmaltz, Tad M. “Galileo and Descartes on Copernicanism and the Cause of the Tides,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 51 (2015): 70–81. Westfall, Richard S. Force in Newton’s Physics: The Science of Dynamics in the Seventeenth Century. London: Macdonald & New York: Elsevier, 1971.

11 Astronomy, Cosmology, and the Limit of Empiricism in Gassendi’s Thought Kuni Sakamoto

11.1 Introduction Pierre Gassendi had two lifelong pursuits. One was his acclaimed Epicurean project, which began around 1626 and lasted until his death in 1655.1 The other was astronomy, a pursuit for which he was not so well known but to which he devoted even more of his time. He started his astronomical observations in 1618 and continued them for nearly 40 years.2 This long-standing engagement resulted in a variety of writings. He exchanged a number of letters, filled with observational information, with fellow astronomers in his time, many of whom (but not all) are included in his Opera omnia.3 He also published treatises that reported his observations; his treatise on the transit of Mercury is particularly noteworthy. He even wrote biographies of famous astronomers. In this chapter, I do not intend to give an overview of his wide range of compositions, not least because this has been recently provided by Sylvie Taussig and Robert Hatch.4 I would rather connect Gassendi’s astronomical pursuits to his broader intellectual concerns. My main focus is on the role that he expected astronomy to play in the intellectual scene of his time. He did not consider it just one of many scholarly disciplines but hoped that it would be paradigmatic for other fields. To substantiate this point, I shall first take up his polemical writings: the Exercitationes against the Aristotelians, the Fifth Objections against René Descartes (1596–1650), the De proportione against Pierre Le Cazre (1589–1664), and criticisms of astrology given in the Syntagma and in Parhelia sive soles quatuor spurii. In opposition to his adversaries, Gassendi highlighted empirical and hypothetical aspects as two facets of astronomy that he thought should serve as models for any natural philosophical investigation.5 After a brief look at Gassendi’s 1645 oration, which exhibits a somewhat exceptional line of thought in his corpus, my examination shall turn to some specific issues concerning the celestial region, one of which was religiously sensitive while others could hardly be based on empirical data at the time. I shall show how Gassendi, with the

DOI: 10.4324/9781315521732-15

Astronomy, Cosmology, and the Limit of Empiricism  293 scholarly ideal derived from the astronomy at hand, effectively (or ineffectively) addressed problems, such as the choice among different world systems and the shaping of the world.

11.2 Astronomy as a Paradigm of the Sciences In the Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos, Gassendi repeatedly denounced the Aristotelians for the contempt in which they held experience or the observation of empirical evidence. They considered all truths to have been discovered by Aristotle and concentrated on interpreting his texts.6 This attitude proved particularly detrimental to the field of astronomy. Without actually observing celestial phenomena, they were given to making unfounded speculations on the nature of the heavens, and consequently made many assumptions that were never verified by experience, such as the existence of solid celestial spheres and, even more ridiculously, that of tube-like channels running through them, in which celestial bodies were supposed to move.7 Aristotle himself could not escape Gassendi’s criticism. In Book 2, chapter 14 of On the Heavens, Aristotle maintained that he proved the immobility of the Earth. However, Gassendi considered the proof unconvincing and asserted, to the contrary, that the Earth’s mobility could be persuasively argued.8 In the same work, Aristotle placed the motionless Earth at the center of the universe, and in connection with this, he claimed that heavy things fall because of their tendency to move toward the center of the world. It was therefore the place of the Earth, not the Earth itself, that was the goal of the falling bodies. For Gassendi, it was absurd to suppose that any place could ever exert attractive power. He instead considered that the Earth had the power of pulling things to itself.9 These oppositions to Aristotle demonstrate that Gassendi rejected geocentrism and supported Copernicanism from the start of his literary career. Gassendi reasoned that the dogmatic assertions by Aristotle and his followers came from their erroneous conviction that they could obtain demonstrative and therefore infallible knowledge about the natural world. Using the argument of ancient skepticism, Gassendi argued for the limit of human knowledge. Humans could only deal with what presented itself to their senses, so they could not recognize invisible causes of phenomenal appearances. All they could know was how things appeared to them. Gassendi called such knowledge about appearances scientia experimentalis.10 A typical example of scientia experimentalis was astronomy. After classifying it as a branch of applied mathematics, Gassendi explained what type of knowledge we could obtain from it: I therefore conclude that any certitude and obviousness found in mathematical disciplines are about appearances. They are by no

294  Kuni Sakamoto means about true causes or intimate natures of things. But I add that, through mathematics, I will be able to become more certain that, for instance, the Earth is spherical. For this can be seen from the lunar eclipse and the change of altitudes of the polar star. But [the following things cannot be seen]: Why is the Earth spherical? What is its true nature? Is it animated or not? And if it has a soul, what sort of soul is it? Which function does the soul carry out and which properties does it have? Why does the Earth rest unmoved at the center? Or if it is moved, what force pushes it?11 Although astronomy could only deal with celestial appearances, Gassendi thought that this by no means diminished its value. Rather, precisely because of this, it was worth pursuing. As humans could not replicate heavenly phenomena, their failure to observe and record them meant an irreparable loss of information. Astronomy should rescue such data from oblivion and transmit them to posterity. Based on such accumulation of records, astronomical knowledge made steady progress, a point that showed a marked contrast to the sterile Aristotelianism.12 Nonetheless, the ideal of scientia experimentalis did not last long. After the Exercitationes, and certainly by 1640, Gassendi changed (or further elaborated on) his conception of the sciences. Mitigating his skeptical tone, he tried to find a middle path between skepticism and dogmatism.13 Unlike the skeptics, he was no longer satisfied with the knowledge of appearances, recognizing the need to investigate causes. But he also disagreed with the dogmatists in not claiming to have certain and infallible knowledge. He emphasized that causal explanations would always remain hypothetical, open to revision and even rejection. Such a probabilistic approach took a clear form in the controversy between himself and Descartes in the first half of the 1640s. What did he have to say about astronomy there?14 Famously enough, Descartes began his Meditations (Paris, 1641) with methodical doubt, declaring that “anything which admits of the slightest doubt I will set aside just as if I had found it to be wholly false.”15 However, Gassendi did not take this doubt seriously. “Now if you do not yet believe that the earth, sky, stars and so on exist, why, may I ask, do you walk on the earth and move your body to look at the sun?”16 For him, Descartes’ supposition that everything was false was an unnatural artifice, forcing Descartes to suppose that he was not awake or to imagine a deceiving God. What was necessary for the abandonment of prejudices was not such a grandiose doubt but admitting to the weakness of the mind, and being more cautious. Should we, like Descartes, really suppose everything to be false, a worse problem would arise, Gassendi continued, for it is impossible to build knowledge on the basis of falsity. As to his own view, Descartes considered that the type of supposition he had made was common among

Astronomy, Cosmology, and the Limit of Empiricism  295 scholars. For instance, astronomers had obtained remarkable results by assuming falsehoods, such as “the equator, the zodiac, or other circles in the sky”17; there was no reason why philosophers could not do the same thing. For Gassendi, however, Descartes was engaged in a wholly different enterprise to that of the astronomers. Astronomers first made observations and confirmed the locations of stars. Based on certain facts, they next tried to explain them, asking, “Why do those stars take those positions?” At that point, they assumed some circles in the heavens to be pathways of celestial bodies. Thus, by no means did astronomers regard this supposition of the circles as false; they took it as at least verisimilar. Of course, they did not dogmatically claim that their supposition conformed to the true state of nature. Indeed, if they found better hypotheses, they would immediately adopt these. In contrast, Descartes had nothing certain at the start on which he could base his inquiry, nor did he subsequently introduce anything as probable. On the contrary, his doubt proceeded to render everything false. As Gassendi mockingly wrote, this would be like a situation in which “astronomers proposed hypotheses without making any previous observations, expecting a true observation to be drawn from those hypotheses.”18 Gassendi highlighted the hypothetical character of astronomy even more clearly in the controversy between him and the Jesuit and Aristotelian Pierre Le Cazre.19 Cazre criticized Gassendi’s explanation of the free fall of bodies, given in De motu. According to Gassendi’s theory therein, the Earth emitted a series of atoms with hooks, which grabbed terrestrial things and pulled them toward the Earth.20 Cazre ridiculed this atomistic and mechanical explanation as mere “fictions” (figmenta). For him, it was superfluous to conceive of atoms with various shapes. Free fall could be explained by just assuming that God had given each thing an inclination to preserve itself. Consequently, the Earth tended to keep its totality so that terrestrial bodies fell to it.21 Gassendi responded: Therefore, you should not take my fictions as if I presented them in place of the inclination given by God. In fact, I use them as some hypotheses, by which I try, as far as I can, to understand and explain the admirable industry through which the most wise artificer wanted these works of his to perform their activities. This is according to the same reason as when astronomers introduce hypotheses (or, if you like, fictions) into the heavens. They have recourse to them not because they deny that the motion was given to the heavens or stars by God, but because, assuming that motion [to have been given by God], they try to understand and explain how such a multiple, harmonious, and regular motion can take place. Perhaps you are wise when you indicate that it must be enough for us if, contemplating on things, we recognize the fact that they exist, and that we should not invent hypotheses by which to explain the reason why they have

296  Kuni Sakamoto come to be as they are, or how they act, etc. As I have said above, however, I cannot see the reason, for then it follows that the whole philosophy ought to be eliminated.22 Gassendi agreed with Cazre in considering God to be the first cause of natural phenomena, but he dissented in claiming that this recognition did not exempt natural philosophers from inquiring into secondary causes. Natural philosophers should try to understand the mechanism through which God produced these phenomena. The results of this inquiry were inevitably probable and hypothetical; humans could not penetrate into the inner mechanism of nature, because it was God’s work, not theirs.23 Therefore, Cazre’s refusal of hypotheses making was tantamount to the denial of the whole enterprise of natural philosophy. What is noteworthy here is that Gassendi shifted the point on which he praised astronomy, reflecting his changing conception of what sciences could bring about. On the one hand, in writing the Exercitationes, he highlighted the accumulation of data by astronomers as embodying an ideal of scientia experimentalis. After 1640, on the other hand, as he expanded the business of sciences into providing causal explanations in probabilistic terms, he sought, in astronomers’ hypothetical accounts of celestial movement, the model of natural philosophy in general.

11.3 Criticism of Astrology In addition to the Aristotelian and Cartesian dogmatism, Gassendi had yet another target, namely astrology. He regarded it as a pseudoscience and throughout his career tried to distinguish it from astronomy.24 Gassendi noted that astrologers based their doctrines on premises that everyone would agree with. For instance, they assumed that the sun sent heat and light to the Earth and that the moon caused the tides.25 Starting from such sound premises, they then leapt to the absurd conclusion that the influence of celestial bodies caused earthly and (especially) human events.26 Gassendi countered that the stars acted on the Earth only in a general way, so they could not be responsible for any particular event.27 He added that the astrological theories of the zodiac and its houses made sense only in the northern hemisphere, not in the southern part.28 He also used his own astronomical observation to debunk astrology. In 1631, he observed the transit of Mercury in front of the sun, a phenomenon that had been predicted by Kepler. This enabled his discovery that Mercury’s size was far smaller than that of the sun, much smaller than generally assumed at that time. He claimed that such a huge difference undermined the assumption of astrologers that Mercury influenced earthly affairs on a scale comparable to that of the sun.29 In the Parhelia sive soles quatuor spurii, Gassendi criticized astrology from a theological perspective. Astrologers claimed that God miraculously

Astronomy, Cosmology, and the Limit of Empiricism  297 caused extraordinary meteorological phenomena, such as parhelia, to foreshadow important future events. Gassendi did not deny this possibility, but argued that if God intended to presage future events, he would surely make clear what events he intended to signal through those phenomena. As he cared about humans, he would not just show the phenomena and then leave humans to the difficult task of interpreting the hidden meaning behind these signs. If no clear indication of the divine will could be observed, such phenomena should not be taken as supernatural but as natural.30 Gassendi then backed up his claim by referring to the Old Testament. There, God declared rare meteorological phenomena to be entirely natural and urged us not to be horrified by them. He condemned some Israelites for being swept up in such horror, and reacting by positing other deities in the heavens and slavishly submitting to them.31 For all of Gassendi’s dismissals of it as pseudoscience, astrology was nonetheless immensely popular. This Gassendi attributed to a psychological explanation. He wrote that humans valued a thing according to its scarcity. They consequently gave special, supernatural meanings to rare phenomena even though these were actually part of the ordinary course of nature.32 He also maintained that a form of anthropocentrism contributed to the popularity of astrology: Next, our vanity is so grand that we consider ourselves to be the only ones for whom such great prodigies deserve to happen. We think that our affairs are very much important for the air, the heavens, and the world. Consequently, if we intend to engage in warfare, or if we are going to be sick, or if a misfortune impends over us, then we think that the nature of things itself should be immediately agitated and it must take a paintbrush to portray the whole thing in the tableau as an emblem.33 Fraudulent astrologers thus preyed on the credulous populace. This attack on astrology also served the cause of Copernicanism. One of the objections against heliocentrism was that it would subvert astrological theories. Facing this objection in the controversy between himself and Jean-Baptiste Morin, Gassendi responded that because astrological teachings were just flights of fancy, their conflict with heliocentrism would never undermine it.34 Whereas he could dismiss the criticism of Copernicanism on astrological grounds fairly easily, there remained (as I show later) a far more pressing concern in the fact that the Copernican model seemed to contradict the Bible.

11.4 Inaugural Oration in 1645 In writing against Descartes and Cazre, Gassendi emphasized the hypothetical character of astronomy, regarding the circles introduced by its

298  Kuni Sakamoto practitioners as not necessarily reflecting reality. However, on one occasion, he expressed an opposite view—the inaugural oration he delivered in 1645 when he became a professor of mathematics at the Collège Royal. There, he argued that the world was mathematically structured, implying that astronomers captured the actual state of the universe.35 Somewhat unexpectedly, the oration revealed Gassendi’s deep misgivings about his appointment. To accept the professorship, he had to leave the priesthood he had held in Digne for over 20 years. He feared that this would provoke the objection that he was impious; he had sacrificed his religious duty for the sake of a profane job. He set out to answer this possible objection. His answer was very simple in a sense: astronomy was not a profane pursuit. To support this claim, he invoked the metaphor of God’s two books. The first book was Scripture, which theologians were meant to interpret. The second was the natural world, and according to Gassendi, its interpretation was assigned to mathematicians (i.e., astronomers). They could therefore be called “natural theologians.” It would follow that leaving the priesthood to become a professor of mathematics was just moving from one temple of God to the other; and in both, God’s words were revered and carefully read. Gassendi concluded that his acceptance of the professorship thus involved no betrayal of God.36 Why would reading the book of nature be the business of mathematicians? Gassendi answered that it was because of God’s use of geometrical principles in creating and preserving the world. Gassendi backed up this claim by referring to two maxims. He traced the first back to Plato: “God always exercises geometry.” The second was taken from the Book of Wisdom: “God makes all things in number, weight, and measure.”37 Gassendi then proceeded to enumerate many instances where God’s geometry could be observed. For example, before creation, God already had the idea of the world. Its shape was spherical since this was the figure that best represented his nature. Consequently, the created world came to have that geometrical form.38 Geometrical constitution could also be observed in the arrangements of the seven planets (note that here, Gassendi was referring to the traditional, Ptolemaic system). Their constellation was so harmonious that they produced a beautiful concord of sounds.39 Lastly, Gassendi claimed that the human soul had a geometrical nature since God “created man in his own image (Genesis 1:27).” This explained why humans had both the capacity and the desire to understand the created world. Indeed, there was “a natural commensuration” between humans and the natural world.40 In conceiving of the world as mathematically structured, Gassendi followed Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). The latter’s influence was particularly evident. His works must have directed Gassendi’s attention to the maxim of God’s exercise of geometry, the quotation from the Book of Wisdom, the attribution of cosmic music to the heavens, and the notion of the geometrical constitution of the

Astronomy, Cosmology, and the Limit of Empiricism  299 human soul.41 In a sense, this is not surprising, given Gassendi’s reverence for the two pioneers of the New Science. Nevertheless, in another sense, the oration strikingly contradicts what he had written elsewhere. He had always emphasized that mathematical objects did not exist in the world but only in the human mind. In line with this position, he had interpreted Galileo’s laws of falling bodies and Kepler’s doctrine of cosmic harmony not as facts that reveal the deeper structure of the universe, but as hypotheses.42 The oration therefore occupies an exceptional place in Gassendi’s corpus. This is primarily because in it, he tried to highlight the theological dimension of astronomy more than in any of his other writings.

11.5 Copernicanism as a Hypothesis In the Exercitationes, Gassendi had already made it clear that he favored Copernicanism.43 In his letter to Peiresc in 1632, he expressed his position even more explicitly: “Following Copernicus’ opinion, I conceive of the sun as located in the center of the world and there rotating on its axis in the space of twenty-eight days.”44 Nonetheless, he could not make such a straightforward assertion in his published writings, especially after the condemnation of Galileo in 1633. Though Gassendi considered the decision unjust, as a Catholic priest he could not oppose it.45 His only option was to downplay the significance of the verdict. In Institutio astronomica, he stressed that the verdict was for Galileo alone, not applicable to others. Additionally, it did not constitute an article of faith because it had not been issued by the general council. It could thus be revoked in the future.46 Although he did not openly endorse Copernicanism, Gassendi did his best to lend support to it. For instance, he defended it against the charge that it contradicted the Bible. Following in Galileo’s footsteps, he maintained that the purpose of Scripture is “to inform humans not of matters in physics or astronomy, but of those regarding grace and the supernatural life.”47 He claimed that as the latter two issues were of interest to everyone, including the uneducated, the Bible used expressions that were accommodated to the understanding of ordinary people. It therefore described stars based only on how they appeared to the senses; the Earth was thus depicted as though it were immobile. As these descriptions did not aim to give an accurate, scientific account of the natural world, they could, if taken literally, sometimes contradict reality. Based on this principle, Gassendi referred to the famous passage in Joshua 10:12: “Then spoke Joshua […], Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon.” Although this passage had often been taken to support geocentrism, Gassendi contended that Joshua merely “wanted the sun to appear to stop above the earth, regardless of whether in the end the position of the sun or that of the earth would bring it about.”48 Gassendi also enumerated many of the merits of Copernicus’ hypothesis. For example, he claimed that Copernicanism alone could explain the

300  Kuni Sakamoto phases of Venus, a phenomenon that Galileo had already considered a decisive proof of heliocentrism. It was also in accord with the principle that “nature is observed to carry out everything concisely.”49 It would be much more economical to assume the revolution of the Earth than to suppose that the immense outermost sphere rotates at enormous speed. Moreover, Gassendi claimed that only heliocentrism gave the sun its proper place: The sun is in the world not only as a torch that illuminates it, but also as the heart that vivifies it. Therefore, it is far from the case that the common opinion [i.e., geocentrism] allots to the sun as equally suitable place as the Pythagorean opinion [i.e., heliocentrism] does. It is only from the center of the world that the sun can uniformly spread rays of light, heat, and life on every side and in every direction. If it were located elsewhere, it would not be able to irradiate, illuminate, keep warm, or animate all things with such uniformity.50 Gassendi inherited this exalted description of the sun from Kepler’s work, most probably from his Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae (Linz and Frankfurt, 1618–1621).51 Again, drawing on Kepler’s work, he proceeded to argue that the sun emitted certain rays, which rotated together with the sun and made the planets revolve around it. This suggests that he had also accepted Kepler’s theory of planetary revolution.52 Despite all these efforts to render support to Copernicanism, there remained an alarming tension between what the Church seemed to endorse and what Gassendi considered rationally probable. Having grappled with this dilemma for over a decade, Gassendi finally—indeed, in the final rendition of the Syntagma—decided to offer the following solution: Although the opinion that the Earth moves may seem to be proven by some of the most plausible arguments, yet no demonstration can be offered that would prove it to be true. So the opposite view cannot be assailed on the grounds that it lacks demonstrative proof, or on the grounds that it is surpassed in respect of certainty by that opinion [that the Earth moves]. The result would be as follows: for those who consider it religiously problematic to support the Copernican hypothesis, the hypothesis of Brahe will come as the most probable.53 According to Gassendi’s epistemological premise, if a hypothesis is backed up by plausible arguments, it should be taken as verisimilar. The first sentence of the passage just quoted therefore indicates his support for the Copernican system. Nonetheless, he tactfully suppresses such an acknowledgment and instead calls attention to another point: though most plausible, Copernicus’ hypothesis still lacks demonstrative proof.54 This meant

Astronomy, Cosmology, and the Limit of Empiricism  301 that one could not reject other systems with absolute certainty. Thus, one could still accept Tycho’s hypothesis, which seemed consistent with the Bible in placing the Earth at the center of the universe. In this way, Gassendi managed to insinuate his support for heliocentrism, while pointing to Tycho’s system as a way of healing the rift between faith and reason. Characteristically, he reached this solution by resorting to his long-held conviction that astronomy was a hypothetical science.

11.6 Cosmogony, Gravity, and Extraterrestrial Life Gassendi faced another challenge when he addressed cosmological issues. Although little empirical data were available regarding many of these issues, he could not take a fully agnostic stance, avoiding the topics as altogether beyond human comprehension. For the rehabilitation of Epicureanism, he had to provide atomistic explanations for a whole range of natural philosophical issues. Thus, his Epicurean project clashed with his empiricism. The first question to address is Gassendi’s explanation for the shaping of the cosmos.55 This problem was inseparable from an interpretation of Genesis, especially its six-day creation story. Gassendi noted that some Church fathers rejected a literal interpretation of this sequence in Genesis, considering it absurd to assume that God needed several days or some such passage of time for the construction of the world. In opposition to them, Gassendi adopted something closer to a literal interpretation: the world actually took some time to arrive at its present state. This did not mean that God could not shape it instantaneously; he could, of course. But he chose to create it step by step (as described in Genesis) in order to render the process intelligible for humans.56 Stressing the gradual shaping of the world, Gassendi followed the same project as that pursued by Epicurus and Descartes. He interpreted their work as giving a similar account of the creation of the universe: matter began to move in a whirling motion, and this movement finally gave rise to the present state of the universe. In this process, they admitted no intervention of a transcendent deity.57 Gassendi tried to offer the same type of explanation. Characteristically, he used the paradigm of his Christianized atomism. According to him, God first created an enormous (but still finite) number of atoms, which would be necessary for the construction of the entire universe. He did not make these atoms separately but grouped them in accordance with their nature. Consequently, there appeared many clusters of atoms, each of which exhibited specific properties. Gassendi called them “molecules” (moleculae) or “the seeds of things” (semina rerum).58 They would play the role of preserving species constancy in the world, since “everything is woven and constructed from its own seeds in such a way that it is not and cannot be made from other seeds.”59 What existed at this point therefore comprised only the seeds of

302  Kuni Sakamoto things, which floated without constituting any order. After their creation, God did not directly intervene in the shaping of the world. He just lent his “general concourse” (generalis concursus) to atoms, that is, his influence only preserved their existence. He let them move according to the motive power that he had given to them.60 To recognize what happened next, Gassendi proposed a thought experiment. Suppose that God broke the entire universe into atoms or molecules. He then mixed them all together so that pure chaos appeared. What would come next? According to Gassendi, it would be quite similar to what is observed in chemical experiments. Chemists, such as Robert Fludd (1574–1637), often prepared a glass vessel in which several kinds of liquids were poured on top of each other in layers. When the vessel was shaken, the liquids were well mixed. However, if the vessel was then left unmoved, each liquid would return to the place it had earlier occupied. The original state would thus be restored.61 Gassendi connected this chemical observation to the universe in his thought experiment: In a similar way, we could imagine what would happen if God let the confused mass [of atoms or molecules], to which he brought back the world, exercise, as it were, its own powers. It seems that out of the immense heap [of atoms or molecules] individual particles will gradually remove themselves from those dissimilar to them. They separate from one another while associating with those similar to them. These associated particles are together rolled around, fit together with one another, and finally form one total unit. Once the restoration of everything is thus achieved, everything will be found in the same order as it was previously: those that were naturally at rest will rest, and those that were moved will be moved. The restoration will be so complete that the earth will be in the same place as it is now, and the moon, the sun, and likewise all other things will be in the same place.62 Gassendi’s point was that this transition from chaos to order was exactly what actually happened after the creation. The seeds of things were designed to move according to the principle that similar things come together. They thus gradually departed from the confused state and finally came to exhibit a magnificent order, namely the present state of the universe.63 Gassendi reminded the reader that his explanation was just a hypothesis. The world is so great a work that its construction is beyond human understanding. Despite this caveat, his cosmogony was sometimes presupposed in his natural philosophy, as was particularly apparent in his discussion on gravity. When addressing this issue, Gassendi relied on William Gilbert (1544–1603), who perceived the Earth as a grand magnet. From this premise, Gassendi argued that gravity was a magnetic

Astronomy, Cosmology, and the Limit of Empiricism  303 power by which the Earth pulled terrestrial things. He further clarified the cosmological role of gravity as follows: “it is true that the fundamental cause of the connection and union of individual parts of the earth is the magnetic power that attracts and connects everything.”64 Was this power not the one that first shaped the Earth as a unified whole? Indeed, Gassendi asserted that gravity operated in accordance with this same principle that similar things come together, a principle that first enabled the universe to arrive at its present order.65 Thus, Gassendi regarded gravity as a magnetic power that had once formed the Earth and continued to preserve its unity to the present day. Gassendi’s cosmogony also conditioned his discussions on extraterrestrial life.66 He observed how some past philosophers thought that the inhabitants of the moon and other stars were far superior to the earthly ones because the Earth was the “sediment of the whole universe.”67 This reasoning was obviously based on geocentrism, given that it positioned the Earth at the bottom (or the center) of the universe. Gassendi countered that each celestial body was made of its own specific substance, so it was a mistake to regard the Earth as something particularly inferior. However, this argument did not lead Gassendi to evaluate equally all celestial bodies. Instead, he recognized a hierarchical order among them. In his view, if there should be animate beings on other stars, those on Mercury must be more perfect than those on Earth because Mercury was nearer to the sun. Generally, planets close to the sun were composed of nobler substances than those far from it since the closer ones “absorb its influence more fully.”68 Gassendi concluded: I am going to say something about the sun itself (and also, by analogy, about individual fixed stars): if you suppose that there are also some animals on the sun, it would be fitting that they are the greatest and noblest by far, to the extent that the sun excels very much other globes in terms of the size and nobility of its substance.69 Once again, Gassendi denied the Earth its traditional, privileged position and affirmed the sun’s centrality and nobility. How should Gassendi’s remarks on these issues be evaluated? Undeniably, they are highly speculative, scarcely supported by empirical evidence. Nonetheless, it should also be noted that in some respects his opinions are in accordance with his scientific methodology. In the Institutio logica, he proposed that microscopic processes in nature could be understood by assuming their similarities with what could be observed in chemical experiments on a macroscopic level.70 He also explained in his cosmogony the unobservable by appealing to the findings of chemistry, this time drawing an analogy between the shaping of the world and a specific chemical phenomenon. His doctrine on extraterrestrial life was less grounded on observations, but still it made sense within his

304  Kuni Sakamoto Copernican worldview. Depriving the Earth of its privileged status in the universe, made much less tenable an outright denial of the possibility that other planets were inhabited. Thus, Gassendi’s remarks, while keeping a certain tension with his empiricism, found their places in the systematic exposition of the Copernican cosmology in the Syntagma.

11.7 Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown that Gassendi not only practiced astronomy but that he also regarded it as an ideal model for the sciences. As a practitioner, he proudly asserted that astronomers always started their investigations from empirical observation, from which they were content to derive probable and hypothetical conclusions. In this he believed astronomy to contrast sharply with the dogmatism of the Aristotelians and Cartesians, as well as with the pseudoscience of astrology. The hypothetical character of astronomy also enabled Gassendi to reconcile, albeit in a somewhat forced way, his allegiance to Copernicanism with the Church’s opposition to a heliocentric understanding of the universe. Heliocentrism was highly plausible but remained a hypothesis; therefore, it did not exclude the possibility of adopting other hypotheses, including Tycho’s Earth-centered system. In addressing cosmological issues, however, Gassendi encountered difficulties in basing his probabilistic approach on an empirical foundation. His remarks on the shaping of the world and the possibility of extraterrestrial life were certainly framed by his heliocentrism and atomism, but were scarcely supported by observational data. His empiricism was thus jeopardized by his attempt to offer a comprehensive Copernican cosmology with the underpinnings of the new matter theory. In this sense, Gassendi’s engagement with the celestial realm presented him with a challenge in coordinating his two lifelong pursuits. Moreover, the difficulties he encountered tell us much about what it was like to be both a practicing astronomer and a restorer of atomism in the early modern period.

Notes 1 See Fisher’s chapter in this volume. 2 Howard Jones, Pierre Gassendi, 1592–1655: An Intellectual Biography (Nieuwkoop: Graaf, 1981), 15, 25. 3 On Gassendi’s correspondence, see Sylvie Taussig, Pierre Gassendi (1592– 1655): Introduction à la vie savante (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 37–82. 4 Taussig, Gassendi, 113–132; Robert Alan Hatch, “Gassendi, Pierre,” in Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, 2nd ed., eds. Thomas Hockey, Katherine Bracher, Daniel W. E. Green, Richard A. Jarrell, Jordan D. Marché II, JoAnn Palmeri, Virginia Trimble, Thomas R. Williams (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 786–789. See also Pierre Humbert, L’Astronomie en France au dix-septième siècle (Paris: Université de Paris, 1952), 79–107.

Astronomy, Cosmology, and the Limit of Empiricism  305 5 The paradigmatic role of astronomy in Gassendi’s philosophy has already been highlighted by Tullio Gregory and Delphine Bellis. I owe a great deal to their insights; see Tullio Gregory, “Pierre Gassendi nel IV centenario della nascita,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 71 (1992): 202–226, esp. 216, 223; and Delphine Bellis, “Nos in Diem Vivimus: Gassendi’s Probabilism and Academic Philosophy from Day to Day,” in Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy, eds. Plínio Junqueira Smith and Sébastien Charles (Cham: Springer, 2017), 125–152, esp. 138–140. 6 OO III, 111a. Citations from the Exercitationes are taken from Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre les Aristotéliciens, ed. and trans. Bernard Rochot (Paris: Vrin, 1959). On Gassendi’s criticism of the Aristotelians, see Garber’s chapter in this volume. 7 OO III, 107b. 8 OO III, 129a, 141a. 9 OO III, 141a; Aristotle, On the Heavens, 4.3.310b1-5. 10 OO III, 192a; Reiner Tack, Untersuchungen zum Philosophie- und Wissenschaftsbegriff bei Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) (Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag A. Hain, 1974), 43–61; Marco Messeri, Causa e spiegazione: La fisica di Pierre Gassendi (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1985), 17–27; see also Paganini’s chapter in this volume. 11 OO III, 209a: Concludo ergo, quaecumque est certitudo et evidentia in disciplinis Mathematicis, eam pertinere ad apparentiam; nullo autem modo ad causas germanas, vel naturas etiam rerum intimas. Hoc autem adjicio quod certior quidem fieri per Mathematicam potero, Terram verbi causa esse sphaericam; hoc enim per Eclipses Lunae, altitudinesque Poli variatas apparere potest; at quare Terra sit sphaerica, quae sit ejus germana natura; sit-ne Animata, an-non; et si Animam habeat, cujusmodi illa sit; quas functiones obeat, aut sortiatur proprietates; quorsum quiescat iners in centro; vel si moveatur, quae vis illam agat? 12 OO VI, 29a–b; IV, 75; Gregory, “Pierre Gassendi,” 209. On the denial of scientific progress by the Aristotelians, see OO III, 115a–116a. 13 OO I, 79b. There has been some controversy over the nature of this “mitigation.” Here, I follow Messeri, Causa e spiegazione, 28–43. 14 On the controversy, see Antonia LoLordo, “Gassendi as Critic of Descartes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, eds. Steven Nadler, Tad M. Schmaltz, and Delphine Antoine-Mahut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 597–609. See also LoLordo’s chapter in this volume. 15 AT VII, 24, trans. CSM II, 16. 16 AT VII, 282 = OO III, 320a–b, trans. CSM II, 197. 17 AT VII, 350, OO III, 278b, trans. CSM II, 242. 18 OO III, 283b: “Neque dicas te ex falsa suppositione elicere aliquid verum, quale est illud, ego cogito, etc…, nam ut heic omittam, quae postea dicentur, perinde hoc est, ac si Astronomi, nullis observationibus praehabitis hypotheses statuerent, ex quibus vera aliqua observatio deduceretur.” I cite Gassendi’s words from Recherches métaphysiques, ou, Doutes et instances contre la métaphysique de R. Descartes et ses réponses, ed. and trans. Bernard Rochot (Paris: Vrin, 1962). 19 On the controversy between Gassendi and Cazre, see Paolo Galluzzi, “Gassendi and l’Affaire Galilée of the Laws of Motion,” Science in Context 13 (2000): 509–545; Carla Rita Palmerino, “Two Jesuit Responses to Galileo’s Science of Motion: Honoré Fabri and Pierre Le Cazre,” in The New

306  Kuni Sakamoto Science and Jesuit Science: Seventeenth Century Perspectives, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Dordrecht: Springer, 2003), 187–227, esp. 204–214. 20 OO III, 491a. 21 OO VI, 450a. 22 OO III, 635a: Quare non debes mea figmenta sic accipere, quasi ego ipsa in locum inditae a Deo inclinationis obtendam. Enim-vero illa usurpo, quasi quasdam hypotheseis, quibus coner, quatenus possum, intelligere, atque explicare industriam admirabilem, qua sapientissimus Opifex voluit sua haec opera proprias exserere actiones. Atque id quidem eadem ratione, qua Astronomi, dum hypotheseis, seu mavis figmenta in Caelum inducunt. Neque enim ad eas confugiunt, quasi motum Caelo, aut Sideribus fuisse a Deo inditum negent; sed, ut illo supposito, intelligant, ac explicent quomodo huiusmodi motus fieri possit tam multiplex, tam consonans, tam regularis. Ac forte tu quidem sapienter, cum innuis debere sufficere nobis, si circa rerum contemplationem, cognoscamus de illis, quod sint: neque fingendas esse hypotheseis, quibus explicetur quid sint, ut se habeant, quomodo agant, etc. sed, ut ante dixi, rationem non video; quando exinde sequitur, ut universam eliminare Philosophiam oporteat. See Tullio Gregory, Scetticismo ed empirismo. Studio su Gassendi (Bari: Laterza, 1961), 173–174. 23 OO VI, 110b; Olivier René Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme, et métaphysique (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 83. 24 On Gassendi’s criticism of astrology, see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 7 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 446–450; Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 98–117; Germana Ernst, “Atomes, providence, signes célestes: le dialogue épistolaire entre Campanella et Gassendi,” in Gassendi et la modernité, ed. Sylvie Taussig (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 61–82; Judith Sribnai, Pierre Gassendi: le voyage vers la sagesse (1592–1655) (Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2017), 196–201. 25 In fact, the cause of the tides was highly controversial; see Wallace Hooper, “Seventeenth-Century Theories of the Tides as a Gauge of Scientific Change,” in The Reception of the Galilean Science of Motion in Seventeenth-Century Europe, eds. Carla Rita Palmerino and J.M.M.H. Thijssen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), 199–242, esp. 235–237; Carla Rita Palmerino, “Gassendi’s Reinterpretation of the Galilean Theory of Tides,” Perspectives on Science 12 (2004): 212–237. 26 OO I, 719a–b. 27 OO I, 719a. 28 OO I, 723b. 29 OO IV, 503b. On this observation, see Humbert, L’Astronomie en France, 91–94; Albert Van Helden, Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 95–104. 30 OO III, 660a; Gregory, Scetticismo ed empirismo, 63; Ernst, “Atomes,” 71. 31 OO III, 660a. Gassendi referred to Jeremiah 10:2 and 2 Kings 21:5. 32 OO III, 661a. 33 OO III, 661a: Deinde ea est vanitas nostra, ut digni soli nobis videamur, propter quos tanta prodigia appareant. Arbitramur enim res nostras tanti esse aeri,

Astronomy, Cosmology, and the Limit of Empiricism  307 Caelo, toti Mundo: ut si bella meditemur, si aegrotaturi simus, si nobis casus sinister impendeat; ipsa statim rerum natura commouenda sit, et usurpare penicillum debeat, ut rem totam, quasi Emblema, repraesentet in tabula. Ernst, “Atomes,” 73. An almost identical argument can be found in Sentimens sur l’eclipse (Paris: Antoine Vitré, 1654), 14–15. This might endorse the traditional attribution of the authorship of Sentimens to Gassendi, which has recently been denied by Jacques Halbronn, “Questions autour du texte sur l’éclipse de 1654 attribué à Gassendi,” in Gassendi et la modernité, 311– 346, esp. 339; see also Bernard Rochot, “Les sentiments de Gassendi sur l’éclipse de 1654,” xviie siècle 27 (1955): 161–177. 34 OO III, 544a–547a. On the controversy between Gassendi and Morin, see Robert Alan Hatch, “Between Astrology and Copernicanism: Morin – Gassendi – Boulliau,” Early Science and Medicine 22 (2017): 487–516. 35 On the oration, see Henri Berr, Du scepticisme de Gassendi (Paris: Albin Michel, 1960), 96–98; Pierre Magnard, “La mathématique mystique de Pierre Gassendi,” in Gassendi et l’Europe, ed. Sylvia Murr (Paris: Vrin, 1997), 21–29. 36 OO IV, 66a–b. On the metaphor of God’s two books, see The Book of Nature in Early Modern and Modern History, eds. Klaas van Berkel and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leuven: Peeters, 2006). 37 OO IV, 67a, 69a. 38 OO IV, 69a. On this biblical passage, see Natacha Fabbri, Cosmologia e armonia in Kepler e Mersenne. Contrappunto a due voci sul tema dell’“Harmonice mundi” (Firenze: Olschki, 2003), 156–170. 39 OO IV, 70b. 40 OO IV, 72a. 41 Kuni Sakamoto, “The German Hercules’s Heir: Pierre Gassendi’s Reception of Keplerian Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009): 69–91. Note that Galileo also referred to the same passage of the Book of Wisdom; see Carla Rita Palmerino, “The Mathematical Characters of Galileo’s Book of Nature,” in The Book of Nature, 27–44, 34. 42 OO III, 233b; Luca Cafiero, “Robert Fludd e la polemica con Gassendi,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia 20 (1965): 3–15, esp. 12; OO III, 570a–b; Tullio Gregory, “Gassendi e Galileo,” in Saggi su Galileo Galilei, ed. Carlo Maccagni 3 vols. (Firenze: Barbèra, 1972), II, 309–323, esp. 311–313. On mathematics and Gassendi, see Bernard Rochot, “Gassendi et les mathématiques,” Revue d’histoire des sciences et de leurs applications 10 (1957): 69–78; Maria Seidl, Pierre Gassendi und die Probleme des Empirismus (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2019), 176–192; see also Mehl’s chapter in this volume. 43 On Gassendi’s remarks on Copernicanism, see especially Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi, 326–334; Barry Brundell, Pierre Gassendi: From Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy (Dordrecht–Boston, MA: Reidel, 1987), 30–47. 44 TL, 259, trans. Delphine Bellis, “Imaginary Spaces and Cosmological Issues in Gassendi’s Philosophy,” in Space, Imagination and the Cosmos from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, eds. Frederik A. Bakker, Delphine Bellis, and Carla Rita Palmerino (Cham: Springer, 2018), 233–260, here 236. 45 See Gassendi’s letter to Galileo written in 1634, a year after the condemnation; OO VI, 67a. 46 OO IV, 60b. 47 OO I, 629b; Gregory, “Pierre Gassendi,” 210.

308  Kuni Sakamoto 48 OO IV, 60a: “Et Patriarcham, Solem non moveri cum iussit; id solum curasse, ut Sol appareret supra Terram consistere; seu Sol demum foret, seu Terra, cuius statu id praestaretur.” 49 OO I, 621a. 50 OO I, 623b: Ad-haec, cum Sol in Mundo sit non modo ut fax ad illuminandum, sed etiam ut cor ad vivificandum; longe sane abest, ut vulgaris sententia ipsum aeque commodo loco, ac Pythagorea constituat. Quippe solum est centrum Mundi, unde radios lucis, caloris ac vitae circumquaque, et quoquoversum diffundere ex aequo possit; cum ubivis alias fuerit collocatus, non ita ex aequo irradiet, illustret, foveat, animetque universa. 51 Johannes Kepler, Epitome astronomiae copernicanae, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7, ed. Max Caspar (München: C.H. Beck, 1953), 259, 262. 52 Sakamoto, “German Hercules’s Heir,” 76–77. 53 OO I, 630a, partly trans. Brundell in Gassendi, 46 (modified): […] tametsi opinio de motu Terrae probari videatur quibusdam verisimilibus argumentis, nulla est tamen Demonstratio, quae illam esse veram convincat; adeo ut exprobrari non possit opinioni oppositae, quod demonstrationibus careat, certitudineque ab ipsa vincatur. Adeo proinde, ut quibus tueri Coperniceam Hypothesin religio est, Braheana praesto occurrat, quae verisimillima omnium sit. On the genesis of this passage, see Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi, 332–333. 54 However, this point contradicts Gassendi’s attempt to provide a proof of the Earth’s motion by revising Galileo’s theory of the tides; see Palmerino, “Gassendi’s Reinterpretation” as well as Palmerino’s chapter in this volume. 55 Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi, 338–345; Alexandra Torero-Ibad, “Fictions of the Worlds in Descartes’ and Gassendi’s Physics,” Society and Politics 5 (2011): 75–87. 56 OO I, 485a. 57 OO I, 635b–636a. 58 OO I, 280b. 59 OO I, 282b, trans. Craig Brush in The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972), 408: “[…] ac deinde res quasque ex seminibus suis ita texi, atque constitui, ut neque sint, neque esse possint ex aliis.” 60 OO I, 485b. On God’s general (or ordinary) concourse, see Étienne Gilson, Index scolastico-cartésien (Paris: Alcan, 1913), 49–50; Antonia LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 145–149. 61 OO I, 485b–486a. Gassendi had already referred to this chemical observation by Fludd in his Epistolica exercitatio; see OO III, 217a. On the controversy between Gassendi and Fludd, see Pierre Gassendi, Examen de la philosophie de Robert Fludd, ed. and trans. Sylvie Taussig (Paris: SÉHA/ Milano: Archè, 2016); see also Mehl’s chapter in this volume. On Gassendi’s notion of seeds and his debt to the chemical tradition, see Hiro Hirai, Le Concept de semence dans les théories de la matière à la Renaissance: de Marsile Ficin à Pierre Gassendi (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 463–491.

Astronomy, Cosmology, and the Limit of Empiricism  309 62 OO I, 486a: […] sic imaginari eventurum licet, si Deus massam illam confusam, in quam Mundum redegerit, suas quasi vires agere sinat. Futurum nempe esse videtur, ut particulae singulae ex immensa illa congerie se subducant sensim a sibi dissimilibus, et cum similibus consociatae sese segregent, una convoluantur, se mutuo coaptent, sua tota denique constituant, factaque omnium restitutione, reperiantur omnia in eodem, in quo praefuerint ordine; et quibus quies fuerit naturalis quiescant, quibus motus, moveantur; adeo ut Terra futura sit in quo loco iam est, et Luna, et Sol, similiterque caetera omnia suis locis. 63 OO I, 486a. 64 OO I, 625a: “Et verum est quidem radicalem causam continentiae, unionisque individuae partium Telluris inter se, esse vim illam Magneticam omnium attrahentem, atque continentem […].” On Gassendi’s theory of gravity, see Ronald J. Overmann, “Theories of Gravity in the Seventeenth Century” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1974), 105–137. 65 OO II, 129a: “Quanquam potest etiam Terra alio nomine dici Magnes ingens, quatenus nimirum ad se terrena omnia attrahit, ut Magnes magnetica omnia, prout alias attigimus.” 66 Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 53–60. 67 OO I, 525a. 68 OO I, 528a. 69 OO I, 528a: De Sole autem ipso (et proportione etiam de singulis Stellis Affixis) dicturi quid simus; nisi quod si aliqua etiam Animalia in illo supponas, congruum sit ea esse longe maxima, nobilissimaque; prout Sol substantiae ut mole, sic nobilitate globis caeteris maxime praecellit. 70 OO I, 123a; Gregory, Scetticismo ed empirismo, 160–161.

Bibliography Bellis, Delphine. “Imaginary Spaces and Cosmological Issues in Gassendi’s Philosophy.” In Space, Imagination and the Cosmos from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, edited by Frederik A. Bakker, Delphine Bellis, and Carla Rita Palmerino, 233–260. Cham: Springer, 2018. Bellis, Delphine. “Nos in Diem Vivimus: Gassendi’s Probabilism and Academic Philosophy from Day to Day.” In Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Plínio Junqueira Smith and Sébastien Charles, 125–152. Cham: Springer, 2017. Berkel, Klaas van and Arjo Vanderjagt, eds. The Book of Nature in Early Modern and Modern History. Leuven: Peeters, 2006. Berr, Henri. Du scepticisme de Gassendi. Paris: Albin Michel, 1960. Bloch, Olivier René. La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971. Brundell, Barry. Pierre Gassendi. From Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht–Boston, MA: Reidel, 1987. Cafiero, Luca. “Robert Fludd e la polemica con Gassendi,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia 19 (1964): 367–410 and 20 (1965): 3–15.

310  Kuni Sakamoto Descartes, René. Œuvres, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 11 vols. 2nd ed. Paris: Vrin, 1996 (abridged AT). Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings, 2 vols. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1985 (abridged CSM). Dick, Steven J. Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Ernst, Germana. “Atomes, providence, signes célestes: le dialogue épistolaire entre Campanella et Gassendi.” In Gassendi et la modernité, edited by Sylvie Taussig, 61–82. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Fabbri, Natacha. Cosmologia e armonia in Kepler e Mersenne. Contrappunto a due voci sul tema dell’ “Harmonice mundi.”. Firenze: Olschki, 2003. Galluzzi, Paolo. “Gassendi and l’Affaire Galilée of the Laws of Motion,” Science in Context 13 (2000): 509–545. Gassendi, Pierre. Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre les Aristotéliciens. Edited and translated by Bernard Rochot. Paris: J. Vrin, 1959. Gassendi, Pierre. Examen de la philosophie de Robert Fludd. Edited and translated by Sylvie Taussig. Paris: S.É.H.A./ Milano: Archè, 2016. Gassendi, Pierre. Opera omnia in sex tomos divisa. Lugduni: Sumptibus Laurentii Anisson, & Ioan. Bapt. Devenet, 1658 (abridged OO). Gassendi, Pierre. Recherches métaphysiques, ou Doutes et instances contre la métaphysique de R. Descartes et ses réponses. Edited and translated by Bernard Rochot. Paris: Vrin, 1962. Gassendi, Pierre. Sentimens sur l’eclipse qui doit arriver le 12. du mois d'Aoust prochain. Paris: Antoine Vitré, 1654. Gassendi, Pierre. The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi. Translated by Craig B. Brush. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972. Gregory, Tullio. “Gassendi e Galileo.” In Saggi su Galileo Galilei, edited by Carlo Maccagni, 3 vols., II, 309–323. Firenze: Barbèra, 1972. Gregory, Tullio. “Pierre Gassendi nel IV centenario della nascita,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 71 (1992): 202–226. Gregory, Tullio. Scetticismo ed empirismo. Studio su Gassendi. Bari: Laterza, 1961. Halbronn, Jacques. “Questions autour du texte sur l’éclipse de 1654 attribué à Gassendi.” In Gassendi et la modernité, edited by Sylvie Taussig, 311–346. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Hatch, Robert Alan. “Between Astrology and Copernicanism: Morin – Gassendi – Boulliau,” Early Science and Medicine 22 (2017): 487–516. Hatch, Robert Alan. “Gassendi, Pierre.” In Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, 2nd ed., edited by Thomas Hockey, Katherine Bracher, Daniel W. E. Green, Richard A. Jarrell, Jordan D. Marché II, JoAnn Palmeri, Virginia Trimble, Thomas R. Williams, 786–789. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014. Hirai, Hiro. Le Concept de semence dans les théories de la matière à la Renaissance: de Marsile Ficin à Pierre Gassendi. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Hooper, Wallace. “Seventeenth-Century Theories of the Tides as a Gauge of Scientific Change.” In The Reception of the Galilean Science of Motion in Seventeenth-Century Europe, edited by Carla Rita Palmerino and J.M.M.H. Thijssen, 199–242. Dordrecht: Springer, 2004. Humbert, Pierre. L’Astronomie en France au dix-septième siècle. Paris: Université de Paris, 1952.

Astronomy, Cosmology, and the Limit of Empiricism  311 Jones, Howard. Pierre Gassendi 1592–1655: An Intellectual Biography. Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1981. Kepler, Johannes. Gesammelte Werke, eds. Max Caspar, Volker Bialas, Friederike Boockmann, Daniel A. Di Liscia, Walther von Dyck, Franz Hammer, Hella Kothmann, Peter Michael Schenkel, Friedrich Seck, 22 vols. München: C.H. Beck, 1938–2017. LoLordo, Antonia. “Gassendi as Critic of Descartes.” In The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, edited by Steven Nadler, Tad M. Schmaltz, and Delphine Antoine-Mahut, 597–609. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. LoLordo, Antonia. Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Magnard, Pierre. “La mathématique mystique de Pierre Gassendi.” In Gassendi et l’Europe, 1592–1792, edited by Sylvia Murr, 21–29. Paris: Vrin, 1997. Messeri, Marco. Causa e spiegazione: La fisica di Pierre Gassendi. Milano: Franco Angeli, 1985. Overmann, Ronald J. “Theories of Gravity in the Seventeenth Century.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1974. Palmerino, Carla Rita. “Gassendi’s Reinterpretation of the Galilean Theory of Tides,” Perspectives on Science 12 (2004): 212–237. Palmerino, Carla Rita. “The Mathematical Characters of Galileo’s Book of Nature.” In The Book of Nature in Early Modern and Modern History, edited by Klaas van Berkel and Arjo Vanderjagt, 27–44. Leuven: Peeters, 2006. Palmerino, Carla Rita. “Two Jesuit Responses to Galileo’s Science of Motion: Honoré Fabri and Pierre Le Cazre.” In The New Science and Jesuit Science: Seventeenth Century Perspectives, edited by Mordechai Feingold, 187–227. Dordrecht: Springer, 2003. Peiresc, Claude Nicolas Fabri de. Lettres de Peiresc publiées par Philippe Tamizey de Larroque, vol. IV. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1893 (abridged TL). Rochot, Bernard. “Gassendi et les mathématiques,” Revue d’histoire des sciences et de leurs applications 10 (1957): 69–78. Rochot, Bernard. “Les sentiments de Gassendi sur l’éclipse de 1654,” xviie siècle 27 (1955): 161–177. Sakamoto, Kuni. “The German Hercules’s Heir: Pierre Gassendi’s Reception of Keplerian Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009): 69–91. Sarasohn, Lisa T. Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1996. Seidl, Maria. Pierre Gassendi und die Probleme des Empirismus. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2019. Sribnai, Judith. Pierre Gassendi: le voyage vers la sagesse (1592–1655). Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2017. Tack, Reiner. Untersuchungen zum Philosophie- und Wissenschaftsbegriff bei Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655). Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag A. Hain, 1974. Taussig, Sylvie. Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655): Introduction à la vie savante. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003. Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 7. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. Torero-Ibad, Alexandra. “Fictions of the Worlds in Descartes’ and Gassendi’s Physics,” Society and Politics 5 (2011): 75–87. Van Helden, Albert. Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1985.

12 Gassendi’s Theory of Living Beings François Duchesneau

12.1 Introduction In his time, Pierre Gassendi assumed a major role in fostering the new mechanist science of nature. As the epistemic foundation for this science, he intended to supplant the Aristotelian scholastic tradition with an Epicurean-inspired philosophy. On that account, the doctrine expounded mainly in the posthumous Syntagma philosophicum (1658) became a source of inspiration for those who were to develop empiricist theories of knowledge and promote the advancement of the “experimental philosophy.” In view of Gassendi’s program for a natural philosophy, the aim of treating organic living bodies as physical entities represented a significant challenge, especially so, since this topic had been a stumbling block for Descartes’ attempts to achieve his own physics. Generally, historians have been of the opinion that Gassendi was not an important contributor to the development of the life sciences. It was occasionally pointed out that he was interested in the great discoveries of his contemporaries, William Harvey on circulation of the blood, Gaspare Aselli on the chyliferous vessels, or Jean Pecquet on the thoracic duct.1 But his positions remained mainly speculative and were often bound to scholarly references rather than to experimental considerations. However, Gassendi’s “biological” ideas deserve closer examination because of their importance in the general economy of his natural philosophy, but even more so, because of the epistemic considerations surrounding his use of corpuscular models to account for the organic combinations and physiological processes manifested by plants and animals. In particular, these corpuscular models were exploited to justify resorting to a concept of material soul that might represent the active and regulative principle of all vital and animal functions. Similarly, corpuscular mechanism was central to Gassendi’s theory of generation, which developed around a renewed interpretation of the concept of “seed” (semen). The Gassendian concept of seed was based on an analogical extension of the notion of “molecule” (molecula), but it also integrated motile powers as dispositions that provided explanatory schemes for the complex functional aspects of the organisms that grew DOI: 10.4324/9781315521732-16

Gassendi’s Theory of Living Beings  313 out of these germinal entities. The analytic framework of concepts and analogies involved in that theory was exemplary and was to inspire many naturalists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. My purpose is here to describe and analyze Gassendi’s refined hypothesis about the nature and formation of living organic bodies as a significant philosophical contribution to a field that had not yet gained its scientific autonomy.2

12.2 Living Beings as Complex Corporeal Entities For Gassendi, the theory of physical reality consists in an analysis in which observable phenomena are substantially grounded in terms of atoms and their intrinsic properties or qualities: figure, magnitude, and weight (gravitas). Concerning the concept of quality, Gassendi argued for the reductive assimilation of three definitions. For Epicurus, quality was a mode of the substance; according to the Stoic tradition, quality was a state resulting from the mixing of principles; for Aristotle, quality was all that by which a concrete object is qualified.3 But, fudging a further Aristotelian distinction, Gassendi conflated accidents and qualities, implying a reduction to matter and its modes. Similarly, he operated a fusion of principles by setting aside the non-material character of the Stoics’ pneuma, or rather by assimilating it into a current (confluxus) of corpuscles in motion. Hence the inference he drew was as follows: There thus remains that all that is considered in these corporeal and physical things (with the exception of the rational soul, which is in man) either is a substance, which is the same thing as matter and body, that is, an aggregate of material or corporeal principles; or it is a quality, which is an accident or mode of being of the same.4 Qualities or modes appear as the end result of substantial change. Gassendi’s thesis is indeed that all changes are attributable to local motion. But he also tends to interpret the Aristotelian position as entailing that the other types of change—generation and corruption, accretion and reduction, qualitative alteration—can be epistemically reduced to local change.5 In fact, the aim is to reduce all alterations to a change that can be analyzed as a mere displacement in space, a mechanistic substitute for such a change as would consist in a transition from power to act or would result from a formal element causally intervening within concrete substances. Even the Aristotelian four elements—earth, water, fire, and air, which constituted the material qualities of coldness, warmth, dryness, and humidity—are linked to modalities of figure, magnitude, and weight of atoms, although, at times, Gassendi identified them as composed of atoms endowed with specific properties: atoms of light, of warmth, atoms constituting the images (species) of sight, etc.6 In a more characteristic

314  François Duchesneau fashion, he appealed to qualities emerging from the interaction of atoms forming specific aggregates. In sum, commistio, the intimate mixing of atoms as material elements, combining to form “molecules,”7 or even more complex structural compounds in living beings, yields the phenomenal manifestation of particular qualities, some of which consist in functional dispositions. From that perspective, one arrives at material equivalents for such properties that the Aristotelians attributed to substantial forms.8 Gassendi adopted a distinction which seemed to have been first proposed by the Stoics. This was the distinction between, on the one hand, matter, which as such is inert and passive, and, on the other, an efficient cause which they conceived to be a dynamic logos; this logos, being the true cause of motion, would produce such a commistio of material parts as results in specific qualitative effects. But Gassendi modified that thesis so as to materialize the efficient cause of motion: he linked the latter to the weight and gravity of atoms as a kind of immanent faculty or force. And this force would imply a specific inclination to motion, a principle of impetus which would be responsible for the changes affecting more complex bodies. This is thus reflected in the Syntagma. The third property attributed to atoms is certainly gravity or weight. As it is nothing but a natural and inner faculty or force by which the atom can set itself moving and move, or, if you prefer, an ingenerated, innate, native, never to be lost, propensity to move, an impulse (propulsio) and an effort (impetus) of intrinsic origin, it results therefrom that, because this property is entirely destined to motion and is only revealed by the motion that it is set to produce, this is the occasion of saying something about the very motion of atoms.9 This elementary quality of the involved corpuscles results from God’s action exerted ab origine and determining not only the specific size and figure of each atom, but even its capacity for generating motion and any such particular effects as may constitute appropriate motile dispositions.10 Thus, Gassendi inserts in his concept of atomic gravity, beyond the Democritean and Epicurean connotations, a dynamic property apt to generate phenomenal features of a physiological kind, through various stages of structural combination between impetus elements. The pattern for this analysis implies a transposition of the formal features of living beings, which may be inferred from the observation of res concretæ, into a hypothetic scheme of organization at the molecular level, which can match the functional features of higher-level corpuscular aggregates. This organization may involve functional dispositions formally reflected in the phenomenal effects they are presumed to occasion, but these dispositions are only taken to represent the outcome of underpinning mechanisms.

Gassendi’s Theory of Living Beings  315 In Gassendi’s natural philosophy, only the corpuscular properties— figure, magnitude, gravity—can express what flows from the nature of substantive elements, but the geometrical-mechanical dispositions issuing from the various coalescences of atoms may yield sui generis motile powers, which generate complex qualitative transformations at higher levels of integration.

12.3 Mechanism and the Teleological Analysis of Living Bodies Gassendi’s scientific project implies extending to living beings—plants and animals—the kind of analysis that should characterize the new physics according to his mechanist views. Methodologically, this means: (1) that the particular representations drawn from sense experience shall be collected for the sake of analyzing the correlated phenomena; and (2) that the empirical generalizations thus obtained shall be transposed in order to yield causal hypotheses based on mechanist models: these models will presumably represent the corpuscular properties of corporeal structures underpinning the complex phenomena to be accounted for. However, this project does not exclude some reliance on teleology, and this for two reasons. On the one hand, the system of nature and its corporeal entities, conceived in alignment with the Epicurean paradigm and made to fit the rational premises of Christianity, is a created system and, as such, it cannot but reflect, in its organization and constitutive laws, the designs of its primary efficient cause. On the other hand, the mechanist analysis, the only one that may be legitimately aimed at unveiling the secondary efficient causes of phenomena, relies on inductive inferences which are built from the empirical observation of emergent properties. And these inferences may bear on qualitative appearances that involve functional dispositions and processes. How could one hope to analyze the causal conditions for those processes without relying on analogical mechanist modeling? And would not hypotheses adequately framed for this end involve some relevant architectonic and powerful agent who designed such mechanistic dispositions in the combination of corpuscular elements as would naturally yield the functional processes characterizing the formation and operations of living beings? This is why Gassendi admits that a cautious resort to final causes may be made for analyzing vital phenomena.11 Witness the defense of teleology in his Objections to Descartes’ Meditationes. This point is developed in the Dubitatio prima against the fourth Meditation, which is entitled: “Of the faculty of judgment created by God, which is not immune from error and of the consideration of final causes excluded from physics” (De creata a Deo facultate iudicandi erroris non immuni; deque rejecta a Physica causarum finalium consideratione).12 While validating the argument pro Deo from natural ends, Gassendi points to the a priori

316  François Duchesneau inaccessibility of the material efficient causes, when trying to explain the formation of complex anatomical structures and processes: […] No mortal can understand, a fortiori explain, which agent forms and assembles, in the manner we observe, those valves that have been set at the orifice of vessels in the cavities of the heart, of which kind of matter and by which changes he frames them up, how he applies himself to the task, which instruments he makes use of, and how, and what he needs in order to realize them with such harmony (temperie), consistence, coherence, flexibility, magnitude, figure and location.13 On this precise point, Descartes responds. His suggestion is that all that appears to point to final causation can be directly carried over into notions of efficient cause. He resumes the example of the physiology of blood circulation and underlines that the functional end of this anatomical system does not represent a problem, implying that the teleological element contained therein can easily be sectioned off and translated into modalities of efficient causation.14 At least this may be interpreted to fit the animal-machine model in L’Homme and the fifth part of Discours de la méthode, for, in this case, an immediately available mechanistic deduction could be substituted for the functional description of the anatomic system. In Instantia II, relating to the same point, Gassendi rejects Descartes’ reduction of teleology to a mere prima facie characterization of the phenomena observed without implication for the causal model that is called upon to provide their explanation: But from the investigation of ends, not only is the final cause understood, but it is also a step towards knowing the efficient cause, which in its action set that end to itself.15 For Gassendi, teleology would therefore play a significant role in attempts to frame scientific knowledge of living beings, since it would be instrumental in reaching adequate causal hypotheses. But the same kind of argument preceded Gassendi’s reflections on Descartes’ Meditationes, as testified in the letter to Jan Baptist Van Helmont of 10 July 1629. The discussion then was on the question of whether or not man is naturally carnivorous. Gassendi argued against Van Helmont that the evidence of human dentition does not justify the affirmative. In this context, he detailed the scope he regarded as attributable to teleological arguments. His view was that on such a kind of problem, no assertion can outspan the limits of mere probability. He then separated the question about the finality of organic parts from any conjecture about the spiritual destiny of man, since the immaterial soul

Gassendi’s Theory of Living Beings  317 cannot be part of any analysis bearing on mere corporeal phenomena. But this restriction gives rise to more questions concerning the conformation of organs relative to the accomplishment of natural functions. Gassendi rejected the thesis he attributed, among others, to Empedocles and Epicurus, that the organs would not have been produced for an end, but by a fortuitous combination of material causes, their role (usus) arising from contingent progressive accommodations and habits. To the contrary, he drew attention to the inferences we can immediately draw from the observed structure of parts, as well as to the methodological instances provided by Galen in his De usu partium. Presuming that physical nature is endowed with a well devised mechanical organization, finality may be called upon to hypothetically unveil the causal dispositions underpinning functional properties (virtus). Data relative to teleological and structural considerations may thus be correlated so as to provide models for interpreting functional processes which arise from the very powers of nature: Where we see an agent, an organ, a form, a force, an action, a mode, a matter, an end conformable to nature: why would it not be legitimate, in all these things correlated together, to infer arguments from nature?16 This explanatory strategy requires that material efficient causes be analyzed in the manner of Ariadne’s thread from the evidence of a finalized emergent organization. Under this condition, one may probably consider the way of final causes to be the surest for interpreting those res concretæ to which plants and animals belong. This supposes a close connection between the functional data and the mechanist models fitting those specific objects.

12.4 Seeds and Animal Souls The concept of ‘fiery soul’ is evoked in order to conciliate the mechanism of the Moderns in its corpuscular version with such functional and teleological traits that vital functions and animal sensibility and motility represent. Indeed, this notion can be traced back to Platonism and its Stoic posterity, but Gassendi adjusts it to fit the premises of his atomistic physics. In the Syntagma, the chapter Quid sit anima brutorum provides the following descriptive definition of it: […] the soul seems to be a certain small flame, or a kind of very thin fire, which, as long as it is active, or remains lit, so long lives the animal; when it is not active anymore but is extinguished, the animal dies.17

318  François Duchesneau And Gassendi goes on to suggest that the animal soul is of the same substantial nature as light: [As for light itself] we deduced in its place that it was nothing but a small flame, that is, the most subtle, thinnest and purest part of the flame. This being so, nothing prevents that the soul be such a fire […].18 Georges Canguilhem once proposed a subtle interpretation to account for this twofold assimilation of flame to light, and light to soul. He viewed Gassendi as resorting to a combined process of division and purification, that is, to a system of subtilizing analogies.19 Thus material corpuscles endowed with properties of figure, size, and weight—the only ingredients of physical entities—would be, as it were, transformed into a quasi-heterogeneous substance that could generate energetic and teleological effects by virtue of a formal, and therefore non-material, disposition. The outstanding properties of gunpowder, which fire causes to explode, could thus provide an analogy for figuring out how submicroscopic corpuscles forming the animal soul might cause various kinds of special motions in the organic mass. Since this concept of ‘fiery soul,’ with its quasi-vital connotations, seemed to him to forecast remarkable developments to be later found, for instance, in Thomas Willis’ theory of nervous processes,20 Canguilhem wondered why Gassendi made such scant use of this model of vital energy. For instance, the section De vi motrice et motionibus animalium seems to do without those dynamic considerations that were put forward to explain the proper action of the soul. Gassendi would explain voluntary as well as involuntary organic motions in geometric fashion as Descartes had done through his beast-machine model. This interpretation seems to fit Gassendi’s explanation of the way animal spirits act on muscles to produce postural changes. But I disagree with Canguilhem’s suspicion that the theory of the ‘fiery soul’ was merely a conceptual stratagem for conciliating atomism with the tenets of a Christian metaphysics. Concerning the animal soul as distinct from man’s intellective soul, Gassendi never deviated from grounding his analysis in a corpuscular ontology, which implied adding to the essential properties of atoms and of the compounds they form, special motile dispositions that inhere in material structures. The development of Gassendi’s physical ‘conjectures,’ always presupposed a close correlation between the description of teleological processes and the putative underlying geometrical-mechanical structures and corpuscular interactions. The animal soul featured a correlation of extremely fine particles whose effects in the organic structure would consist in producing and diffusing vital heat, nutrition, sensibility, and motility, and all such functions as could not be accomplished in any other way but by this presumed cause. As materia actuosa and principle of action, it would form “a certain very thin

Gassendi’s Theory of Living Beings  319 substance, and so to say, the flower of matter, with a special disposition, arrangement and symmetry of parts occurring within the coarser mass of the body.”21 To account for the energy involved, Gassendi asserted that the elementary material parts are not bereft of power to act. Each atom is possessed of a particular determination to move; and the intermediary structures, which result from atomic aggregates, elicit specific combinations of mechanical dispositions, like those aggregates of very fine corpuscles that produce heat. Whatever hypothetical representation we may form, the observed effects duly characterized draw our attention to possible analogical models for the corresponding causes. Gassendi, for instance, annexed Aristotelian considerations about animal heat, namely, the need to suppose an organic seat for it; a particular type of feeding for its preservation; out of elements contained in the blood, a particular motion of the heart; as well as mechanical and chemical actions in the lungs, as experiments in reanimation would suggest. The author of the Syntagma was also looking for empirical arguments to ascertain a certain perpetuation of motion in the fiery soul—arguments, for instance, about the persistence of sensitive and imaginative activity during sleep—or in support of endowing it with intense dynamic capacity, as evidenced in pathological cases of frenzy and fever.22 Gassendi also saw the perpetual destruction and reconstitution of the animal soul as inherent in vital motions. He would even draw arguments to reject any identification of the vital principle with a spiritual substance that would not change state throughout the living being’s entire life. If there were a vital principle, it should be material and consist in a constantly renewed texture of atoms, like a flame that holds by itself the material principles of nutrition, growth, sensibility, and the other vital functions.23 Thus, the question arose as to how the animal soul comes about in time. Addressing it, Gassendi resorted to the notion of an analogous texture of atoms in the “animated” seed. The structure of a living being’s seed would comprise certain motile dispositions issuing from parent organism(s), and so would be apt to recompose through embryogenesis the vital principle of an equivalent organism. In brief, Gassendi’s doctrine of the fiery or vital soul relied on considerations about “molecules” and “seeds,” without which the theory of generation would have been incomprehensible and all explanation of physiological functions epistemically inaccessible. In this instance, it is appropriate to refer to the investigations into chemistry and crystallography mentioned in the Syntagma. Notwith­ standing the criticisms he launched against Robert Fludd and the Paracelsians, Gassendi was very impressed by the chemical doctrines of his contemporaries and, notably, by their work on the generation of minerals. He incorporated many of their findings into the Syntagma, although

320  François Duchesneau transposed in a somewhat different conceptual framework.24 And he himself undertook some investigation into the way crystals form and how they undergo physical changes. The influence of these researches on the framing of his approach to physiological processes is not to be underestimated. For example, Gassendi had found in Étienne de Clave’s Paradoxes ou traités philosophiques des pierres et pierreries (1635) the thesis that minerals are produced from petrifying seeds deploying their seminal power (virtus seminalis). He transposed those ‘hylozoist’ concepts into mechanist ones. And the example of crystals provided him with an adequate scheme for that transposition. Since these structures keep a constant geometrical figure when they crystallize as well as dissolve, there would thus be an empirical argument that, analogically, living seeds consist in the combinative structures of atoms. According to Olivier René Bloch, in the period 1637–1642, Gassendi began referring to these structures in terms of moleculæ and semina rerum.25 But, at the same time, he considered that the organizing power issuing from the aggregates of atoms that form “molecules” cannot flow directly from the sole gravity of individual atoms, though that property represented for Gassendi the ultimate equivalent for a source-element of motile power (vis motrix). What was being considered here was a form of more complex material entity, endowed with dynamic properties and organizing capacity—in a word, a “spirit” in the material sense—apt to produce organic structuring. And so, he asserted what may at first seem paradoxical: “Assuredly, the seminal force resides in a certain active substance which is not ignorant of its own work, after the manner that can only be that of a spirit.”26 Here, it should be recalled that Gassendi admitted that the animal soul and its various possible analogs would own complex mechanical functions that could correspond with processes involving sensibility and image framing. Once more, at the phenomenal level, effects may be analyzed as teleological, but without jeopardizing the presumption that equivalent causal explanations of a geometrical-mechanical kind might nonetheless be forthcoming. Gassendi, however, encountered some difficulty in fully articulating an adequate notion of those “molecules” that form the structural essences of seeds. In this case, he was dealing with different concepts, which he tried to harmonize. One set of ingredients was materialist. The fiery souls are conceived as an efflorescence of matter (flos materiæ), a diffuse and subtle substance that constitutes seeds and prefigures, in terms of immanent powers, the form of the living being to be produced. The seeds of these organisms imply textures of corpuscles that display specific modalities of motion: their vis motrix combines the motile determinations of their compounding atoms, but the effect produced amounts to more complex organic processes than would flow from the motile capacity of the individual atoms. On the other hand, Gassendi insisted that seeds are endowed with a structuring power of their own, a “special seminal force”

Gassendi’s Theory of Living Beings  321 (vis specialis seminis) that warrants their production and reproduction according to an orderly pattern, a uniform and typical mode of organization. This hypothetical representation borrowed formal elements from the Aristotelian conception of entelechy, but transposed into the modes of representation of a corpuscular mechanism. These formal elements correspond to the structural order of the molecules forming the seeds of organic entities, and to the emergent functional dispositions that this ordering or organization of parts manifests in developing bodies. These clearly come about as a result of an initial empowering of seeds and their material components for delivering such end products. Thus, if the matrix and so to say the branches of amethysts or crystals cannot have so elegant and uniform a conformation of their individual elements without the special force of a seed, if a plant cannot obtain without a seminal force such a variety, refinement, correlation, symmetry and destination of its parts to certain ends and similitude with others that are also born spontaneously, and all other things of this kind, how much more shall it be said concerning animals themselves, in which all this is found, but also so many harmonious and adapted organs, devoted to external as well as internal senses, and to motions necessary as well as voluntary? These features are surely not to be related to chance, but to a cause that comprehends its work. Nevertheless, it does not seem that there is any seminal seed to which it appertains to be such.27 Indeed, in this system, God’s creative role features as a fundamental postulate, but if God had not created self-sufficient structures and processes, regulated in their unfolding by immanent causes, the order of nature would have been deficient ab origine. Gassendi remained therefore attached to the idea that, in the material composition of seeds, there resides an active immanent power that can instigate and animate the adaptive structures of living beings. Some interpreters have identified inconsistencies within Gassendi’s physiological theory owing to his appeals to form and vital functionality in his characterization of the material organization of living beings. According to Olivier René Bloch, for example, Gassendi offered a mere juxtaposition of atomism and a Christian metaphysics in order to avoid the dreadful consequences of a materialist interpretation of the living res concretæ.28 In fact, Gassendi was totally clear that the animal soul can only be material, since it is subject to composition and corruption. As he stated in the Syntagma, “Life is, as it were, the presence of the soul in the body and death, as it were, its absence.”29 This means that life, fundamentally, boils down to local motion in specific clusters of atoms, even if it should be admitted that a special motile force inheres in these clusters: “Life, according to a more general notion, is but a capacity to use the

322  François Duchesneau force and mobility of one’s active faculties, while death is the extinction of the same.”30 Concerning the nutrition and generation of plants, which serves as an analog for explaining the corresponding, if more complex, functions in animals, he adds: “The cause of it is because, as previously said, life consists in continuous motion.”31 The sine qua non condition for this motion is heat; and this heat is generated by the agitation of particles (concitatio partium) stirring up effects in the molecular structures of the organized body. There exists a hierarchy of living creatures, corresponding to different capacities for organic sensibility and motion, but these cannot be accounted for, except by diverse degrees of functional agitation in the inner corpuscular texture of their more or less complex anatomic constitutions. The seeds and animal souls are formed by the coalescence of the tiniest, most subtle, most active, most rapid corpuscles, by which the materia actuosa is constituted. This notion is indeed essential for harmonizing the principles of atomism with the methodological requirements of a physiology conceived as a physics of the living. The theory of generation in the Syntagma affords a good example of this syncretic approach.

12.5 The Theory of Generation In conformity with the Epicurean tradition, Gassendi proposed that generation can be of two types: spontaneous and seed produced.32 Concerning the former, although he did not exclude it as a possibility, he was reluctant, contrary to Epicurus and Lucretius, to acknowledge that the more complex living structures might occur by haphazard processes, that is, without proximate efficient causes that formally suffice to generate clusters of organic parts capable of animation and vital function. And referring to God’s immediate action, he pointed out that the contingent productions of the more perfect living beings, which appear to develop from one another, would unduly require permanent miracles, if conceived as spontaneously generated. As for those theories that make organic productions depend on a soul of the world or some equivalent power, one should retain that they can hardly account for such beings’ individualized production and functional autonomy. Heat, for instance, can represent a concomitant cause intervening in generation, but an inner cause linked to the structure of the living being—a structure of material parts that is specific to this or that type—seems requisite for determining its membership in a given species. So, the typical cause in organic productions consists in a seed endowed with the equivalent of a material soul that mechanically induces such an ordering of corpuscles as would result into the apparently spontaneous emergence of the living: The cause of this mode of generation in animals seems to be nothing else than the seed itself or a small soul in it destined to this end in

Gassendi’s Theory of Living Beings  323 terms of function. For, although this small soul be of the type of warm things, and can even, from what was said before, be called a sort of small flame, it is nevertheless a small flame of its own kind, which, nourished by a particular humidity, is so diffused through, and retained in, the seminal matter that, tending to deploy itself through innumerable insensible meandering ducts, it is diversely modified by these and cannot, but, because of this type of modification, manifest itself, regulate its action (nisum regere), separate the particles out of similar matter, frame them diversely, distribute appropriate nutriment to each part and thus provide growth to the whole body formed from those parts. And because the inner texture (textura) of all seeds is of the same sort and that the small ducts through which the soul is pressed, constrained, and determined, are different in different seeds, it results that the architecture (architectatio) of all these is not the same, but that they are different in different seeds, as flowing from different processes.33 From the formation of the soul in a seed, the attention is then drawn to the question of the production of this seed. Referring to Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals, Gassendi challenges the hypothesis according to which seeds would form epigenetically from the direct mixing of humid and warm elements. Interpreting the formation of organic seeds this way, out of a plain mixture of inorganic ingredients, falls short of accounting for the complex integration of seminal forms that experience reveals. Along this line, Gassendi emphasizes the relative perfection of all living forms, even in the humblest forms of life. For instance, would not the mite or the flea be of equal value, in terms of organization and functional dispositions, with any complex mammal resulting from sexual reproduction? Hence, he presumes that for each organism there pre-exists a corresponding seed and that these seeds come about as combinations of molecules resulting from an ordering of material processes imposed by the divine creative act: For assuredly one can thus understand how it happens that the small soul contained in the seed can, with such craftiness and industry, undertake, develop and improve the structuring of its organs and whole body, when such a grand, wise and powerful artisan has founded it, endowed it with such a force, willed that it be included into such a body with such a structure, so that it could neither act, nor build its structure otherwise.34 In the empirical system of nature, no efficient cause would seem apt to determine the complex organization of any living being, even of a rudimentary type, if it did not involve the notion of an inner material agent,

324  François Duchesneau inherent in an appropriately framed organic structure, and destined to that end.35 In support of the hypothesis that living beings are generally produced from seeds, Gassendi evokes the persisting similarities across generations that determine to which species and types individuals are taken to belong, as well as the concomitant factors that regulate the reproduction of organisms according to their type. Thus, he seems to minimize the sphere of spontaneous generation. He argues, for example, that imperceptible seeds might come from antecedent generations of beings of the same kind, and causally account for the apparent advent of unbegotten organic bodies. The eggs or seeds laid by the parents could fail to be perceived being minuscule or because they have undergone a longer or shorter period of latency before developing into a perceivable body under favorable environmental conditions. Gassendi here refers to insect larvae and fish eggs, but might we not extend the analogy to most presumed spontaneous generations? Generation by seed seeming to be the more general rule, can one discover the underlying mechanism? Would unveiling the microstructures enable the discovery of the causal explanation of the organogenetic power of seeds? On these, Gassendi’s judgment is telling. Indeed, he allows that one may trace out generative processes as they unfold from seeds—and the advancement of knowledge requires it—but we would only thus attain observable sequences of mechanical micro-processes. Descriptions and models of these shall be proposed, but the substantial element underpinning the generative activity, that is, the inner disposition of the soul acting as a “craftsman” (faber) programmed to that effect by the “divine and incomparable Architect,” will forever escape us.36 Generation by seeds raises certain issues concerning the processes involved. Against the challenges arising from the Aristotelian tradition, Gassendi develops arguments that derive from the Hippocratic and Democritean legacies. Accordingly, the male and the female contribute on a par to the generative process and provide seeds of their own. On the other hand, Gassendi undertakes to recast the defluxus theory, which supposed that the parts of the seed derive from the genitor’s corresponding parts, into such a formulation as may be compatible with the mechanist view.37 He thus presumes that the natural ducts which veins, arteries, and nerves form, convey corpuscles from the various parts of the body to the organs, female as well as male, that produce the seed. When this seed has reached maturity, it is secreted from the testes and conveyed to the womb in which it will develop in fetal form. The defluxus theory is also interpreted so as to mechanically account for hereditary phenomena. It is thus specified that the seed is composed of parts that are akin to those of the parent organisms, and made apt to reproduce the whole set of characters of these. Similar ingredients tend to blend in the mixing of seeds: hence the resemblance of the new organic being’s features to a

Gassendi’s Theory of Living Beings  325 combination of traits of its genitors. Gassendi can explain in this way the variable resemblance of offspring—in dominant and recessive traits, so to speak—with parents or ancestors, and the transmission of defects, malformations, and hereditary illnesses. However, he acknowledges that there is room for variations in the generative operations compared with a strict replication of structures. But nowhere does his hypothesis allow that this conditioning influence might be exerted by a non-material agent. Concerning the formation of the fetus, Gassendi categorically rejects the Aristotelian view of the role exerted by the form enacted in the male seed, which was presumed to work out the potential structures of the fetus within the secondary matter provided by the female.38 More in line with the Hippocratic model, Gassendi interprets embryogenesis as if the quasi-similar corpuscles in both seeds tended to aggregate and unite in virtue of their figures and intrinsic motions. He hypothesizes from the same model that the fetal soul derives from the two parental souls via textures of corpuscles bred by these and combining so as to form a new complete individual soul.39 The soul in the fetus appears then to constitute a dynamic component apt to direct the formation, nutrition, and functioning of the whole set of parts constituting the organic body. It is clearly the case that the analog for this productive and regulative capacity is a form of mental activity, but the Syntagma seeks to transpose this knowledge analogy as a mechanical disposition to preserve, repair, and reproduce the same organic whole: One can thus understand that the soul that is in the seed, in so far as it flowed from all the parts [of the genitor’s body], is conscious of the way to feed, animate, arrange each part so that, since this soul is a kind of epitome of the whole soul, it continues to do to the matter of the seed, which is itself an epitome of the whole body, what together with the whole soul, that is the rest of the soul, it was doing to the whole body, that is the rest of the body. It behoved it that in nutrition it applied parts to parts and ceaselessly formed the whole body, by repairing it. It behoves it now that it should apply given parts to parts and that, setting them in the place and order in which they were before, it should form a whole minute body.40 The consciousness which is here hypothesized would equate to a metaphorical expression for a bodily power able to execute the embryogenesis for a type of living being, which power is to be attributed to the more subtle and active part of the seed. In a similar manner, Gassendi develops a conception of generation that is hard to situate between preformation and epigenesis. In Gassendi’s time, preformism had not yet reached those formulations that will be found in Jan Swammerdam, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, or Nicolas Malebranche. On the other hand, epigenesis was either to be conceived in

326  François Duchesneau a strict corpuscular aggregative mode or in the Aristotelian form-induced progressive making up and complexification of organic structures. In a way, Gassendi’s position is different from both and points to a form of material preformation in terms of preset motile determinations in the seminal clusters of molecules. He asserts that all the essential parts of the embryo are simultaneously formed, even if they appear successively in fetal development—an argument which is not that different from Marcello Malpighi’s later conception of preformation as a physical unfolding of an original organic structure.41 Their different dimensions would render the initial fetal parts unequally perceptible. At the initial stage, might not some organs be considered as folded in, similarly to the way in which the stem in plants is contained in the bud, and the flower in the bulb? By analogical retrogression, Gassendi presumes that, in the initial stage of the embryo, there occurs a texture of corpuscles generated by defluxus that represents a functional design in terms of motile dispositions underpinning the progressively ensuing structuration. Can one therefore qualify Gassendi’s theory of generation as a form of preformism? Gassendi himself does not seem to have professed allegiance to the view that a complete organic structure of the organism pre-existed its unfolding and growth, and that such a structural form would have been set by the Creator at the onset of the physical world. As for Bernier, in his chapter De la formation du fœtus, he links Gassendi’s position to the Hippocratic tradition and contrasts it to the doctrines, professed by others at the time of Bernier’s writing, that would entail such a structural pre-existence.42 According to Gassendi, seeds are formed continuously in plants and animals, and even in inorganic matrices in some cases of spontaneous generations, like crystalline or metallic formations. But the dynamic and organogenetic dispositions of seeds depend on the properties devolved to atoms by God and are causally responsible for the structural agencies that result from the motile powers invested in and among these interacting atoms. Concerning the animation of the fetus, it should be emphasized that the intervention of a particular soul coincides with the acquired autonomy of the embryo or seed from the generating bodies. As noted, Gassendi considered the soul to be materially compounded from parts of the parental souls or equivalent textures of corpuscles. It was that derivation that made it possible to account for the transmission of hereditary features, including diverse anomalies resulting from the so-called phantasms of the progenitors.43 The interpretation Gassendi gives of the imaginative function and its presumed morphogenetic role consists in discarding any properly psychic causation from what only consists in mechanical processes recording and transmitting sense impressions and cerebral imprints. These are phenomena that entirely depend on the animal or vegetal nature. In the case of humans, the spiritual soul— directly created by God to be infused in the embryo44—is to be added to

Gassendi’s Theory of Living Beings  327 the vegetative and sensitive soul, at a moment and by causal modalities that cannot be empirically assessed. The existence of the spiritual soul is hypothesized because of the intelligible and reflexive knowledge we become aware of from the exercise of reason, after the corresponding animal functions have developed. This is reason in action, experienced through its operations. The original advent of reason as a faculty, power, or disposition cannot be identified, except on metaphysical grounds as irreducible to material causation. In fact, for Gassendi, generation can be interpreted by means of two distinct mechanist models. The first derives from Epicurean materialism. The soul is an aggregate of atoms closely interacting. The seminal molecule can be conceived of as a minimal structure, a tiny aggregate of corpuscles previously elaborated in the genitors’ various organs. In this case, Gassendi refers to the Hippocratic theory of the defluxus. And there should not be any problem figuring out the reproduction of organic bodies: the seminal molecules would precast, in a way, the whole structure of the resulting organism. One could argue that this view foreshadowed the more classical type of seminal preformation. Following arguments by Jacques Roger, I was personally tempted to lend weight to this orientation in my book Les Modèles du vivant de Descartes à Leibniz.45 This line of thought was challenged by Saul Fisher, because it did not match the more standard interpretation of what was meant by preformation in later decades.46 In fact, we are dealing with a pre-preformist view, which excluded that a whole miniature organic body might pre-exist embryonic development, but connected the epigenetic development of this body with preset structural and motile dispositions in the seeds. These indeed result from the intervention of mechanical laws ruling over the interactions of atoms, but the harmonious effects produced at the level of seeds and material souls cannot be accounted for, except if the physical system is deemed to have been originally designed to produce these effects, as it were, ‘naturally.’ The second model relies on the notion of an inherent mobility of the atom. More exactly, motion and inherent disposition to motion in the “molecules” would provide the basic form of life. And these molecules would generate vital functions by dynamic processes which can be analogically represented by gunpowder explosions. Other analogies may be drawn from the phenomena of plant nutrition, germination, and growth.47 These functional representations would be used to account for analogous operations in animals, on condition of a major modification, since it would be appropriate to add to the model properties of sensibility and outward motility: these would flow from specific combinations affecting the more elementary vires motrices. It seems however that Olivier René Bloch exaggerated when he supposed that this dynamic model would imply the motion of a true epigenetic embryology.48 What one reads in the Syntagma is relatively different:

328  François Duchesneau The motile force (vis motrix) must, it seems, be drawn from the very nature and texture of the soul, for, if we proved something when we argued that the soul was of an igneous nature, it is obvious that the motile force with which the soul is endowed, is not different from that of fire itself, which, animated by an inherent mobility, moves itself first and then the other things on which it impinges, in the way we have inferred, for the sake of providing a sensible example, that it occurs in war machines. And it would be possible that this mobility be further referred to corpuscles, or, if you prefer, to the atoms making up fire, to which motion is essentially inherent (congeneus). But here it may suffice that it be referred to the spirits (spiritus) that are in the animated body, which are essentially mobile as they are essentially igneous, and for this reason perfectly capable of acting on the body and its parts.49 According to Gassendi, this vis motrix only appears to be the proximate, immediate, and concomitant cause of the functions of life: as such, it does not significantly differ from the common properties of the various atoms. One cannot therefore find any kind of latent vitalism in Gassendi’s biological ideas. The explanation of spontaneous generation itself illustrates the methodological implications of such an undeniable reductionism. We should not forget that, in a materialist philosophy, spontaneous generation served as a touchstone for rejecting the efficiency of formal causes. As Jacques Roger once wrote, “For an atomist, spontaneous generation, far from being a problem, is a particularly clear case of matter’s organizing power.”50 Did Gassendi develop mechanism to that limit? One could summarize Gassendi’s position by underlining that spontaneous generation is not really spontaneous. There is no identifiable power of atoms that could directly account for the epigenetic formation of complex organisms. The more reasonable explanation consists in supposing that God has provided for the natural formation of seeds that would yield living bodies of distinct kinds in contingent circumstances. The seminal molecules would thus constitute aggregates of atoms endowed with the primary embryological conditions for living beings to become. Extending the application of this model, one may obtain a general analytic representation of the various modes of generation, since they all imply a teleological organization of atoms in seeds. This even applies to so-called spontaneous generations, when the formation of the more rudimentary seeds from organic matter in decomposition presupposes some mechanical action from the outside, which does not immediately depend on pre-existent complex organisms. But this is equally the case in reproductive, and especially sexual, generation, when the connection with the genitors is afforded by replicative dispositions emerging in the fetus from the mixing of parental seeds. Provided we retain that there is no real structural pre-existence of organic bodies in the seeds from which they

Gassendi’s Theory of Living Beings  329 originated and that these seeds are themselves contingently assembled, but are immanently disposed to bring about the ensuing organic formations, there seems to be no better summary of Gassendi’s generation model than that provided by Jacques Roger: The soul is […] “a summary of the whole body,”51 and the soul of the seed emanated from its genitor’s soul […] can represent this genitor’s body. But this material soul cannot have the knowledge and craftsmanship required for forming the embryo […]. With Epicurus, Gassendi resorts to a sequence of motions that is pursued from the genitor to the seed and to the embryo. These motions involve aggregates of atoms, and, at the moment of conception, the corresponding atoms coming from the two seeds get assembled by means of that attraction of the same toward the same, which Hippocrates had described in purely physical terms.52 One can thus say that all organs are formed coevally at the start, but still “confused, dispersed, and imperfect.”53 For “it is evident that the seed is heterogeneous, and composed of the same parts from which the organic parts themselves are framed up, stepwise and by continuous sequence.”54

12.6 Conclusion For Gassendi, all data about the physical world are to be analyzed as resulting from the geometrical and mechanical properties of atoms, which in turn are comprised in “molecules” and, further on, in higher-level corporeal aggregates. This applies to the living organic beings as well as to their inorganic counterparts. The vital processes, including those involved in animal sensibility and motility, are presumed to depend on special functional dispositions elicited in sui generis corpuscular contextures. De facto, the immanent power of organic bodies for yielding these processes is attributed to a soul (anima) whose texture is made up of very tiny and active particles, apt to frame and reconstitute the whole structure and its dynamic operations. This ‘fiery soul’ derives its motive and formative powers from its original formation in a seed, whose properties are analogized with those of the source-elements of crystalline formations and similar complex ‘molecules.’ A special ‘texture’ of corpuscles is deemed sufficient to produce the emergence of a motile force (vis motrix), which will serve as the most important model aimed at representing the mechanisms of vital and animal functions. Generated in an appropriate material matrix, the seed is presumed to possess a formative active power which, in the more complex seminal aggregates, is identified with the embryo’s soul as the artisan of the whole organism to be developed by successive accretions of similar particles. Be they the outcome of spontaneous generation or of reproduction from parent organisms, seeds represent organogenetic dispositions that unfold contingently according to the mechanical

330  François Duchesneau order of nature. Resuming the Hippocratic notion of defluxus, Gassendi conceives that, in generative reproduction, the embryo is formed from a combination of similar parts extracted from the parent bodies; the fiery soul itself arising from elements of the genitors’ souls. The ensuing organic body deploys the order potentially comprised in the seed, as its inherent soul transforms the potentially predisposed structure stepwise. Elements of this system, duly revised, will find their way into later generation theories, under both the labels of “preformation” and “epigenesis.” But this is another story to tell.

Notes 1 See, for example, Olivier René Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 439–441; Anita Guerrini, “Experiments, Causation, and the Uses of Vivisection in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the History of Biology 46 (2013): 227–254. 2 This chapter builds on a revised version of François Duchesneau, Les Modèles du vivant de Descartes à Leibniz (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 85–117. 3 Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 372b. 4 Ibid., 373b. 5 On Gassendi’s reductive interpretation of the Aristotelian notion of selfmotion as implying the action of a soul or form, see Sarah Byers, “Life as ‘Self-Motion’: Descartes and ‘The Aristotelians’ on the Soul as the Life of the Body,” The Review of Metaphysics 59 (2006): 740–748. 6 See, for example, Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 401b, concerning the positive and active nature of the qualities of warm and cold. 7 On Gassendi’s notion of the molecule, see Henk H. Kubbinga, “La théorie moléculaire chez Gassendi,” in Pierre Gassendi 1592–1655: Actes du colloque international Digne-les-Bains, 18–21 mai 1992 (Digne: Société scientifique et littéraire des Alpes-de-Haute-Provence), 283–302. 8 See Marco Messeri, Causa e spiegazione: La fisica di Pierre Gassendi (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1985), chap. 7. 9 Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 273b. 10 See ibid., 280b. 11 On the role of final causes in Gassendi’s natural philosophy, see Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 49–50, 161–163. 12 Disquisitio metaphysica, OO III, 358a–363a. 13 Ibid., 358b. 14 Ibid., Responsio, OO III, 359a: “Quæcumque deinde affers pro causa finali, ad efficientem sunt referenda […].” 15 Ibid., 360b–361a. 16 Letter to Jan Baptist Van Helmont, 10 July 1629, OO VI, 20b. 17 Syntagma philosophicum, OO II, 251a. 18 Ibid. 19 Georges Canguilhem, La Formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955), 79–81. 20 See, for example, Thomas Willis, De anima brutorum quæ hominis vitalis ac sensitiva est, exercitationes duæ (1672) in Opera medica et physica… (Lugduni: Sumptibus Joannis Antonii Huguetan & soc., 1676).

Gassendi’s Theory of Living Beings  331 21 Syntagma, OO II, 250b. 22 For these various empirical arguments, see ibid., 252a–b. 23 See ibid., 252b: “Ex hisce igitur, aliisque Argumentis huiusmodi videri potest Anima nihil esse aliud, quam accensa quædam intra animalis corpus flammula, quæ sit vegetationis, sensus, aliarumque vitalium actionum principium.” 24 We may refer here to the analyses provided by Hiro Hirai, “Le concept de semence de Pierre Gassendi entre les théories de la matière et les sciences de la vie au XVIIe siècle,” Medicina nei secoli 15 (2003): 205–226; idem, “Mysteries of Living Corpuscles: Atomism and the Origin of Life in Sennert, Gassendi and Kircher,” in Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy, eds. Peter Distelzweig, Benjamin Goldberg, and Evan Ragland (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), 255–269. Hirai has rightly stressed the influence of Severinus on Gassendi in this instance; see Syntagma, OO II, 558b–559a. Hirai analyzes Severinus’ views as expressed in P. Severinus, Idea medicinæ philosophicæ fundamenta continens totius doctrinæ Paracelsicæ, Hippocraticæ & Galenicæ (Basilae: Ex officina Sixti Henricpetri, 1571). 25 Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi, 267. 26 Syntagma, OO II, 114b: “Nimirum seminalis vis in quadam actuosa, operisque sui non ignara substantia, cuiusmodi esse solus spiritus potest.” 27 Ibid., 260b. 28 See Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi, passim. 29 Syntagma, OO II, 250a–b. 30 Ibid., 145a. 31 Ibid., 180b. 32 See Syntagma, II, III, membrum posterius, lib. IV. De generatione animalium, OO II, 260–295. Gassendi’s theses are well rendered in François Bernier, Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi (Paris: Fayard, 1992), V, 321–364. For a critical analysis of this theory, see Saul Fisher, “Gassendi’s Atomist Account of Generation and Heredity in Plants and Animals,” Perspectives on Science 11 (2003): 484–512. 33 Syntagma, OO II, 262a. 34 Ibid., 262b. 35 See ibid., 263b. 36 See ibid., 266b; Bernier, Abrégé, V, 330. 37 See Syntagma, OO II, 270b–272b. 38 Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, IV, 1, 765b–766b. 39 See Syntagma, OO II, 275a–b. 40 Ibid., 275b. 41 Marcello Malpighi, De formatione pulli in ovo (1673), in Howard B. Adelmann, Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 932–981. 42 Bernier, Abrégé, V, 340–343. 43 See Syntagma, OO, II, 284b–285a; 288b–289a. 44 See ibid., 256b. 45 François Duchesneau, Les Modèles du vivant, 117. 46 See Fisher, “Gassendi’s Atomist Account,” wherein the author relied on Peter Bowler, “Preformation and Pre-existence in the Seventeenth Century: A Brief Analysis,” Journal of the History of Biology 4 (1971): 221–244. 47 On Gassendi’s conception of plants as living beings, see Luigi Guerrini, “Animazione, sensibilità, facoltà: Le premesse allo studio del mondo vegetale nel Syntagma philosophicum di Pierre Gassendi,” Rivista di storia della filosofia 59 (2004): 853–875.

332  François Duchesneau 48 Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi, 367: “C’est finalement l’identité dynamique et structurale du mouvement de cette ‘flamme’ constamment renouvelée dans sa substance matérielle qui permet de parler de l’identité de l’organisme à travers son perpétuel changement.” 49 Syntagma, OO II, 505b. 50 Jacques Roger, Les Sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIIIe siècle. La génération des animaux de Descartes à l’Encyclopédie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971), 138, n. 209. 51 The reference here is to Syntagma, OO II, 275b: “[…] cum jam sit [semen] Animæ totius quasi epitome.” 52 The reference here is to ibid., 275a–b. 53 The reference here is to ibid., 277a–b. 54 Roger, Les Sciences de la vie, 136. The reference here is to Syntagma, OO II, 280b: “[…] quando et manifeste heterogeneum est, et ex partibus iisdem constat, ex quibus sensim, ac una serie perficiuntur ipsæ organicæ partes.”

Bibliography Adelmann, Howard B. Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966. Bernier, François. Abrégé de la philosophie de M. Gassendi (2e édition revue et augmentée par l’auteur), 7 vols. Lyon: Anisson, Posuel et Rigaud, 1684/revised edition by Sylvia Murr and Geneviève Stefani. Paris: Fayard, 1992. Bloch, Olivier René. La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971. Bowler, Peter. “Preformation and Pre-existence in the Seventeenth Century: A Brief Analysis,” Journal of the History of Biology 4 (1971): 221–244. Byers, Sarah. “Life as ‘Self-Motion’: Descartes and ‘The Aristotelians’ on the Soul as the Life of the Body,” The Review of Metaphysics 59 (2006): 740–748. Canguilhem, Georges. La Formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955. Duchesneau, François. Les Modèles du vivant de Descartes à Leibniz. Paris: Vrin, 1998. Fisher, Saul. “Gassendi’s Atomist Account of Generation and Heredity in Plants and Animals,” Perspectives on Science 11 (2003): 484–512. Gassendi, Pierre. Opera omnia in sex tomos divisa. Lugduni: Sumptibus Laurentii Anisson, & Ioan. Bapt. Devenet, 1658 (abridged OO). Guerrini, Anita. “Experiments, Causation, and the Uses of Vivisection in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the History of Biology 46 (2013): 227–254. Guerrini, Luigi. “Animazione, sensibilità, facoltà: Le premesse allo studio del mondo vegetale nel Syntagma philosophicum di Pierre Gassendi,” Rivista di storia della filosofia 59 (2004): 853–875. Hirai, Hiro. “Le concept de semence de Pierre Gassendi entre les théories de la matière et les sciences de la vie au XVIIe siècle,” Medicina nei secoli 15 (2003): 205–226. Hirai, Hiro. “Mysteries of Living Corpuscles: Atomism and the Origin of Life in Sennert, Gassendi and Kircher.” In Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy, edited by Peter Distelzweig, Benjamin Goldberg, and Evan Ragland, 255–269. Dordrecht: Springer: 2016.

Gassendi’s Theory of Living Beings  333 Kubbinga, Henk H. “La théorie moléculaire chez Gassendi.” In Pierre Gassendi 1592–1655: Actes du colloque international Digne-les-Bains, 18–21 mai 1992, 283–302. Digne: Société scientifique et littéraire des Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, 1994. Messeri, Marco. Causa e spiegazione: La fisica di Pierre Gassendi. Milano: Franco Angeli, 1985. Osler, Margaret J. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Roger, Jacques. Les Sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIIIe siècle. La génération des animaux de Descartes à l’Encyclopédie. Paris: Armand Colin, 1971. Severinus, Petrus. Idea medicinæ philosophicæ fundamenta continens totius doctrinæ Paracelsicæ, Hippocraticæ & Galenicæ. Basileae: Ex officina Sixti Henricpetri, 1571. Willis, Thomas. De anima brutorum quae hominis vitalis ac sensitiva est: exercitationes duae. Londini: Prostant apud Gulielm. Wells & Robertum Scott, 1672.

13 “The Best Philosopher in France” The Reception of Gassendi’s Natural Philosophy in England Antonio Clericuzio 13.1 Introduction It is beyond doubt that Gassendi’s natural philosophy played a central part in seventeenth-century England. The reception of his ideas, albeit a selective one, coincided with the appropriation of Descartes’ philosophy and contributed to the establishment of the mechanical philosophy.1 Gassendi’s empiricism and atomism found fertile ground in England since, in the early decades of the seventeenth century, Nicholas Hill, Thomas Harriot, and Walter Warner had promoted the philosophy of atoms and adopted it to investigate natural phenomena.2 Whereas in the 1630s Gassendi, as author of philosophical and astronomical treatises, was seen as the advocate of empiricism and skepticism, in the mid-1640s, when news of his atomical philosophy began to reach England, he came to be seen as a major proponent of a new version of Epicureanism. During the Civil War and Interregnum, several Royalist savants who had left England and settled in Paris became acquainted with Gassendi’s philosophy and established personal contacts with him. His ideas entered England via members of the so-called Newcastle Circle (of Royalist sympathy), including Thomas Hobbes. Two intelligencers in particular, Marin Mersenne and Samuel Hartlib, were instrumental in the spread of Gassendi’s works and ideas in England. Once published, the long-awaited work on Epicurus, that is, the Animadversiones (which included the Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri) gave a strong stimulus to atomism and provided an alternative to Descartes’ strict mechanical philosophy. Gassendi’s Christianized version of Epicureanism was endorsed by Walter Charleton, who embraced his philosophy of atoms and resorted to the Frenchman’s critique of Epicurus’ anti-providentialism to halt the spread of materialism during the Interregnum. Robert Boyle shared Gassendi’s aim to free atomism from the most dangerous Epicurean doctrines, and he adopted relevant aspects of Gassendi’s mechanism as well as his empiricism and voluntarism. Yet, he took issue with the French philosopher’s notion of active matter, arguing that it would give rise to materialism. The popularity of Gassendi’s DOI: 10.4324/9781315521732-17

“The Best Philosopher in France”  335 works and the related revival of Epicureanism (notably of Lucretius) disquieted some pious English philosophers and divines like Henry More and Richard Baxter. While they saw Gassendi’s program to Christianize the philosophy of Epicurus as a substantial failure, other divines like Edward Stillingfleet and Samuel Parker endorsed Gassendi’s natural philosophy. The reaction among natural philosophers was equally diverse, with some savants opposing Gassendi’s philosophy to that of Descartes, while others tried to establish a compromise between the two versions of mechanism. While Gassendi’s influence was not confined to his matter theory, this topic played an important part in the philosophical debate. Mathematicians and natural philosophers resorted to Gassendi’s astronomical works and to the physics of the Syntagma philosophicum, notably to his experiments and the explanations of a variety of phenomena including cohesion, cold, light, colors, tides, respiration, digestion, and the generation of animals. Gassendi’s conception of void played a no less significant part in the scientific debate. Whereas Hobbes’ mature physics dispensed with any conception of a vacuum, Charleton and Isaac Barrow endorsed the existence of empty space. A study of the impact of Gassendi’s philosophy cannot ignore his doctrine of the animal soul, given its inspiration of Thomas Willis’ theory of the lower soul as contained in his influential De anima brutorum (1672). The Gassendian and Willisian notion of the fiery soul became a subject of debate among philosophers and divines. Among those who rejected the notion was Henry More. In this chapter, I investigate the varied reception of Gassendi’s works, with a focus on the English natural philosophers’ appropriation of his philosophy. The controversy with Robert Fludd and with Lord Herbert of Cherbury offers a good place to start—a controversy that sheds light on Gassendi’s confrontation with English philosophy and science, notably with the works of Francis Bacon and of William Harvey. Moreover, it provides evidence for Gassendi’s ‘mitigated skepticism’ and his probabilistic view of science. I will then deal with the dissemination in England of Gassendi’s works via the English émigrés who had settled in France, and with the early reactions to the Animadversiones. Gassendi’s writings were enthusiastically received in Oxford, where the so-called “experimental philosophy club” approved of Gassendi’s atomism and looked into his observations and experiments. Walter Charleton was an enthusiastic reader of Gassendi and played a central part in the dissemination of his ideas in England by including translations from the Animadversiones in his Physiologia. In the 1660s, English natural philosophy came to be characterized by a marked tendency toward experimentalism, and a number of scientific practitioners—especially Boyle—adopted substantial aspects of Gassendi’s theory of matter while testing his explanations of natural phenomena, notably, his accounts of cold, colors, and of

336  Antonio Clericuzio generation. Boyle’s hierarchical matter theory which played a crucial part in his chemical investigations—namely, the view that simple unchanged corpuscles form larger aggregate corpuscles—was heavily dependent on Gassendi’s notion of moleculae, that is, clusters of atoms. Newton’s doctrine of the internal structure of matter, moreover, was closer to Gassendi’s views than to those of Boyle. Newton maintained that atoms, that is, solid, massy, impenetrable, indivisible, and moveable units of uniform matter, cohere to compose bigger particles less strongly bound. Gassendi’s vacuum disseminatum was evidently behind Newton’s insistence on the existence of vacuola between corpuscles of solid matter, which he adopted to explain a variety of phenomena, notably those related to light. It is well known that Locke was, in his own day, regarded as a Gassendist, and a number of studies have explored the numerous aspects of Locke’s philosophy that show his indebtedness to Gassendi. While a detailed study of the influence of Gassendi’s philosophy on Locke is beyond the scope of the present chapter, it is useful to note that Locke’s exposure to Gassendi’s thought was established early, during his student days in Oxford. He became interested in atomism and in the research undertaken by the Oxonians on blood, respiration, and generation through anatomical investigations and experiments that, as we shall see, derived some of their impetus from Gassendi’s views. Furthermore, there is evidence of his involvement in the debate over the animal soul, as he kept notes from Willis’ lectures on this topic. The catalog of Locke’s library includes the 1655 edition of the Life of Peiresc (Viri illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabrici de Peiresc… vita), but not Gassendi’s Opera omnia. Locke’s library also contained the Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi (1678) by François Bernier, with whom he shared an interest in medicine.3 In addition, he owned a copy of Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1656–1660), which included a lengthy section on Epicurus, a translation of Gassendi’s De vita et moribus Epicuri, and a large portion of his Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri.4

13.2 Empiricism and Skepticism: The Quarrel with Fludd and Herbert The history of Gassendi’s connections with British savants might start with his criticism of Robert Fludd, the English physician and alchemist. In 1628, Marin Mersenne sent Gassendi a number of works by Fludd, and asked him to write a reply to the English alchemist.5 Gassendi complied with his friend’s request, and in 1629 he completed a treatise against Fludd, which he published in 1630 under the title of Epistolica exercitatio. Gassendi engaged in a detailed critique of Fludd’s fusion of alchemy with cabala and religion, notably the interpretation of Creation as an alchemical process. Gassendi also dismissed the Neoplatonic anima mundi (world soul), that is, an incorporeal agent animating the physical

“The Best Philosopher in France”  337 world, maintaining that God intervened directly in the universe and that there was no need to introduce intermediate agents between God and the physical world. In his examination of Fludd’s theories, Gassendi dealt also with Harvey’s Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis (1628). Gassendi promptly read this book having received a copy from Mersenne, and in a letter to Peiresc dated 28 August 1629 he stated that Harvey’s discovery was “fort vraysemblable et establie.”6Yet he was not convinced by the English physician’s arguments against the existence of the interventricular pores. In the Epistolica exercitatio, Gassendi eulogized Harvey’s investigations of blood circulation though he did not share Harvey’s rejection of the blood’s passage through the septal pores, which he claimed he had seen while witnessing dissections at Aix.7 Gassendi nevertheless maintained a skeptical stance and stated that medicine was so uncertain a discipline that blood circulation, albeit supported by strong evidence, was but a probable hypothesis.8 Following on from his critique of Fludd, Gassendi engaged in a quarrel with Herbert of Cherbury. In 1634 Elia Diodati sent Gassendi a copy of the 1633 edition of Herbert’s De veritate (first edition: 1624), asking for his opinion. On 29 August 1634 Gassendi wrote a response questioning Herbert’s claim of having discovered the criterion of truth and took issue with the Englishman’s attack on skepticism, arguing that absolute truth is unknown and unknowable. Gassendi deemed Herbert’s system as inadequate for solving the basic problems related to knowledge of the external world.9 Subsequently, Gassendi wrote a letter to Herbert, which was never sent but that was ultimately made available to him. In it, Gassendi styled Herbert “England’s treasure” and the worthy successor of Francis Bacon, whose works the French philosopher extolled.10 After the flattering opening, however, Gassendi goes on to criticize Herbert’s doctrine of Common Notions and to voice his own empiricist explanation of the origin of ideas.11 Gassendi’s astronomical and philosophical writings soon gained a wider readership in England. In 1635 Henry Gellibrand, Gresham Professor of Astronomy, voiced his admiration for Gassendi calling him “one of the best Astronomers of France.” It is likely that Gellibrand was familiar with Gassendi’s Parhelia, sive soles quatuor (1630), containing a resolute rejection of all kinds of astrology, and Mercurius in Sole visus (1632), with the observation of the 1631 transit of Mercury predicted by Kepler.12 On 24 November 1639 Marin Mersenne provided Theodore Haak, a German Calvinist who lived in England, with information on Gassendi’s work: “Monsieur Gassendus, vient d’achever la Vie de Monsieur de Peiresc, Conseiller au Parlement de Provence, lequel a esté inimitable; il y

338  Antonio Clericuzio aura de belles choses. Entre ce que vous dites, il a fait un livre en mon faveur, contre Robert Flud, il y a environ 9 ou 10 ans, pour responce à un volume, qu’il avoit fait contre moy, tous m’ayant conseillé de ne luy respondre point. Il y a une Philosophie admirable, suivant les principes d’Epicure, laquelle est fort avancée.” 13 Haak forwarded Mersenne’s letter on to Samuel Hartlib, who in turn circulated it among his circle of correspondents who played a central part in the dissemination of Gassendi’s ideas in England.

13.3 Gassendi, the British Émigrés in Paris, and the Hartlib Circle Gassendi’s Viri illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc… vita (Paris, 1641) gained him a certain following in philosophical circles in Commonwealth and Protectorate England, notably among the Hartlib Circle. In 1640, Mersenne informed Theodore Haak of the imminent publication of Gassendi’s previously announced biography of Peiresc.14 Haak passed the information on to Hartlib, who in turn asked Thomas Smith, the Cambridge orientalist and theologian, to translate it.15 As Smith declined the invitation, William Rand, one of Hartlib’s associates, took up the translation into English (1657), and dedicated it to his kinsman John Evelyn.16 The spread of Gassendi’s works gained impetus from the Hartlib Circle and the English exiles in France. Sir Charles Cavendish, first duke of Newcastle upon Tyne, his brother William Cavendish, Thomas Hobbes, William Petty, and Kenelm Digby had contacts with Gassendi, while the mathematician and divine, John Pell, who lived in Amsterdam, received news about his work via Mersenne. The latter sent regular news of Gassendi’s writings to members of the Newcastle Circle and to Hartlib.17 In a letter of 7/17 September 1644, John Pell informed Charles Cavendish of the publication of the Disquisitio metaphysica (1644), stressing that both Hobbes and Gassendi criticized Descartes’ philosophy. Moreover, Pell gave Cavendish a detailed account of Gassendi’s Iudicium (1643)—a refutation of the astronomer and Capuchin friar Anton de Rheita, who claimed to have observed five more moons of Jupiter.18 In 1645 Charles Cavendish settled in Paris, where he was joined by his brother William and William’s wife Margaret. The Cavendish salon became a meeting place for Paris intellectuals, including Gassendi, who had conversations with Charles Cavendish on matters astronomical and philosophical. On 11/21 June 1647 Cavendish was able to report to Pell that De vita et moribus Epicuri (1647) was in press, as well as the Institutio astronomica (1647), based on lectures he delivered at the Collège Royal. The latter work made a significant impact in England, as attested by the publication in London of its second edition (1653).19 Robert Boyle perused Gassendi’s

“The Best Philosopher in France”  339 astronomical works and enthused about them in a letter to Hartlib of 8 May 1647: Gassendus, a great favourite of mine, I take to be a very profound mathematician, as well as an excellent astronomer, and one that has collected a very ample treasury of numerous and accurate observations of all that belongs to the abstruse science of those sublimer bodies.20 Boyle read Gassendi’s Institutio astronomica shortly after its publication and, in the second essay of The usefulness of experimental philosophy (published in 1663, but written largely in 1648), he explicitly referred to Gassendi’s work when dealing with the question of the size of the universe.21 The Cavendish Circle was given regular information on the progress of Gassendi’s philosophy. In October 1644 Cavendish wrote to Pell that “Mr: Hobbes writes, Gassendes his philosophie is not yet printed, but that he hath reade it, & that it is as big as Aristotles philosophie but much truer, & excellent Latin.” Two months later, in December, Cavendish reported that Hobbes approved of Gassendi’s Disquisitio metaphysica (1644) and went on by writing that “Mr Hobbes joins with Gassendes in his dislike of De Cartes his writings, for he utterlie mislikes De Cartes his last newe booke of philosophie [i.e., Descartes’ Principia]….”22 By the time Gassendi had written Vita et doctrina Epicuri and almost all the Animadversiones, Hobbes had access to the French philosopher’s manuscripts, as attested by Sorbière’s letter of September 1646. Here, Sorbière asked Hobbes to urge Gassendi to send the manuscripts to the Netherlands for publication: “please urge M. Gassendi to send me his Physics. Our printers here are longing for it; and they are far preferable to the ones at Lyon, if he wants either elegant or speedy printing.”23 Hobbes took upon himself the task of convincing Gassendi, but was not optimistic about the outcome: I shall do my best to persuade M. Gassendi to send you anything of his which is ready for the press; but I shall do this when I am in Paris, that is, I think, in about mid-November. However, if your letter fails to persuade him, my talking is even less likely to succeed.24 News of the imminent publication of the Animadversiones circulated among the English émigrés in Paris. Charles Cavendish thus relayed it to William Petty (who had been introduced to Gassendi by Thomas Hobbes): Your worthy Friend and myne mr Gassend is reasonable well and hath Printed a book of the life and Manners of Epicurus since your going from hence as I thinke. He hath now in the Presse at Lyons, the

340  Antonio Clericuzio philosophie of Epicurus in which I beleeve wee shall have much of his owne philosophy which doubtlesse will be an excellent worke. There is an Experiment, how to shew as they suppose that there is, or may be, vacuum.25 In any event, Hobbes was able to get hold of the Animadversiones immediately after its publication and informed Gassendi (who was at that time in Digne) that copies of his book had reached Paris.26 As we gather from Pell’s letter to Cavendish of May 1650, Gassendi’s work was much in demand: “almost all the coppies of Gassendi philosophia are sold: so that they talke already of a new impression in France.”27 The response to Gassendi’s Animadversiones was enthusiastic. In 1650 Robert Payne, Charles Cavendish’s chaplain and a friend of Hobbes, styled Gassendi “the best philosopher in France” and in the same year Cavendish eulogized Gassendi for purifying Epicurus’ philosophy: “Mr: Gassendes hath both maintained & opposed Epicurus when he ought, most excellentlie.”28 Walter Charleton, who was a close friend of Digby and an admirer of Hobbes, wrote in 1652 that “the leaves of whose most learned Works, we blush not to confesse our selves to have been so conversant in, that we have sullyed them by often revolution.”29 The Animadversiones provided readers with a ‘purged’ Epicureanism as well as philosophical investigations built on sensory-based evidence. The posthumous publication of Gassendi’s Opera omnia in 1658 provided English natural philosophers with the complete corpus of Gassendi’s philosophy, including his “Physica,” that is, the bulky section of the Syntagma philosophicum devoted to natural philosophy. 30 Henceforward, English natural philosophers and theologians could access the bulk of Gassendi’s natural philosophy therein, namely, the theory of matter as well as theories and observations related to a broad range of natural phenomena.

13.4 Gassendi’s Impact at Oxford and Cambridge During the Interregnum, Gassendi’s philosophy was often included in the projects of educational reform originating from many quarters. John Beale’s project of a new college in Dublin put special emphasis on mathematical, chemical, and botanical teaching, and recommended the works of Bacon and Gassendi as part of the science curriculum.31 In his critique of the traditional university curricula (Academiarum examen, 1654), the radical reformer John Webster aimed to replace Aristotelian philosophy with that of Gassendi.32 Webster’s tract elicited a reply from Seth Ward, Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, who in Vindiciae academiarum (1654) claimed that Gassendi’s works were already well known in Oxford and retorted to Webster by accusing him of plagiarizing Gassendi’s Exercitationes. Ward substantiated his allegation by a meticulous comparison of Webster’s Academiarum examen with

“The Best Philosopher in France”  341 Gassendi’s work.33 Gassendi’s philosophy was a matter of debate in the appendix to Vindiciae academiarum, authored by Seth Ward and John Wilkins, being an answer to Hobbes’ allegation that the English universities continued to cling to Aristotelianism. Ward and Wilkins opined that Oxford scholars were already familiar with the works of Descartes, Gassendi, and Digby. Like Webster, Hobbes too was castigated for allegedly plagiarizing Gassendi’s works.34 In his reply, Hobbes sought to downplay Gassendi’s influence maintaining that his views diverged from those of the French philosopher and he referred to the publication of his writings in Mersenne’s Cogitata physico-mathematica (1644) to substantiate the claim that he had formulated his philosophy before knowing the works of Gassendi.35 The claims made by Seth Ward and his colleagues for the progressiveness of the Oxford University curriculum were not groundless as, in the mid-seventeenth century, Oxford professors were free to shape their teaching within the statutory constraints. They taught the astronomy of Copernicus and Kepler and the new corpuscular philosophy, while their libraries purchased the books of Descartes and Gassendi.36 As we have seen in his responses to Webster and to Hobbes, Seth Ward emphasized his acquaintance with Gassendi’s work. John Wallis, the Savilian Professor of Geometry, corresponded with Gassendi in 1655 and exchanged with him information on astronomical matters.37 In the paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society (1666), Wallis elaborated on Gassendi’s theory of tides, and praised the Frenchman for “attempting to give an account of the menstrual periods from the earth’s carrying the moon about itself.”38 It was, however, mostly in informal gatherings, and notably in the so-called Oxford Philosophical Club, that the impact of Gassendi’s works was particularly conspicuous. Two leading figures in the Oxford group—namely, Petty and Boyle— promoted the corpuscular philosophy. At the same time, Robert Hooke, who collaborated with Boyle to build the air-pump, espoused Gassendi’s view of self-moving atoms, as contained in Animadversiones.39 Nathaniel Highmore, who was educated at Oxford, where he carried out medical investigations under the tutelage of Harvey before moving to Sherburne, kept close contact with the Oxford physiologists, notably with Boyle. In Corporis humani disquisitio anatomica (1651), Highmore investigated blood composition by adopting the particulate theory of matter, while in the History of Generation (1651)—dedicated to Boyle—he deployed his embryological views by resorting to Gassendi’s atoms. Highmore’s atoms, like those of Gassendi, were endowed with both different geometrical shapes and with motion. Moreover, for Highmore, atoms formed seminal concretions responsible for generation.40 As we shall see, seminal principles played a central part in Boyle’s views of generation. Ralph Bathurst and Thomas Willis, two influential Oxford physicians, resorted to Gassendi in their medical investigations. In the 1654 lectures

342  Antonio Clericuzio dealing with respiration (Praelectiones tres), Bathurst often referred to Gassendi’s views on animal economy. By relying on Gassendi’s Animadversiones, Bathurst maintained that fishes were able to breathe because particles of air were contained in the vacuola to be found in parts of water.41 Bathurst referred to Gassendi when dealing with digestion, claiming that the French philosopher, like Jan Baptist Van Helmont, maintained that digestion was not produced by heat, but by an acid ferment.42 An influential physician, Thomas Willis took an ambivalent attitude toward Gassendi’s teachings. He took issue with the mechanical philosophy while endorsing the Frenchman’s doctrine of the activity of matter. His debts to Gassendi are conspicuous in his works on the brain, notably De anima brutorum (Oxford, 1672), adopting Gassendi’s views on the animal soul. Willis voiced his doubts about atomic philosophy in his tract on fermentation written in 1656 and published in Diatribae duae (1659). In it, Willis praised the philosophy of Epicurus that hath been revived in our Age […] as it undertakes mechanically the unfolding of things, and accommodates nature with working tools, as it were in the hand of an artificer, and without running to occult qualities, sympathy, and other refuges of ignorance, doth happily and very ingeniously disintangle some difficult knots of the sciences, and dark riddles […]. Yet, he argued, the atomic philosophy was scarcely serviceable to conduct chemical and medical investigations because it rather supposes, than demonstrates its principles, and teaches of what figure those elements of bodies may be, not what they have been, and also induces notions that are extremely subtle and remote from the sense, and that do not sufficiently conform with the phenomena of nature. He therefore adopted the chemical doctrine of five principles (Spirit, Sulfur, Salt, Water, and Earth) that he reinterpreted in terms of corpuscles.43 Willis (like Gassendi) maintained that matter was not inert but active, and conceived the corpuscles of spirit as units of matter endowed with motion. Willis spelled out his view of active matter in De anima brutorum, as follows: Then what is vulgarly delivered, that Matter, out of which Natural things are made, is merely passive, and cannot be moved, unless it be moved by another thing, is not true; but rather on the contrary, Atoms, which are the matter of sublunary things, are so very active and self-moving, that they never stay long, but ordinarily stray out of

“The Best Philosopher in France”  343 one subject into another; or being shut up in the same, they cut forth for themselves Pores and Passages, into which they are Expatiated.44 Significantly, Willis found Gassendi’s natural philosophy congenial to his non-mechanical approach to natural philosophy and to medicine, and took up the Frenchman’s chemical explanation of meteorological phenomena to support his arguments on subterranean effluvia: In like manner, in this visible and Ethereal World, vapors both sulphureous and saline, and of a diverse kind and nature, perpetually breath forth, and are diffused through the whole region of air. From hence the diversity of winds, the vicissitudes of cold and heat, rain, snow, hail, dew, and hoar frost, and what are of this nature, have their origine. Concerning the particular instances of these, the famous Gassendus may be consulted; who, in his Epicurean Philosophy, most aptly deduces the phaenomena, almost of all meteors, and the reasons of them, from the exhalations of sulphur and salts, either nitrous, vitriolick, aluminous or armoniack.45 Willis concurred with Gassendi’s doctrine of the animal soul in the last of his neurological works, that is, the De anima brutorum, grounded in the anatomical investigations of the nervous system he had carried out in Oxford, as well as in his clinical experience. Willis’ work on the animal soul incorporated the lectures he delivered in the early 1660s as Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy, which John Locke attended, as evidenced by his extensive notes taken and circulated among the Oxford physiologists.46 Willis articulated his view of the reciprocal influence of body and mind and, like Gassendi, distinguished the immortal rational soul from the animal, that is, the material soul, which he deemed as corporeal, being “that by which brutes as well men live, feel and move.” The investigation of the corporeal soul would disclose the temperament of men and “the Causes, and formal Reasons of many diseases, as of the Phrensie, Lethargy, Vertigo, Madness, Melancholy, and others, belonging rather to the Soul than to the Body.”47 Following the Epicureans, Willis contended that [t]he soul therefore to be a certain flame, or a species of most thin fire, which as long as it lives, or remains inkindled, so long the animal lives; when it no longer lives or is extinguished, the animal dyes.48 Willis’ definition of the corporeal soul is taken almost verbatim from Gassendi, who in Syntagma philosophicum argued that the corporeal soul is “this internal force present to us and in our members, by which we live, feel, imagine, move.” The lower soul—for Gassendi—is of a very subtle texture, consisting of the most active corpuscles, like those of fire, whereas the rational soul is immaterial and therefore immortal.49

344  Antonio Clericuzio The lower soul is to be found in both men and animals, and—Willis argued—is composed of two parts, the vital and the sensitive. The vital part, which he described in corpuscular and chemical terms, is a flame located in the blood; the sensitive was “an heap of animal spirits every where diffused thorow the brain and nervous stock.”50 The corporeal soul is able to attain some degree of knowledge, as is shown by some animals that are endowed with perception, memory and imagination, and a degree of thought. This view of animal faculties, he continued, was held by Gassendi who has provided “many instances, by which the cunning and wonderful sagacity of brute animals were declared.” Willis reinforced his arguments by referring to Gassendi’s theory that “the acquisition and loss of a habit, stands in the power of the brain and phantasie, a subject purely corporeal.”51 As we shall see, the doctrine of the animal soul was a matter of considerable debate among philosophers and divines, and became the target of Henry More’s fierce attacks. In Cambridge, Gassendi’s ideas met with a lukewarm response. Gassendi’s books were to be found in the libraries of Ralph Cudworth and John Smith, who in the early 1640s served as mathematical lecturers at Cambridge.52 After professing some initial support for the mechanical philosophy, Henry More and Cudworth developed serious reservations about Gassendi’s thought and about mechanism as a whole. In 1649 Henry More was keen to read Gassendi’s Animadversiones and wrote to Hartlib: “procure me out of France with any tolerable speed a Copy of Gassendus his Epicurean Philosophy I will willingly pay what it shall cost.” On 30 December 1649, having procured a copy from Hartlib and having read the text, More voiced his disillusionment, writing that “Gassendus is too tedious a Philosopher for me.”53 In Antidote against Atheism (1653), More set out to rebuke the enemies of Christian religion, namely, atheists, Epicureans, enthusiasts, and libertines. He went on by rejecting the mechanical philosophy, namely the view that natural phenomena could be explained exclusively in terms of matter and motion, excluding the action of a spiritual substance. In 1660, More reiterated his attacks on the philosophy of Epicurus (which he styled a ‘foolery’), claiming that he preferred Descartes’ philosophy and dismissed Gassendi’s attempt to rehabilitate Epicureanism, stating that he “was much amazed that a person of so commendable parts as P. Gassendus could ever have the patience to rake out such old course rags out of that rotten dunghill to stuffe his large Volumes withall.”54 Henry More set out to rebut Gassendi and Willis in their doctrine of the corporeal soul and claimed that life, sense, cogitation, and consciousness were produced by the immortal soul, not by the configuration of matter within the brain and the nervous system. More asserted the immortality of the animal soul and accused Willis and Gassendi of being “psychopyrists.”55 More and Cudworth were not alone in criticizing the Gassendian and Willisian doctrine of the soul of brutes. As Sytsma maintained, for Richard Baxter

“The Best Philosopher in France”  345 “Willis’s Gassendian arguments for material animal souls could be extended to the human soul” and he singled out Gassendi as a crypto materialist.56 Boyle was another among those who questioned Gassendi’s outlook of the animal soul. As can be gathered from his manuscript notes on the beast-machine, he took issue with Gassendi’s view as outlined in the Fifth Objections to Descartes’ Meditations, where he “pleaded for the rationality of beasts” and “had ascrib’d too much to the imaginative faculty of Bruits.” Boyle softened his criticism of Gassendi somewhat by adding that the French philosopher had apparently subsequently changed his view (i.e., in the Syntagma philosophicum), and “freely acknowledges that there are divers sorts of thoughts in men, which even the highest faculty of bruits, their imagination cannot reach to.”57 Gassendi’s effort to Christianize the Epicurean physics met with the approbation of Edward Stillingfleet, a divine and an influential Latitu­ dinarian who had studied at Cambridge.58 Isaac Barrow, a theologian and mathematician, did not agree with the Cambridge Platonists’ attacks on Gassendi’s philosophy and endorsed the doctrine of atoms and the void. According to Malet, Barrow’s view of space, which was aimed to disprove Descartes’ conception, entailed that space was not a figment of the human imagination, but rather a real thing, falling under the category of possibilities or capabilities, like “sensibility” or “mobility.” 59 Like Gassendi, Barrow defended the existence of real space to contrast Descartes’ ‘relationist’ view of motion.60 One critique of the Cambridge Platonists’ philosophy came from Samuel Parker, a divine and a natural philosopher, who in 1666 was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, and who in 1686 was appointed to the bishopric of Oxford. A protégé of Ralph Bathurst, Parker became familiar with Gassendi’s works when he was a student at Trinity College, Oxford.61 In his Tentamina physico-theologica de Deo (1665), and in the subsequent Disputationes de Deo (1678), he set out to refute the atheists and to vindicate Epicurus’ ethics from the charge of atheism. He advocated an empiricist and anti-speculative outlook and embraced Gassendi’s doctrine of infinite and absolute space.62 Parker, who was familiar with Willis’ work on the brain, showed that he fully agreed with the doctrine of the corporeal soul by declaring: “there is no doubt that the sensitive soul is a fiery substance.”63 As we shall see, the divisibility of matter, the motion of atoms, the nature of space and the existence of vacuum were central issues in the reception of Gassendi’s philosophy among English philosophers.

13.5 Hobbes and Gassendi During his stay in France in the 1640s, Hobbes established a close relationship with Gassendi and shared the Frenchman’s opposition to Descartes’ philosophy. Yet, despite their mutual esteem and their common

346  Antonio Clericuzio commitment to put forward a mechanistic philosophy, Hobbes and Gassendi diverged significantly. The difference between the two philosophers is summarized by Lisa Sarasohn as follows: […] Hobbes formulated a complete materialism in which he combined Gassendi’s atomistic model and his own deterministic philosophy to equate analogically inertial motion and human behavior; and Gassendi reacted against Hobbes’s materialism by interpolating much more theology in his physics. Hobbes and Gassendi disagreed on the existence of the vacuum and on their theories of light. The French philosopher held the corpuscular and ‘emissionist’ theory of light, while Hobbes saw light (and vision) as the outcome of local motion in the medium.64 After espousing atomism in the 1640s, Hobbes ruled out the existence of atoms and void. In Tractatus opticus I and Tractatus opticus II (both written in 1640), Hobbes claimed that light transmission implied the existence of interstitial small empty spaces, that is, Gassendi’s vacuum disseminatum.65 Despite Hobbes’ acceptance of vacuola, his explanation of light and vision was at odds with that of the atomists. The socalled Short Tract on First Principles (an anonymous work, undated and published as a work of Hobbes in 1889) might be considered an exception, as it adopted the Atomists’ theory of light (which in fact Hobbes did not hold in other works). Yet, Hobbes scholars have convincingly questioned the authorship of Short Tract, suggesting that it was not written by Hobbes, but by Robert Payne.66 The latter, as we have seen, embraced Gassendi’s philosophy and was familiar with De apparente magnitudine solis (1642). As attested by his surviving annotated copy, Payne thoroughly examined Gassendi’s work, where vision was explained as the outcome of the transmission of ‘membranulae.’67 By contrast, Hobbes stated that the action of a luminous body was a motion propagated to the eye through the contiguous parts of the surrounding medium, and neither the object, nor parts of it traveled.68 For Hobbes, the luminous body expands into a greater volume and then contracts again, having a continuous systolic and diastolic motion.69 To account for this motion, Hobbes posited it as an effect of small empty spaces among particles of matter, a theory that we also find in Tractatus opticus II. For Hobbes, systolic and diastolic movement could not occur, nor could it be imagined, if one did not admit the existence of small void spaces.70 In the letter to Mersenne of 7/17 February 1648, Hobbes reconsidered a vacuist position by taking issue with Etienne Noël’s Le plein du vide, where the Jesuit had rejected the existence of a void at the top of the tube in the Torricellian experiment. Hobbes wrote to Mersenne that “to sum up my opinion about the vacuum, I still think what I told you before: that there are certain minimal spaces here and there, in

“The Best Philosopher in France”  347 which there is no body…” For Hobbes small empty spaces are to be found in nature, because the sun, fire, and other heat-producing bodies set in motion “bodies which are next to them, and dissipate their component parts by making them strike against one another.” For this reason, he concluded, “certain small empty spaces are necessarily formed by this action.”71 The subsequent letter to Mersenne of 15/25 May 1648 testifies to Hobbes’ vacillation concerning the existence or non-existence of void. He cast doubts on the vacuist interpretations of the Torricellian experiment, implicitly criticizing Gassendi’s view of vacuum coacervatum: All the experiments which you and others have made with mercury do not prove that a vacuum exists, because when the subtle matter which is in the air is pressed, it will pass through the mercury, and through any other fluid or molten body whatsoever – just as smoke passes through water.72 Hobbes’ De corpore (1655) contains an explicit rejection of vacuum that rests on an experiment that he deemed “unanswerable,” namely the operation of the gardener’s watering-pot having an opening at the top and small holes in the bottom. When it is filled with water and the top opening is stopped, the water does not descend. When the top hole is opened, water flows because the air below the watering-pot so displaced can occupy the space left by water at the top of the watering-pot. Otherwise, the water will not descend since there is no vacuum below the wateringpot, and all space is full.73 In a letter to Sorbière of 6/16 February 1657, Hobbes reiterated his anti-vacuist view and added that what Epicurus called vacuum might be identified with Descartes’ materia subtilis or “extremely pure substance.”74 Though he called his corpuscles atoms, Hobbes never insisted on the indivisibility of the smallest units of matter. He stated that they could be further divided into smaller parts, though the smaller the parts, the more difficult the division.75 In Dialogus physicus de natura aeris, written against Boyle and the Fellows of the Royal Society, he rejected Gassendi’s mechanism as incompatible with the transmission of light: Moreover, what reason can be offered for the transparency of those bodies through which all visible bodies appear no less distinctly than through the purest air? If glass consisted of hard particles, hooked, entangled, or with pores disconnected in whatever way, it would be impossible for rays of light to pass through the transparent sphere without various refractions, by which the arrangement of the parts would be disturbed, and vision would become confused, which daily experience shows to be false.”76

348  Antonio Clericuzio

13.6 Gassendi and the English Atomists In Paris, Gassendi met with Sir Kenelm Digby who was a friend and correspondent of Hobbes and of Mersenne. Digby advocated the atomic philosophy and banished forms from natural philosophy. However, in his influential Two Treatises (1644), he reshaped atomism in order to reconcile it with Aristotelian philosophy, namely with the doctrine of elements. Atoms and their motion played a central part in Digby’s philosophy. He praised Gassendi, styling him “that learned and ingenious man,” and maintained that bodies act one upon the other on the basis of the congruity of the particles’ forms with pores.77 Yet, his views of matter and space totally departed from those of Gassendi. Digby made it clear that the corpuscles he called atoms were not to be conceived as indivisible units of matter. Furthermore, he rejected the existence of void by saying that “the inconveniences that follow out this supposition of vacuities, are so great, as it is impossible by any meanes to slide them over.”78 Gassendi, in turn, criticized Digby’s theory of condensation and rarefaction (as contained in Two Treatises) given its basis in plenism.79 The physician and natural philosopher Walter Charleton, who had joined the English exiles in France, played a major role in the spread of Gassendi’s philosophy in England. Charleton embraced atomism in his numerous works dealing with natural philosophy and medicine.80 In 1652 he published The Darkness of Atheism, which promoted physico-theology, by appealing to the works of Descartes and Gassendi. Two years later, in 1654, Charleton published the influential Physio_ logia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana, largely based on Gassendi’s Animadversiones. In 1656, he sent to press a translation of Epicurus’ ethics under the title Epicurus’ moral and in 1657 he published The Immortality of Human Soul, a dialogue criticizing Lucretian doctrines. Charleton’s works were aimed at defending the mechanical philosophy against the allegation of impiety—a task that pious philosophers deemed urgent following the publication of works supporting materialism and the mortalist heresy, such as Richard Overton’s Mans Mortallitie (1643), Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), and Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies and Philosophical Fancies. The latter work embraced the Epicurean doctrine of the origin of the universe as issuing from the fortuitous concourse of atoms.81 In The Darkness of Atheism, Charleton censured Epicurean atomism, emphasizing both the irreligious and subversive motifs in the old Romance of the spontaneous result of the World from a casual segregation and disposition of that abysse of atoms, which rowled up and down, to and fro, by an impetuous and continual inquietude, estuation, or civil war, caused by their ingenite propensity to motion, in the range of the infinite space.82

“The Best Philosopher in France”  349 Charleton found the doctrine of atoms a better tool than the Peripatetic philosophy for the refutation of atheism, and to this end he resorted to a number of sources, notably Gassendi and Descartes, aiming to demonstrate the agreement between the mechanical philosophers.83 Charleton declared that God created ex nihilo “such a proportionate congeries, or just mass of Atoms, as was necessary to the constitution of the Universe.”84 The rehabilitation of atomism entailed the rebuttal of Epicurus’ doctrine “that Atoms had, from all eternity, a faculty of Motion, or impetuous tendency, inherent in them, and received not the same from any forreign principle, or impression extradvenient.”85 Yet, Charleton did not endorse Descartes’ concept of inert matter, but rather aligned his thinking with Gassendi, arguing that “Atoms in the instant of their creation received immediately from God a faculty of selfmotion.”86 God, he stated, guided the motions of all atoms and “cast them into that excellent composure or figure, which the visible World now holds.”87 In order to stress the role of divine providence in the natural world, Charleton—like Gassendi— had recourse to seminal principles, that is, corpuscles endowed by God with formative power. Since atoms “in their naked and incomplex nature” cannot account for the origin of the living organism, generation is performed by special corpuscles created by God with formative virtue which… immediately designes this or that parcel of matter for such or such a part, another for another, and so spins it out into an uniform labyrinth of members, at last weaving all those into an ingenious figure, in all points resembling the Protoplast or first genitor of that species.88 Charleton’s Physiologia did much to disseminate Gassendi’s ideas in England, given the large extent to which it was based upon his Animadversiones.89 Charleton followed Gassendi’s view of materia actuosa, arguing that particles of matter “are indefinently motive, and in perpetual endeavour of emergency or exsilition.”90 Like Gassendi, Charleton speculated about the shapes of atoms and resorted to the notion of moleculae. He surmised that atoms of fire were small and spherical, atoms of cold (‘frigorifick atoms’) tetrahedral or pyramidic, while salts were formed of cubic atoms.91 Atoms combined together to form aggregates, which he called “moleculae, or first concretions of atoms.”. Again like Gassendi, Charleton maintained that molecules were the “proxime and immediate principles” of the four elements and of the chemical principles.92 The physical properties of bodies could thus be explained by means of the shape and motion of atoms, the small empty spaces within them, and the textures of atoms. Those bodies, he concluded, having empty spaces interposed among particles and lax connection of atoms, can be easily

350  Antonio Clericuzio separated into their constituent parts. If the texture is compact and atoms are at rest, bodies—such as those composed of gold—were stable and could hardly be separated.93 Fluidity was a consequence of the motion of atoms, which in turn was due to their smooth surfaces and to the presence of small voids. Firmness occurred when atoms, “being uncapable of rowling upon each others in superfice, both in respect of the ineptitude of their figures thereunto, and the want of competent inane spaces among them.”94 Charleton adopted Gassendi’s vacuum disseminatum (i.e., affirming the existence of small empty spaces among particles of matter), yet—like Hobbes—he denied the existence of vacuum coacervatum and expressed reservations about the ‘vacuist’ interpretation of the Torricellian experiment. Dispensing with the horror vacui and Cartesian plenism, Charleton claimed that tiny particles of air, of light, and magnetic effluvia, might penetrate the pores of glass, thereby preventing the vacuum coacervatum. As we shall see, Boyle’s arguments concerning the vacuum had much in common with the views of Charleton.95 John Evelyn lived in Paris from 1649 and was acquainted with François La Mothe Le Vayer, Gabriel Naudé, and Pierre Gassendi. An advocate of atomism since 1646, on his return to England in 1653, Evelyn set out to translate Lucretius’ poem De rerum natura. His translation of the first book thereof was published in 1656, with a Preface and“Animadversions.”96 Adopting Gassendi’s purged version of the philosophy of Epicurus, Evelyn extolled Lucretius’ ethics while rejecting his impious views on the origin of the universe.97 In the commentary on Lucretius, he endorsed Gassendi’s arguments for the existence of vacuum and saw rarefaction and condensation as alterations of the ratio of void to atoms.98 Owing to the disapproval of some of his pious friends, Evelyn declined to publish his translation of the remaining books of Lucretius.99

13.7 Robert Boyle Robert Boyle’s corpuscular philosophy is well known as having provided a via media between Cartesianism and atomism, yet it seems that he shared some relevant tenets of Gassendi’s philosophy, namely voluntarism, empiricism, and probabilism. Boyle adopted a voluntarist theology that had much in common with the theology of Gassendi, as they both emphasized God’s omnipotence and the contingency of natural phenomena.100 Boyle ruled out intermediate agents between God and the physical world, and shared the French philosopher’s arguments against the Neoplatonic anima mundi; God created the world and maintained it with his general concourse without the assistance of a “vice-gerent.”101 For Boyle, God’s concourse is necessary to the conservation and efficacy of every particular physical agent, we cannot but acknowledge, that, by with-holding his

“The Best Philosopher in France”  351 concourse or changing these Laws of Motion, which depend perfectly upon his Will, he may invalidate most, if not all the Axioms and Theorems of natural philosophy[...].102 An influential advocate of the experimental philosophy, Boyle imposed restrictions on the heuristic power of scientific theories. The utmost that naturalists “can attain to in their explications,” he maintained is that the explicated phenomena may be produced after such a manner as they deliver, but not that they really are so… It is a very easy mistake for men to conclude, that because an effect may be produced by some determinate causes, it must be so, or actually is so.103 He went on to provide a picture of Epicurus as a philosopher who opposed dogmatism and who, unlike some modern naturalists, refrained from pretending “to know the true and adequate cause of things.” Boyle argued that Epicurus himself, as appears by ancient testimony and by his own writings, was more modest, not onely contenting himself, on many occasions, to propose several possible ways whereby a phaenomenon may be accounted for, but sometimes seeming to dislike the so pitching upon any one explication, as to exclude and reject all others. Finally, referring to Epicurus’ followers (i.e., Gassendi), Boyle stated that “Some modern philosophers that much favour his doctrine, do likewise imitate his example, in pretending to assign not precisely the true, but possible cause of the phenomenon they endeavour to explain.”104 He shared Gassendi’s critique of Descartes’ view of final causes, arguing that, although the human intellect was not able to achieve a complete understanding of God’s ends in the Creation, yet the investigation of final causes might be conducive to an understanding of God as Creator and governor of the universe.105 Following a well-established tradition—that included Gassendi—Boyle pointed out that anatomy revealed God’s ends, as attested by the admirable structure of the eye and by the use of the valves in the veins for blood circulation.106 Despite there being several points of agreement in some crucial aspects of his and Gassendi’s philosophy, Boyle opposed the Frenchman’s version of atomism, and particularly his view of self-moving atoms. At an early stage of his intellectual career (ca. 1650–1651), Boyle wrote a tract entitled “Of the Atomicall Philosophy” where he eulogized Gassendi as a restorer of atomism—a philosophy he unreservedly espoused.107 Boyle maintained that “most of the phenomena of Nature doe seeme to evince the being of Atomes” and stressed that atoms were to be conceived as units of matter, not as “mathematicall points.” Like Gassendi, Boyle

352  Antonio Clericuzio found evidence for the existence of atoms from the subtlest effluvia “issuing out of all bodyes.”108 A later annotation on the first page of Boyle’s tract reads “These Papers are without fayle to be burn’t,” testifying to the author’s second thoughts on atomism, and in particular on Epicurus’ doctrine of atoms. Boyle articulated his criticism of Epicurus’ philosophy in the fourth and fifth essays of The Usefulnesse Part I, possibly written in about 1653. In his critique of Epicurus, Boyle resorted to Gassendi’s (and Charleton’s) arguments but he took issue with the Atomists’ doctrine of self-moving atoms and unambiguously rejected Gassendi’s view (as contained in Animadversiones) that matter was active.109 Yet, in Syntagma philosophicum Gassendi wrote that human intellect was unable to give definitive answer to the origin of atoms’ motion.110 God—Boyle stated— impressed motion on to matter and guided it in order to produce the universe. Following Descartes, he declared “Motion is no way necessary to the essence of matter, which seems to consist principally in extension.”111 Boyle unambiguously opposed the doctrine of self-moving atoms while he became increasingly concerned with the influence of Epicureanism in England. As he put it in The Excellence of Theology (1674), Epicurus “has nowadays so numerous a sect of naturalists to follow him.”112 Boyle attributed to the Epicureans the theory that atoms have, flowing immediately from matter, “emanative” attributes such as gravity or internal power.113 Belief in the activity of matter was in fact not uncommon among Fellows of the Royal Society. In 1664 Henry Power, who provided experimental evidence for the existence of the vacuum, declared that the origin of motion was “one of the obscurest things in nature.” Nonetheless, he did not refrain from claiming that matter was active: the minute particles of most (if not all) bodies are constantly in some kind of motion, and that motion may be both invisibly and unintelligibly slow, as well as swift and probably is as inseparable an attribute to bodies, as well as extension is.114 Robert Hooke explicitly endorsed the Epicurean doctrine of self-moving atoms in a letter to Robert Boyle of July 1662: For my first hypothesis being Epicurean, supposes first an internall motion in the particles of bodyes especially of such as are fluid (a principle generally granted by that Sect) which therefore though it may be retarded by the occursion of other bodys, either contrarily moved or at rest, yet those impediments are noe sooner remov’d, then the freed particles begin again their naturall and congenite motion […].115 Finally, in the paper he read at the Royal Society in 1674, William Petty contended that atoms were endowed with gravity and attractive power.116

“The Best Philosopher in France”  353 Though Boyle criticized the doctrine of active mater, he nevertheless recognized that experimental evidence had shown that corpuscles of metals, of glass and even of diamonds have some “intestine motion.” He rejected the Epicurean view of the “innate mobility” of atoms, yet he engaged in an elaborate hypothesis concerning the motion of corpuscles. He wrote that “some of the bodies which we think to have their parts most at rest, are not exempted from having intestine motion in them.”117 Boyle’s view owed something to Gassendi, who claimed that even most solid bodies have their parts in constant motion. Boyle, however, did not say where the motion of these corpuscles came from.118 The hierarchy of corpuscles played an important part of Boyle’s theory of matter. Boyle explained a number of natural phenomena by recourse to complex corpuscles, that is, primary concretions of corpuscles which, he stated, were rarely broken and remained unchanged in nature.119 Boyle articulated this crucial aspect of his theory of matter as follows: There are also multitudes of corpuscles, which are made up of the coalition of several of the former minima naturalia; and whose bulk is so small, and their adhesion so close and strict, that each of these little primitive concretions or clusters (if I may so call them) of particles is singly below the discernment of sense, and though not absolutely indivisible by nature into the prima naturalia that composed it, or perhaps into other little fragments, yet, for the reasons stated above, they very rarely happened to be actually dissolved or broken, but remained entire in a great variety of sensible bodies, and under various forms or disguises.120 Boyle’s doctrine of complex corpuscles is evidently a legacy of Gassendi’s concept of molecule, which the French philosopher adopted to bridge the gap between the mechanical affections of atoms and the sensible qualities of res concretae.121 As we have seen, Gassendi saw moleculae as the proximate constituents of the chemical principles, as well as of metals.122 Boyle, who rejected the chemists’ doctrine of principles on the basis of experimental evidence, followed Gassendi’s view by stating that the chemical principles were no simple substances but primary concretions of simple corpuscles: The chemist’s salt, sulphur, and mercury themselves are not the first and most simple principles of bodies, but rather primary concretions of corpuscles, or particles more simple than they, as being endowed with the first, or most radical, (if I may so speak) and most catholic affections of simple bodies, namely, bulk, shape and motion, or rest; by the different conventions or coalitions of which minutest portions of matter are made those differing concretions that chemists name salt, sulphur, and mercury.123

354  Antonio Clericuzio Gassendi’s legacy becomes conspicuous if we consider Boyle’s investigations into topics like firmness and fluidity, cold, colors, and generation. “The History of Fluidity and Firmness” (published in Certain Physiological Essays) is mainly devoted to the experimental investigations of fluidity and firmness, yet, in the opening section, Boyle articulated the corpuscular explanation underlying his experiments. Following the atomists’ account, namely that of Gassendi, he argued that a body seems to be fluid, chiefly upon this account, that it consists of corpuscles that touching one another in some parts only of their surfaces (and so being incontiguous in the rest), and separately agitated to and fro, can by reason of the numerous pores or spaces necessary left betwixt their incontiguous parts, easily glide along each other superficies […].124 Like Gassendi, Boyle took into consideration Lucretius’ views as expressed in De rerum natura, II, 451–454, and corrected Lucretius by arguing that, besides spherical corpuscles, other shapes of particles may account for fluidity. Boyle downplayed the role of particles’ shapes, focusing on three other causes of fluidity—tested by his own experimentation—namely, the small size of corpuscles, the occurrence of spaces between particles of matter, and finally the brisk motion of corpuscles.125 For Boyle, as for the atomists, firmness and cohesion depended on “the grossness of parts, the quiet contact, and the implication of the component parts.” However, he did not rule out Descartes’ explanation and added that cohesion might be the outcome of “the bare rest of the small and contiguous parts that make up the firm body.”126 Gassendi’s focus on the textura atomorum provided Boyle with a powerful explanatory notion for an exploration of colors along corpuscular lines. Boyle acknowledged his debt to Gassendi’s explanation of colors as contained in De apparente magnitudine solis, by stating that this “very ingenious person has anticipated part of what I should say.” For Gassendi, “water is not in itself white in colour, but the ray of light reflected by it onto the eye looks white.”127 Boyle agreed with Gassendi on a crucial aspect of the theory of colors, namely that white and black result when light is reflected diversely or absorbed according to the superficial texture of a body. When he dealt with blackness, Boyle resorted again to Gassendi adding that he had wished the French philosopher had enlarged himself upon this subject; for indeed it seems, that as that which makes a body white, is chiefly such a disposition of its parts, that it reflects […] more of the light that falls on it, than bodies of any other colour do, so that which makes a body black is principally a peculiar kind of texture, chiefly of its superficial particles.128

“The Best Philosopher in France”  355 The investigation of cold was an important part of Boyle’s work. He collected observations and conducted numerous experiments that he published in the Experimental History of Cold (1665). Boyle focused on matters of fact and was reluctant to articulate a comprehensive mechanical explanation of cold. As he stated in the Preface, “I found the framing of an [sic] universal and unexceptionable hypothesis of cold, to be a work of greater difficulty, then [sic] every body would imagine.”129 When discussing the received explanations of cold, Boyle followed his usual method of testing theories against experimentally produced matters of fact. This was his approach when looking into the theory of primum frigidum, which Gassendi—among others—had espoused. This doctrine postulated the existence of a distinct substance that, by its own nature, was able to produce cold in other bodies.130 Gassendi maintained that cold was a real and positive quality (qualitas vera & positiva), and he identified niter as the principle of cold, that is, the primum frigidum. For Gassendi, niter (and similar substances) contained the seeds of cold (frigoris semina) made of atomi frigoris, that is, atoms in the shape of tetrahedra; it was their shape that gave them the power of cooling. While Gassendi posited the existence of special atoms to explain cold, this was a view that Boyle rejected by focusing instead on the motion of corpuscles, rather than on their shape.131 Gassendi supported his theory with some empirical evidence, arguing that atoms of niter in snow could pass through the pores of a flask, freezing the water contained therein. This experiment, he stated, was performed in the summertime.132 Notwithstanding the praise Boyle lavished upon “the learned and ingenious Gassendus […] for, according to his custom, he speaks warily, and not confidently of it [i.e., cold]”, yet he pointed out that the Frenchman failed to provide experimental circumstances to adequately support his theory and added that he was “tempted to suspect that the learned man [Gassendi] might be imposed upon [by] others to write that, as matter of fact, which he never had tried.”133 Boyle—who performed a substantial number of experiments with niter—presented several objections to Gassendi’s arguments. First, he argued that the Frenchman did not prove that snow and ice contained corpuscles of niter; secondly, he reported that he had tried many times the experiment of freezing water in summer by dissolving niter in it, but had never succeeded, despite using a substantial amount of niter to the point that the solution became saturated. Thirdly, he found that the volatile part of niter (spirit of niter) dissolved ice in the same way as sea salt. Finally, he claimed that experimental evidence demonstrated that “actual cold might be manifestly promoted, if not generated by the addition of a body that is not actually cold”; in fact, he found that a variety of substances were able to produce cold. Nonetheless, he did not peremptorily reject Gassendi’s view that corpuscles of niter originating from

356  Antonio Clericuzio earth “might be qualified to refrigerate air.”134 Boyle summed up his outlook as follows: having discours’d thus long against the admitting a primum frigidum, I think it not amiss to take notice once more, that my design in playing the sceptick on this subject, is not so much to reject other mens probable opinions, of a primum frigidum, as absolutely false, as 'tis to give an account, why I look upon them, as doubtful.135 Boyle continued his investigations into cold and published two more tracts on the topic, that is, Of the Positive or Privative Nature of Cold (1673) and Of the Mechanical Origin of Heat and Cold (1675). In the latter work, he restated his view of cold as having the nature of a “privation” and articulated a mechanical explanation of cold grounded in kinetic theory, that is, the privation of motion, but he did not deny that some agent could be responsible for cold: “And though its effect, which is coldness, seem a privation or negation; yet, the cause of it may be a positive agent acting mechanically, by clogging the agile calorific particles, or deadening their motion […].”136 As we have seen, Gassendi and Boyle both had recourse to teleology in their investigations of living organisms. When dealing with generation, they integrated the mechanical philosophy with the notion of seminal principles, namely corpuscles endowed with plastic power. It is apparent, however, that their views of seeds diverged in some respects. In Syntagma philosophicum, Gassendi wrote that “nothing forbids to suppose that God chose special atoms (atomos speciales) and interwove with them these seeds and put together the molecules.” Semina, Gassendi stated, were endowed by God with knowledge (scientia) and activity (industria).137 Like Gassendi, Boyle saw semina as having a special status in the Creation, as in the beginning God created the “great Mass of lazy Matter… and seminal Principles of animated Concretions”—seeds being coalitions of simple particles.138 In the fragment of the essay on spontaneous generation, Boyle opposed the view of generation as the outcome of mechanical shuffling of corpuscles and stated that God “made the Protoplasts or first Individualls of each kind of liveing Creatures, and lodg’d the seminall Principles he thought fit in certain portions of matter.”139 Although Boyle never made any explicit pronouncements about his ideas on the generation of living organisms, he seemed to lean toward the preformationism which Gassendi had espoused. This might be deduced from what Boyle wrote in an unpublished essay on spontaneous generation, that is, that “the seminal matter might containe a delineation & epitome of this modell.”140 Boyle did not provide an explanation of the modus operandi of the seminal principles, but we can infer that he did not account for it in strictly mechanical terms, since he distinguished seminal principles from other parcels of matter and added that seminal

“The Best Philosopher in France”  357 principles acted according to a goal established by the Creator. Boyle did not deny that the growth of living organisms was the outcome of matter and motion, and he declared that the ultimate source of the “plastick, or formative power” of seminal principles originated from God.141

13.8 A Newtonian Epilogue Richard Westfall suggested that Newton was likely to have read Gassendi’s works, but he failed to provide any evidence for this.142 One can safely assume that the legacy of Gassendi’s atomism, conveyed by Charleton, contributed to shape Newton’s early investigations into matter and space as contained in his juvenile notebook (“Questiones quaedam Philosophiae,” ca. 1664–1665). The young Newton distinguished the mathematical from the physical continuum, arguing that matter was not infinitely divisible and that “the first matter must be atoms.”143 As the editors of Newton’s notebook put it, Newton endorsed the existence of the vacuum by arguing that “[t]o suppose that there is ‘smaller matter to run in and keep out vacuum’ is to assume that matter is already divided into smaller parts before it is in fact divided: Thus, a vacuum exists, or else there is an infinity of smaller and smaller parts.”144 This is not the place to comment on Newton’s early notebook in detail; suffice to say, it testifies to Newton’s endorsement of the atomistic philosophy and his rejection of the central tenets of Descartes’ philosophy. Gassendian views of matter, motion, and space were adopted by Newton in the manuscript entitled “De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum.” In it, Newton shared Gassendi’s arguments about motion and space, maintained that matter depended on God’s will and emphasized the difference between extension and body.145 The influence on Newton of Gassendi’s thought appears to have become increasingly attenuated in subsequent years. In the Principia, he wrote that the primary particles were endowed with extension, shape, solidity, and inertia, and upheld the idea of the inertial homogeneity of matter. One can only point out that Newton’s conception of the internal structure of matter, as contained in Opticks, showed an echo of Boyle’s notion of compound corpuscles, to which Newton added interstitial empty spaces.146

13.9 Conclusion Gassendi’s impact on British natural philosophers was extensive and multifaceted. In the 1640s, English émigrés in France established contacts with Gassendi and were keen to read his works on Epicurus and on atomism. Information on Gassendi’s work reached England via Mersenne and the Hartlib Circle, as an active member of which the young Robert Boyle became familiar with Gassendi’s writings, including his astronomical investigations. Shortly after publication, Animadversiones aroused much interest among natural philosophers, and his Christianized Epicureanism

358  Antonio Clericuzio provided an impetus for the establishment of the corpuscular philosophy. Walter Charleton’s Physiologia was instrumental in the dissemination of Gassendi’s views and contributed to exonerate the mechanical philosophy from allegations of impiety, by emphasizing the role of divine providence and by ruling out the self-organizing potentialities of matter. What was at issue in the debate on atoms and motion was the activity of matter. As we have seen, Gassendi was ambivalent on this question: whereas in Animadversiones, he affirmed his belief that God endowed atoms with motion, in the Syntagma philosophicum he adopted a more cautious position about the ultimate origin of matter’s activity, claiming that the human intellect was unable to give a definitive answer to this question. Though Boyle expressed his approval for Gassendi’s aim to remove the impious Epicurean doctrines from atomism, he unambiguously declared that matter was inert. Gassendi the empiricist was seen as complementing Bacon’s teachings, since the French philosopher combined the theory of atoms with the investigation of nature based on the direct observation of phenomena. Unlike Descartes, Gassendi did not rule out explanations based on the observable properties of bodies and resorted to the aggregates of atoms, or molecules, as the explanans for a wide range of phenomena. Charleton and Boyle followed this approach and sketched a hierarchy of corpuscles similar to that of the French philosopher. For Boyle, the simplest particles form aggregates of the first order, quite similar to the molecules of Gassendi. This hierarchy of particles was adopted and thoroughly developed by Newton, whose juvenile notebook shows that in an early stage of his career he endorsed Gassendi’s atomism, knowledge of which he likely derived from Charleton’s Physiologia. Like Gassendi and Charleton, Newton attached special importance to interstitial voids in his investigations of the microscopic structure of bodies, which he grounded in the experimental study of the optical properties of bodies. Gassendi’s philosophy, notably his theory of atoms and void, and the notion of moleculae, spurred the young Newton’s rejection of Descartes’ mechanism. Charleton and Boyle adopted Gassendi’s views of generation, namely the theory that God created semina, that is, molecules having the power of organizing matter. As part of his rejection of materialistic doctrines, Boyle opposed the view that generation was the outcome of the mechanical shuffling of corpuscles, stating instead that God created special kinds of corpuscles and endowed them with formative power. It is clear that Gassendi’s impact on English natural philosophy was not confined to matter theory. Gassendi’s astronomical works were very popular in England and his anti-astrological writings were translated into English. His research into mechanics and his views of tides enjoyed favorable reception among mathematicians and philosophers. Finally, Gassendi’s theory that the soul of brutes was corporeal and fiery provided a direct inspiration for Willis’ influential De anima brutorum.

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Notes 1 See Richard W.F. Kroll, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD–London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 85–230; Thomas M. Lennon, The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655–1715 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 63–106. 2 Stephen Clucas, “The Atomism of the Cavendish Circle: A Reappraisal,” The Seventeenth Century 9 (1994): 247–273. 3 It seems that Locke read at least part of Gassendi’s Opera omnia, which are cited in Locke’s commonplace books: see J.R. Milton, “Locke and Descartes,” in Locke and Cartesian Philosophy, eds. Philippe Hamou and Martine Pécharman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 15–32, esp. 20. The literature on the relationship between the philosophies of Gassendi and Locke is huge. I restrict myself to references to Richard W.F. Kroll, “The Question of Locke’s Relation to Gassendi,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984): 339–359; Rolf W. Puster, Britische Gassendi-Rezeption am Beispiel John Lockes (Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: Fromann-Holzboog, 1991); Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 168–197; John R. Milton, “Locke and Gassendi: a Reappraisal,” in English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 87–109. 4 On Stanley, see Kenneth Sheppard, Anti-Atheism in Early Modern England 1580–1720: The Atheist Answered and his Error Confuted (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 102–105; and Dmitri Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 38–54. 5 CM II, 181. See Luca Cafiero, “Robert Fludd e la polemica con Gassendi,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia 19 (1964): 367–410, and ibid., 20 (1965): 3–15; Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy (New York: Science History Publications, 1977), 205–293; William H. Huffman, Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance (London–New York: Routledge, 1988); JeanCharles Darmon, “Quelques enjeux épistémologiques de la querelle entre Gassendi et Fludd: les clairs-obscurs de l’Âme du monde,” in Aspects de la tradition alchimique au XVIIe siècle, ed. Franck Greiner (Paris: S.É.H.A./ Milano: Archè, 1998), 63–84. See also Mehl’s chapter in this volume. 6 TL, 208. 7 Gassendi, Examen de la philosophie de Robert Fludd, ed. and trans. Sylvie Taussig (Paris: S.É.H.A./ Milano: Archè, 2016), 137–139; TL, 208. In his answer to Gassendi, Fludd questioned Gassendi’s supposed observation of the intraventricular pores. Fludd wrote that he had seen Harvey searching in vain for the pores in a number of dissections of corpses: Robert Fludd, Clavis philosophiae et alchymiae fluddanae… (Francofurti: Apud Guilhelmum Fitzerum, 1633), 33; Allen G. Debus, “Harvey and Fludd: The Irrational Factor in the Rational Science of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the History of Biology 3 (1970): 81–105; Roger French, William Harvey’s Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 125. 8 Gassendi articulated his views of Harvey’s theory of blood circulation in the anonymous Discours sceptique sur le passage du chyle et sur le mouvement du cœur (A Leyde: De l’Imprimerie de Jean Maire, 1648) signed S.S., which was identified by Jean Riolan as the work of Gassendi. For Gassendi, medicine was entirely conjectural and was not able to understand the causes of phenomena (Discours, 55–56); see French, Harvey, 328–336.

360  Antonio Clericuzio 9 CM IV, 336. 10 For Gassendi’s references to Francis Bacon, see Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 62–65 (‘Logica Verulamii’). 11 The letter was published, apparently incomplete, with title of Ad librum D. Edoardi Herberti, De veritate Epistola singularis, in OO III, 411–419. On Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury see Richard W. Serjeantson, “Herbert of Cherbury before Deism: The Early Reception of the De Veritate,” The Seventeenth Century 16/2 (2001): 217–238. It would seem that Herbert read Gassendi’s letter when they met in Paris in 1647. 12 Hartlib, “Ephemerides” 1635–1636: Hartlib Papers (hereafter: HP) 29/3/64a, https://www.dhi.ac.uk/hartlib/view?docset=main&docname=29_ 03_50. 13 CM VIII, 639. On 23 November 1640, Mersenne wrote to Haak: “Quant à Monsieur Gassend, qui devoit estre icy pour faire imprimer le gros Volume de la Vie de Monsieur de Peiresc, il est encore en Provence, et sa Philosophie d'Atomes Epicuriens est à mon advis achevé(e), ou peu s’en faut,” CM XI, 419–424; see also HP 18/2/3a–b. 14 Mersenne to Haak, 13 December 1640, HP 18/2/31a and 20 January 1640, 18/2/12b. 15 Smith to Hartlib, 3 September 1651, HP 15/6/25a; see Anthony Turner, “Paris–London: Empirical Philosophy, Invention and the Hartlib Circle,” Artefact: Techniques, histoire et sciences humaines 7 (2017): 123–150. 16 As we read in the ‘Epistle dedicatory,’ Rand undertook the translation at the suggestion of Benjamin Worsley and Samuel Hartlib. Rand stated that ten years had passed since Hartlib “put the Latine book into my hand.” Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility, Being the Life of the Renowned Nicolaus Claudius Fabricius, Lord of Pieresk, Englished by W. Rand (London: J. Streater for Humphrey Moseley, 1657), sig. A3r. On Rand, see Charles Webster, The Great Instauration (London: Duckworth, 1975), 37, 301, and Oxford Dictionary of National Bibliography, s.v.: https://doi. org/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.107620. 17 On the so-called Newcastle Circle, or rather the Newcastle entourage, see Robert H. Kargon, Atomism in England From Hariot to Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 63–76 and Timothy Raylor, “Newcastle’s Ghosts: Robert Payne, Ben Jonson, and the ‘Cavendish’s Circle,’” in Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England, eds. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, MO–London: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 92–114. On Gassendi’s Life of Peiresc, see Lynn Sumida Joy, Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 41–65. 18 John Pell to Charles Cavendish, 7/17 September 1644. Antonius Maria Schyrleus de Rheita, Novem stellae circa Jovem visae,… et de eisdem P. Gassendi judicium (Parisiis: Apud Sebastianum Cramoisy, 1643). Pell evidently read the manuscript before it was sent to the press. Though Pell dismissed Rheita’s claims, he did not subscribe to Gassendi’s arguments against the Capuchin; see Noel Malcolm and Jacqueline Stedall, John Pell (1611– 1685) and His Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish: The Mental World of an Early Modern Mathematician (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 97–98, 355, 373–376. 19 Gassendi, Institutio astronomica, juxta hypotheses tam Veterum quam Recentiorum: cui accesserunt Galilei Galilei Nuntius Sidereus, et Johannis Kepleri Dioptrice (Londini: Typis Jacobi Flesher, prostant apud Gulielmum Morden, 1653). The third edition was issued in London in 1683. On Gassendi’s Institutio and its impact, see Isabelle Pantin, “L’Institutio astronomica de

“The Best Philosopher in France”  361 Pierre Gassendi et la vulgarisation des arguments coperniciens après la condamnation de Galilée,” Galilæana: Journal of Galilean Studies 9 (2012): 65–90. 20 Boyle to Hartlib, 8 May 1647; see The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, eds. Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio and Lawrence M. Principe, 6 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), I, 60. 21 Boyle, The Usefulnesse, Part I (1663), in The Works of Robert Boyle, eds. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, 14 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999–2000), III, 220–221 (hereafter: Boyle, Works). For the date of composition of Part I of The Usefulness, see ibid., xix (editors’ introductory notes) and 195. Boyle’s references are to Gassendi, Institutio astronomica (Parisiis: Apud Ludovicum de Heuqueville, 1647), 127–134 and 205–209. The section of the Institutio astronomica containing Gassendi’s refutation of astrology was translated into English as The Vanity of Judiciary Astrology (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1659); see Antonia LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 14–16. 22 Cavendish to Pell 10/20 October 1644 and 10/20 December 1644, Malcolm and Stedall, John Pell, 382, 395. 23 Sorbière to Hobbes, late September 1646, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, repr. 1997), (hereafter: CH), I, 136–137. The manuscripts referred to by Sorbière survive in the Bibliothèque municipale, Tours, MSS 707, 709, 710 and were published in Animadversiones and in the ‘Physica’ of the Syntagma philosophicum; see Bernard Rochot, Les Travaux de Gassendi sur Épicure et sur l’atomisme 1619–1658 (Paris: Vrin, 1944), 75–83. 24 CH I, 142–143. 25 Cavendish’s letter to Petty 7/17 April 1648. HP 8/29/1a. On 9 May 1648 Hartlib forwarded to Robert Boyle the above-quoted section of Cavendish’s letter to Petty (The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, vol. I, 66). 26 Hobbes to Gassendi, 12/22 September 1649, CH I, 178–179. 27 Pell to Cavendish, 16/26 May 1650, Malcolm and Stedall, John Pell, 557. 28 W. N. Clarke, “Illustrations of the State of the Church during the Great Rebellion,” The Theologian and Ecclesiastic 6 (1848): 170–174, 171. Cavendish to Pell, 27 August/6 September 1650, Malcolm and Stedall, John Pell, 562. 29 Walter Charleton, The Darkness of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature: A Physico-theologicall Treatise (London: J.F. for W. Lee, 1652), “Advertisement to the reader,” unpaginated. 30 The Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri was issued in London: Gassendi, Institutio logica, et philosophiae Epicuri syntagma (Londini: Ex officina Rogeri Danielis, 1660). The demand was evidently sufficient to warrant the printing of a second edition in 1668. 31 HP 31/1/78a, undated, but possibly 1658; see Webster, The Great Instauration, 230. 32 John Webster, Academiarum examen (London: Giles Calvert, 1654), 35, 78: What shall I say of the Epicuraean Philosophy, brought to light, illustrated and compleated by the labour of that general Scholar Petrus Gassendus? Surely if it be rightly examined, it will prove a more perfect, and sound piece, than any the Schools ever had, or followed. 33 Seth Ward, Vindiciae academiarum (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield for Thomas Robinson, 1654), 33; see Allen G. Debus, Science and Education in the

362  Antonio Clericuzio Seventeenth Century: The Webster-Ward Debate (London: Macdonald, 1970), 226–227, and Kroll, The Material Word, 201. 34 Seth Ward and John Wilkins, “An Appendix Concerning what Mr Hobbs and Mr Dell have written touching the Universities,” in Vindiciae academiarum, separate pagination, 53. 35 Thomas Hobbes, Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematiques… (London: Printed by J.M. for Andrew Crook, 1656), 58, reprinted in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. William Molesworth, 11 vols. (London: John Bohn-Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1839–45), VII, 340–341. And for Gassendus, and Sir Kenelm Digby, it is manifest by their writings, that their opinions are not different from that of Epicurus, which is very different from mine. Or if these two, or any of those I conversed with at Paris, had prevented me in publishing my own doctrine, yet since it was there known, and declared for mine by Mersennus in the preface to his Ballistica (of which the three first leaves are employed wholly in the setting forth of my opinion concerning sense, and the rest of the faculties of the soul) they ought not therefore to be said to have found it out before me. On the quarrel between Hobbes and Ward, see Jan Prins, “Ward’s Polemic with Hobbes on the Sources of his Optical Theories,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 46 (1993): 195–224. 36 In the 1670s the Bodleian Library owned 15 works of Gassendi; see Robert G. Frank, Jr., Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists: A Study of Scientific Ideas (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 46, 58. See also Webster, The Great Instauration, 134; Mordechai Feingold, “The Mathematical Sciences and New Philosophies,” in The History of the University of Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2000), 8 vols., IV: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (1997), 405–413. 37 The Correspondence of John Wallis (1616–1703), vol. I (1641–1659), eds. Philip Beeley and Christoph J. Scriba (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 127–128, 137–138, 161–163. 38 Philosophical Transactions 16 (6 August 1666): 263–289, at 287. For the theories of Gassendi and Wallis on tides, see Wallace Hooper, “SeventeenthCentury Theories of the Tides as a Gauge of Scientific Change,” in The Reception of the Galilean Science of Motion in Seventeenth-Century Europe, eds. Carla Rita Palmerino and J.M.M. Hans Thijssen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), 199–242. 39 See Antonio Clericuzio, “Gassendi, Charleton and Boyle on Matter and Motion,” in Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories, eds. Christoph Lüthy, John E. Murdoch, and William Newman (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 467–482, esp. 473–476. 40 Nathaniel Highmore, The History of Generation. Examining the Several Opinions of Divers Authors, Especially That of Sir Kenelm Digby (London: Printed by R.N. for John Martin, and are to be sold at the Bell in S. Pauls Churchyard, 1651). See Frank, Harvey, 97–101; Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, Principles and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 88–89. 41 Thomas Warton, The Life and Literary Remains of Ralph Bathurst (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1761), 174, 199–200. Gassendi’s observations on the respiration of fishes are to be found in the section of Animadversiones, devoted to the Torricellian experiment (Gassendi, Animadversiones, 430–431). Following Gassendi, Bathurst explained, in terms of motion, the common experience that when one exhales air through a narrow opening of the

“The Best Philosopher in France”  363 mouth it is cold, whereas if one breathes out air with the mouth open, it is warm; see Warton, Life, 178 and Gassendi, Animadversiones, 329. 42 Bathurst, “Tres Quaestiones” in Warton, Life, 230–232. Cf. Gassendi, Animadversiones, Appendix, xl–xli (the Appendix is printed in the Animadversiones, following “Meteorologia Epicuri,” and bears separate pagination); see also Syntagma philosophicum, “Physica,” OO II, 298. Gassendi’s views of gastric digestion are evidently indebted to Jan Baptist Van Helmont; see Antonio Clericuzio, “Mechanism and Chemical Medicine in 17th-century England: Boyle’s Investigation of Ferments and Fermentation,” in Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy, eds. Peter Distelzweig, Benjamin Goldberg, and Evan Ragland (Dordrecht: Springer: 2016), 271–294. 43 Thomas Willis, De fermentatione, in Diatribae duae (London: Typis Tho. Roycroft…, 1660), 4, English translation in Practice of Physick… (London: printed for T. Dring, C. Harper, and J. Leigh, 1681), 2. For Willis’ theory of matter, see Clericuzio, Elements, 100–101. For Gassendi’s rejection of occult qualities and the action at-a-distance, see OO I, 450a. 44 Thomas Willis, De anima brutorum quae hominis vitalis ac sensitiva est: exercitationes duae (Londini: Prostant apud Gulielm. Wells & Robertum Scott, 1672), English translation: Thomas Willis, Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes (London: Thomas Dring, 1683), 33. For Gassendi’s active matter, see Animadversiones, 446 and Philosophiae Epicuri syntagma, OO III, 19b: “Neque enim absurdum est facere materiam actuosam; absurdum potius facere inertem; quoniam qui talem faciunt, et ex ipsa tamen fieri omnia volunt, dicere non possunt, unde ea, quae fiunt, suam efficiendi vim habeant…”. Cf. Olivier René Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi. Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 213–215. 45 Willis, Practice of Physick, 9; see Gassendi, Animadversiones, 1052–1070 (“De Meteorologia Epicuri’). For Gassendi and chemistry, see Clericuzio, Elements, 63–74. 46 Kenneth Dewhurst, Thomas Willis’ Oxford Lectures (Oxford: Sandford Publications, 1980); Robert G. Frank, “Thomas Willis and His Circle: Brain and Mind in Seventeenth-Century Medicine,” in The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought: Clark Library Lectures 1985–1986, ed. G.S. Rousseau (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 107–146; John P. Wright, “Locke, Willis, and the SeventeenthCentury Epicurean Soul,” in Atoms, Pneuma and Tranquility: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 239–258. 47 Willis, Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, 1. 48 Ibid., ‘Preface to the reader,’ sig. A4r and 4. According to Gassendi, “Vita est quasi praesentia animae in corpore, et mors quasi eius absentia […],” Syntagma philosophicum, OO II, 250. Gassendi distinguished Anima, that is, the corporeal soul, from Animus, the immortal rational soul, see Syntagma philosophicum, OO II, 400–401. 49 Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 155b; II, 250–251 and OO II, 628a: “Anima rationalis immaterialis est; igitur est immortalis”; see LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi, 202–207. 50 Willis, Two Discourses, ‘Preface to the reader,’ sig. A4r. 51 Ibid., 2, 41. For Gassendi, see Syntagma philosophicum, OO II, 412–417. 52 Cudworth’s extensive library included the following works of Gassendi: Disquisitio metaphysica (Amsterodami (sic): Apud Johannem Blaeu, 1644),

364  Antonio Clericuzio De apparente magnitudine solis (Parisiis: Apud Ludovicum de Heuqueville, 1642), De proportione, qua gravia decidentia accelerantur Epistolae tres. (Parisiis: Apud Ludovicum de Heuqueville, 1646), Institutio astronomica (Londini: Typis Jacobi Flesher, prostant apud Gulielmum Morden, bibliopolam Cantabrigiensem, 1653), Exercitationes paradoxicae (Amstelodami: Apud Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1649); see Edward Millington, Bibliotheca Cudworthiana (London: s. n., 1691), 29, 31, 32. For Smith’s library, see John E. Saveson, “The Library of John Smith, the Cambridge Platonist,” Notes and Queries 203 (1958): 215–216; Mordechai Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship: Science, Universities, and Society in England, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 52–53. 53 HP 18/1/36a and HP 18/1/40a–41b; see Charles Webster, “Henry More and Descartes: Some New Sources,” British Journal for the History of Science 4 (1969): 359–377; Alan Gabbey, “Henry More and the limits of mechanism,” in Henry More (1614–1687) Tercentenary Studies, ed. Sarah Hutton (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), 136–157. 54 Henry More, An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godlines (London: J. Flesher, for W. Morden, 1660), “To the reader,” vii. In his sermons and lectures (read before 1650), John Smith (1618–1652), who introduced Descartes in the teaching of philosophy at Cambridge, opposed the view that motion is inherent in matter: John Smith, “A short discourse of atheism,” in Selected Discourses (London: Printed by J. Flesher, for W. Morden, 1660), 48. 55 John Henry, “The Matter of the Soul: Medical Theory and Theology in Seventeenth-Century England,” in The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, eds. Roger French and Andrew Wear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 87–113. For an overview of the debate on the soul of brutes, see Charles T. Wolfe and Michaela van Esveld, “The Material Soul: Strategies for Naturalizing the Soul in an Early Modern Epicurean Context,” in Conjunctions of Mind, Soul and Body from Plato to the Enlightenment, ed. Danijela Kambaskovic (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 371–421. 56 David S. Sytsma, Richard Baxter and the Mechanical Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 191. As shown by Sytsma, Sir Matthew Hale agreed with Baxter’s critique of Willis’ doctrine of the corporeal soul, ibid., 213–214. 57 Robert Boyle Royal Society Papers, vol. 17, fols. 166v–167r, published in Yvette Conry, “Robert Boyle et la doctrine cartésienne des animauxmachines,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 33 (1980): 69–74, at 71. 58 Edward Stillingfleet, Origines sacrae (London: R.W. for Henry Mortlock, 1662), 454–457; see Sytsma, Richard Baxter, 42–43. 59 Antoni Malet, “Isaac Barrow contra la metafísica: dios y la naturaleza del espacio,” in Ciencia y religión en la edad moderna, eds. J. Montesinos and Sergio Toledo (La Orotava: Fundación Canaria Orotava de Historia de la Ciencia, 2007), 95–115, at 106. 60 Dmitri Levitin, “Isaac Newton’s ‘De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum’: Its Purpose in Historical Context,” Annals of Science 78 (2021): 133–161. 61 For Parker’s philosophy, see Arrigo Pacchi, Cartesio in Inghilterra (Bari: Laterza, 1973), 118–140. For Parker’s Tentamina, see Dmitri Levitin, “Rethinking English Physico-theology: Samuel Parker’s Tentamina de Deo (1665),” Early Science and Medicine 19 (2014): 28–75. 62 Samuel Parker, Tentamina physico-theologica de Deo (Londini: Typis A.M., 1665), 32, 403, and idem, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (Oxford: Printed by W. Hall, for Richard Davis, 1666), 44.

“The Best Philosopher in France”  365 63 Parker, Tentamina, 368. 64 Lisa T. Sarasohn, “Motion and Morality: Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes and the Mechanical World-view,” Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985): 363–378, at 370–371; 375. 65 “Omnis actio est motus localis in agente, sicut & omnis passio est motus localis in patiente. Agentis nomine intelligo corpus, cuius motu producitur effectus in alio corpore.” Hobbes, Tractatus opticus I; part of it was published by Mersenne in Universae geometriae mixtaeque mathematicae synopsis (Parisiis: Apud Antonium Bertier, 1644), 567, reprinted in Thomas Hobbes, Opera philosophica quae latine scripsit omnia, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 5 vols. (Londini: Apud Joannem Bohn, 1839–45) (hereafter: OL). Cf. Gianni Paganini, “Le néant et le vide: Les parcours croisés de Gassendi et Hobbes,” in Gassendi et la modernité, ed. Sylvie Taussig (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 177–214. 66 On the authorship of the “Short Tract,” see Timothy Raylor, “Hobbes, Payne, and A Short Tract on First Principles,” The Historical Journal 44 (2001): 29–58, and Noel Malcolm, “Robert Payne, the Hobbes Manuscripts, and the “Short Tract,” in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 80–140. 67 See Gassendi, OO III, 425–426. Cf. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 114. 68 Tractatus opticus I, in OL V, 217–218. Cf. Franco Giudice, “The Most Curious of Sciences: Hobbes’s Optics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Hobbes, eds. Kinch Hoekstra and Aloysius P. Martinich (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 149–168. 69 Tractatus opticus I, in OL V, 218. 70 “…id quod neque fieri potest, neque concipi, nisi concedatur posse dari vacuum, saltem per vim; dari autem vacuum facile est imaginari.” Tractatus opticus II (BL, MS Harley 6796), edited by Franco Alessio, in Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia 18 (1963): 148. In the answer to Thomas White’s De mundo (1642), Hobbes argued that the Sun expanded and contracted, and this movement generated light—a motion that would be impossible if all spaces were filled with bodies; see Hobbes, Critique du De mundo de Thomas White, eds. Jean Jacquot and Harold W. Jones (Paris: Vrin, 1973), chapter ix, § 2, 161. 71 CH I, 167. 72 Ibid., 173. 73 Thomas Hobbes, De corpore, chapter xxvi, § 2 (Engl. trans.: Elements of Philosophy, the First Section, Concerning Body, (London: Printed by R. & W. Leybourn for Andrew Crooke, 1656), 309). Cf. Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 90. 74 CH I, 445. 75 De corpore, chapter xxvi, § 3 (Engl. trans.: Elements of Philosophy the First Section, Concerning Body, 312). 76 OL IV, 281; 286, English translation in Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan, 385–386; 390. 77 Kenelm Digby, Two Treatises (Paris: Gilles Blaizot, 1644), 154–156. On Digby’s theory of matter, see Betty J.T. Dobbs, “Studies in the Natural Philosophy of Sir Kenelm Digby,” Ambix 18 (1971): 1–25; Ambix 20 (1973): 143–163; Ambix 21 (1974): 1–28; John Henry, “Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher,” in Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, eds. Graham A.J. Rogers, Tom Sorrell, and Jill Kraye (London–New York: Routledge, 2010), 43–75; Han Thomas Adriaenssen and Sander de

366  Antonio Clericuzio Boer, “Between Atoms and Forms: Natural Philosophy and Metaphysics in Kenelm Digby,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 57 (2019): 57–80. 78 Digby, Two Treatises, 20–38. 79 Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 247a. Digby disagreed with Gassendi on the explanation of solubility in terms of size and shape of water pores; see Digby, Two Treatises, 154–156. Gassendi’s theory of solubility is in OO II, 39a. 80 For Charleton, see Emily Booth, A Subtle and Mysterious Machine: The Medical World of Walter Charleton (1619–1707) (New York: Springer, 2005). 81 Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 144–148 and Sheppard, Anti-Atheism. 82 Charleton, The Darkness of Atheism, 43. 83 Ibid., 4–5. 84 Ibid., 47. 85 Ibid., 46. 86 Ibid., 47. 87 Ibid., 44. 88 Ibid., 63. For Gassendi’s theory of generation, see LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi, 186–202 and Saul Fisher, “Gassendi’s Atomist Account of Generation and Heredity in Plants and Animals,” Perspectives on Science 11 (2003): 484–512. 89 For a comparison between Gassendi’s Animadversiones and Charleton’s Physiologia, see Sabina Fleitmann, Walter Charleton (1620–1707), “Virtuoso”: Leben und Werk (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986), 416–417. 90 Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana… (London: Tho. Newcomb for Thomas Heath, 1654), 125. 91 Ibid., 297, 306–307, 31–32, 119. 92 Ibid., 426. For Gassendi’s molecular theory, see Clericuzio, Elements, 63–71. 93 Charleton, Physiologia, 432. 94 Ibid., 318–320. For Gassendi’s explanation of fluidity and firmness, see Animadversiones, 333–335. 95 Charleton, Physiologia, 43. 96 John Evelyn, An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus de Rerum Natura (London: G. Bedell and T. Collins, 1656), 123, 172–173. Evelyn refers to Gassendi’s arguments on the origin of the world as contained in Animadversiones, ‘De exortu mundi,’ § 10, 193. 97 Evelyn, An Essay, sig. A8v. Evelyn spelled out his concern about the predictable objections to his publication of Lucretius in a letter to Jeremy Taylor, future Church of Ireland Bishop of Down, dated 27 April 1656; see The Letterbooks of John Evelyn, eds. Douglas Chambers and David Galbraith (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2014), 171. On Evelyn, see Gillian Darley, John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity (New Haven, CT–London: Yale University Press, 2006). 98 Evelyn, Essay, 135–136. 99 Evelyn’s unpublished translations of Books III–VI are to be found in the British Library, Evelyn Collection, MS 34. 100 On Gassendi’s voluntarism, see Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 48–56; 163–166. For God’s absolute power in Gassendi, see Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 307b–309a. 101 For Gassendi’s rejection of the World Soul, see Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 334a. In The Excellency of the Mechanical Hypothesis (1674), Boyle

“The Best Philosopher in France”  367 rejected those “general agents, as the Platonic Soul of the World, or the Universal Spirit,” Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 109. On Anima mundi, see Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 398–418. 102 Reason and Religion (1675), Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 251–252; see also Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, in Works, vol. 10, 457. For Gassendi’s view of God’s ordinary concourse, see Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 494a. 103 The Usefulness, Boyle, Works, vol. 3, 255–256. 104 Ibid., 256. Boyle’s statement disproves Levitin’s thesis that the former opposed Epicurus’ philosophy not because it was impious, but because he saw it as a “dogmatic Atomism;” see Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 380. On Gassendi’s probabilism, see Delphine Bellis, “Nos in Diem Vivimus: Gassendi’s Probabilism and Academic Philosophy from Day to Day,” in Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy, eds. Plínio Junqueira Smith and Sébastien Charles (Cham: Springer, 2017), 125–152. 105 A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things (1688), Boyle, Works, vol. 11, 87–88, 95. For Gassendi’s doctrine of final causes, see Osler, Divine Will, 162. 106 Final Causes, Boyle, Works, vol. 11, 125–130. Gassendi’s arguments to support teleology were grounded in the order of universe and in anatomy; see Disquisitio metaphysica, OO III, 360a–363b. 107 Boyle, “Of the Atomicall Philosophy,” published in Boyle, Works, vol. 13, 225–235 The Atomicall Philosophy invented or brought into request by Democritus, Leucippus, Epicurus, & their Contemporaries, tho since the inundation of Barbarians & Barbarisme expell’d out of the Roman world all but the casually escaping Peripateticke Philosophy, it have been either wholly ignor’d in the European Schooles or mention’d there but as an exploded systeme of Absurdities yet in our lesse partiall & more inquisitive times it is so luckyly reviv’d & so skillfully celebrated in divers parts of Europe by the learned pens of Gassendus, Magnenus, Des Cartes & his disciples our deservedly famous Countryman Sir Kenelme Digby & many other writers. On Boyle’s tract on atoms, see Antonio Clericuzio, “A Redefinition of Boyle’s Chemistry and Corpuscular Philosophy,” Annals of Science 47 (1990): 561– 589, at 568–571. 108 Boyle, Works, vol. 13, 227–229; see Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 132a. 109 Gassendi, Animadversiones, 446; Syntagma Epicuri philosophiae, OO III, 19b. Boyle questioned the activity of matter, not a supposed Epicurean reductionism, as claimed by Dmitri Levitin, “The Experimentalist as Humanist: Robert Boyle on the History of Philosophy,” Annals of science 71 (2014): 148–182, at 162–163. 110 Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 275b. 111 The Usefulness, Boyle, Works, vol. 3, 252–253. Boyle reassessed this view in The Origin of Forms and Qualities (1666), Boyle, Works, vol. 5, 306. Stillingfleet endorsed Boyle’s arguments against the Epicureans on the origin of motion, Origines sacrae, 455–458. 112 Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 48. In this work, Boyle praised Gassendi’s translation of Epicurus’ life. For the association of modern libertines with Epicurus’ philosophy, see Reason and Religion (1675), Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 237.

368  Antonio Clericuzio 113 Robert Boyle, Royal Society, BP 2: fol. 4; see John J. MacIntosh, Robert Boyle on Atheism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 339–340. 114 Henry Power, Experimental Philosophy (London: T. Roycroft, for John Martin and James Allestry, 1664), ‘Preface’ sig. b. 3v-c2r. 115 The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 2001, vol. 2, 29. 116 William Petty, Discourse Made Before the Royal Society the 26 of November, 1674, Concerning the Use of Duplicate Proportion in Sundry Important Particulars Together with a New Hypothesis of Springing or Elastique Motions (London: John Martyn, 1674), 121–135. Petty’s Discourse was attacked by Thomas Barlow (who in 1675 became Bishop of Lincoln) as impious. Barlow saw Gassendi’s atomism as the blueprint of Petty’s selfmoving atoms; see William Petty, On the Order of Nature: An Unpublished Manuscript Treatise, ed. Rhodri Lewis (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012), 1–9. 117 Of Absolute Rest in Bodies, Appendix to the second edition of Certain Physiological Essays (1669), Boyle, Works, vol. 6, 193–199. 118 Gassendi, Animadversiones, 217–218, and Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 277a Difficultas forte esse potest de solidis illis concretionibus, intra quas omnia videntur se quam-pacatissime habere: Verum dici potest esse in illis quoque motus aliquos intestinos, qui utcunque sensui non pateant, arguantur tamen ex eo, quod nullum sit corpus adeo compactum, quod, seclusa etiam extrinseca causa, non habeat in se cur exsolvi possit, subireque interitum; cum id aliunde esse non possit, quam quia huiuscemodi corpus contextum est ex iis principiis, quae quiete nunquam se habeant, sed sint in perpetuo quasi emergendi conatu. 119 Clericuzio, Elements, 122–125 and William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 190–215. 120 Boyle, Works, vol. 5, 326; see also About the Excellency and Grounds of the Mechanical Hypothesis (1674), Works, vol. 8, 113. 121 Cf. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 282b: “Heinc ex atomis conformari primum moleculas quasdam inter se diversas, quae sint semina rerum diversarum.” 122 Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 472 a: “Huiusmodi moleculas esse quasi proxima, immediataque principia ignis, aquae & rerum magis simplicium, cuiusmodi Chymicorum quoque elementa, Sal, Sulphur, Mercurius & similia dici.” 123 Discourse of the Imperfection of the Chemists’s Doctrine of Qualities (1675), Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 401. 124 Certain Physiological Essays, Boyle, Works, vol. 2, 120. Cf. Gassendi, Animadversiones, 333–334. 125 Certain Physiological Essays, Boyle, Works, vol. 2, 120–131; Gassendi, Animadversiones, 334–335. Boyle’s reliance on Gassendi is confirmed by the fact that, like the French philosopher, he quoted from De rerum natura, II, verses 451–454 omitting verse 453. 126 Certain Physiological Essays, Boyle, Works, vol. 2, 150–151. Boyle cast doubts on the Atomists’ insistence on the shape of atoms as an explanation of cohesion; see ibid., 167. Cf. Gassendi, Animadversiones, 335. 127 Gassendi, De apparente magnitudine solis, Epistola secunda, § 45, OO III, 432a; Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours first occasionally written, among some other essays to a friend, and now suffer’d to come

“The Best Philosopher in France”  369 abroad as the beginning of an experimental history of colours (1664), Boyle, Works, vol. 4, 61–62. 128 Ibid., Works, vol. 4, 70–71. 129 New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold, or an Experimental History of Cold (1665), Boyle, Works, vol. 4, 221–222. 130 See Christiana Christopoulou, “Early Modern History of Cold: Robert Boyle and the Emergence of a New Experimental Field in Seventeenth Century Experimental Philosophy,” in History of Artificial Cold: Scientific, Technological and Cultural Issues, ed. Kostas Gavroglu (Dordrecht: Springer 2014), 21–51. 131 Gassendi, Animadversiones, 324–331 and Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 399b–401b. 132 Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 400a. 133 New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold, or, an Experimental History of Cold Begun, Boyle, Works, vol. 4, 376–377. 134 Ibid., 378–380. 135 Ibid., 381. 136 Of the Mechanical Origin of Heat and Cold, Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 341. 137 Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, OO I, 280b and 493b. For Gassendi’s semina, see Hiro Hirai, Le Concept de semence dans les théories de la matière à la Renaissance: de Marsile Ficin à Pierre Gassendi (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 463–491. 138 The Usefulness, Boyle, Works, vol. 3, 253; 245–246. 139 “Essay on Spontaneous generation,” Boyle, Works, vol. 13, 287. For Boyle’s view of spontaneous generation, see Peter Anstey, “Boyle on Seminal Principles,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 33 (2002): 597–630. 140 “Essay on Spontaneous generation,” Boyle, Works, vol. 13, 278; see also High Veneration, Boyle, Works, vol. 10, 172. 141 The Christian Virtuoso, Boyle, Works, vol. 12, 444. 142 Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 89. 143 Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton’s Trinity Notebook, eds. J.E. McGuire and Martin Tamny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 341. For Newton’s debts to Charleton’s views of matter, space, and motion, see ibid., 26–43, 213–215. 144 Ibid., 45. 145 MS Add. 4003, published in Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, eds. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 90–121, English translation, 121–156. For the date of Newton’s manuscript see J. A. Ruffner, “Newton’s ‘De Gravitatione’: A Review and Reassessment.” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 66 (2012): 241–264. Levitin convincingly argued that Newton’s view of space as contained in “De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum” was at odds with Henry More’s, being “simply a reformulation of the basic ‘container’ view espoused by Gassendi and Barrow,” see Levitin, “Isaac Newton’s ‘De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum,’” 20. 146 See Arnold Thackray, Atoms and Powers: An Essay on Newtonian MatterTheory and the Development of Chemistry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 12–26 and William R. Newman, Newton the Alchemist: Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature’s “Secret Fire” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 119–125.

370  Antonio Clericuzio

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374  Antonio Clericuzio Malet, Antoni. “Isaac Barrow contra la metafísica: dios y la naturaleza del espacio.” In Ciencia y religión en la edad moderna, edited by José Montesinos and Sergio Toledo, 95–115. La Orotava: Fundación Canaria Orotava de Historia de la Ciencia, 2007. Mersenne, Marin. Correspondance du Père Marin Mersenne, 18 vols. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1932–1988 (abridged CM). Millington, Edward. Bibliotheca Cudworthiana. London: s. n., 1691. Milton, John R. “Locke and Gassendi: a Reappraisal.” In English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, edited by M. A. Stewart, 87–109. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Milton, John R. “Locke and Descartes.” In Locke and Cartesian Philosophy, edited by Philippe Hamou and Martine Pécharman, 15–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. More, Henry. An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godlines. London: J. Flesher, for W. Morden, 1660. Newman, William R. Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Newman, William R. Newton the Alchemist: Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature’s “Secret Fire.”. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Newton, Isaac. Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, edited by A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962. Newton, Isaac. Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton’s Trinity Notebook, edited by J.E. McGuire and Martin Tamny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Osler, Margaret J. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Paganini, Gianni. “Le néant et le vide. Les parcours croisés de Gassendi et de Hobbes.” In Gassendi et la modernité, edited by Sylvie Taussig, 177–214. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Pantin, Isabelle. “L’Institutio astronomica de Pierre Gassendi et la vulgarisation des arguments coperniciens après la condamnation de Galilée,” Galilæana: Journal of Galilean Studies 9 (2012): 65–90. Parker, Samuel. Tentamina physico-theologica de Deo. Londini: Typis A.M., 1665. Parker, Samuel. A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie. Oxford: W. Hall, for Richard Davis, 1666. de Peiresc, Claude Nicolas Fabri. Lettres de Peiresc publiées par Philippe Tamizey de Larroque, vol. IV. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1893 (abridged TL). Petty, William. Discourse Made Before the Royal Society the 26. of November, 1674, Concerning the Use of Duplicate Proportion in Sundry Important Particulars Together With a New Hypothesis of Springing or Elastique Motions. London: John Martyn, 1674. Petty, William. On the Order of Nature: An Unpublished Manuscript Treatise, ed. Rhodri Lewis. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012. Power, Henry. Experimental Philosophy… London: T. Roycroft, for John Martin and James Allestry, 1664.

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Bibliography

Manuscript Sources of Gassendi’s Works1 Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine: - MS 1832, fols. 205–259: copy of De vita et doctrina Epicuri, books IX-XI (Logic: IX “De canonica dialecticae substituta”; X “De criteriis veritatis generaliter”; XI “De criteriis veritatis specialiter”). Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana: - MS Ashburnham 1237, fols. 1–63: autograph of the Liber prooemialis “De philosophia universe” of the Syntagma philosophicum. - MS Ashburnham 1238, fols. 1–44: autograph of Exercitationes paradoxicae, book II. - MS Ashburnham 1239, fols. 501–575: autograph of De vita et doctrina Epicuri, book XXI (Physics: “De Deo authore et rectore mundi”). London, British Library: - MS Harley 1677, fols. 1–160: copy of De vita et doctrina Epicuri, books VIII-XI (VIII “De philosophia Epicuri universe”; IX “De canonica dialecticae substituta”; X “De criteriis veritatis generaliter”; XI “De criteriis veritatis specialiter”). Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France: - MS NAL 1636, fols. 1–815: autograph of Commentariorum De rebus cœlestis - MS NAL 1636, fols. 817–857: autograph of Manuductio ad theoriam seu partem speculativam musicae. Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale: - MS 706, fols. 1–619: autograph of Logic and sections I and II of Physics of the Syntagma philosophicum. - MS 707, fols. 853–1037: autograph of De vita et doctrina Epicuri, book XXV (Physics: “De Tellure et rebus inanimis”). - MS 708, fols. 1039–1577: autograph of De vita et doctrina Epicuri, unnumbered book (end of Physics on living beings). - MS 709, fols. 147–500: autograph of De vita et doctrina Epicuri, books XII-XX (Physics: XII “De Vniverso, seu natura rerum”; XIII “De atomis”; XIV “De inane, seu loco, et de tempore”; XV “De principiis, seu elementis”; XVI “De caussis, fortuna, & fato”; XVII “De ortu et

378 Bibliography interitu”; XVIII “De motu et mutatione”; XIX “De rerum qualitatibus”; XX “De mundo”). - MS 710, fols. 576–852: autograph of De vita et doctrina Epicuri, books XXII-XXIV (Physics: XXII “De coelo et sideribus”; XXIII “De luce et significatione siderum”; XXIV “De vocatis vulgo meteoris”).

Other Manuscript Sources Grenoble, Bibliothèque Municipale: - MS 4139: documents on Gassendi’s genealogy and biography of Pierre Gassendi by La Poterie. London, British Library: - Evelyn Collection, MS 34: contains Evelyn’s translation of Books III-VI of Lucretius’ De rerum natura. - MS Harley 6796: contains Hobbes’ Tractatus opticus II.

Gassendi’s Printed Works2 Gassendi, Pierre. Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii, qui est De vita, moribus, placitisque Epicuri. Lugduni: Apud Guillelmum Barbier, 1649a. Gassendi, Pierre. Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii, qui est De vita, moribus, placitisque Epicuri. Lugduni: Sumptibus Franscisci Barbier, 1675a. Gassendi, Pierre. Apologia in Jo. Bap. Morini librum, cui titulus Alae Telluris fractae. Epistola IV De motu impresso a motore translato. Una cum tribus Galilaei Epistolis de conciliatione Scripturae S. cum systemate Telluris mobilis. Lugduni: Apud Guillelmum Barbier, 1649b. Gassendi, Pierre. Catalogus rarorum librorum quos ex Oriente nuper advexit et in publica bibliotheca inclytae Leydensis Academiae deposuit…Jacobus Golius. Parisiis: Antonius Vitray, 1630a. Gassendi, Pierre. De apparente magnitudine solis humilis et sublimis. Epistolae quatuor. Parisiis: Apud Ludovicum de Heuqueville, 1642a. Gassendi, Pierre. De motu impresso a motore translato. Epistulae duae. Parisiis: Apud Ludovicum de Heuqueville, 1642b. Gassendi, Pierre. De proportione, qua gravia decidentia accelerantur Epistolae tres. Parisiis: Apud Ludovicum de Heuqueville, 1646. Gassendi, Pierre. De septo cordis pervio observatio in Sever. Pinaei Carnut. De integritatis & corruptionis virginum notis: graviditate item & partu naturali mulierum, opuscula… Lugduni Batavorum: Apud Franciscum Hegerum, 1640, reis. 1641. Gassendi, Pierre. De septo cordis pervio observatio in Sever. Pinaei Carnut. De integritatis & corruptionis virginum notis: graviditate item & partu naturali mulierum, opuscula… Amstelodami: Apud Joannem Ravesteinium, 1663. Gassendi, Pierre. De septo cordis pervio observatio in Sever. Pinaeus … De integritatis & corruptionis virginum notis: de graviditate & partu naturali mulierum…Lugduni Batavorum: Apud Franciscos Hegerum & Hackium, 1639.

Bibliography  379 Gassendi, Pierre. De septo cordis pervio observatio in Sever. Pinaei Carnut. De integritatis & corruptionis virginum notis: graviditate item & partu naturali mulierum, opuscula… Francofurti & Lipsiae: Apud Christophor. Wohlfart, 1690. Gassendi, Pierre. De septo cordis pervio observatio in Sever. Pinaeus de virginitatis notis, graviditate & partu. Ludov. Bonaciolus de conformatione fœtus. Lugduni Batavorum: Apud Franciscum Moyaert, 1650. Gassendi, Pierre. De vita et moribus Epicuri libri octo. Lugduni: Apud Guillelmum Barbier, 1647a. Gassendi, Pierre. De vita et moribus Epicuri libri octo. Hagae Comitum: Apud A. Vlacq, 1656a. Gassendi, Pierre. Discours sceptique sur le passage du chyle et sur le mouvement du cœur. A Leyde: De l’Imprimerie de Jean Maire, 1648 (signed S.S). Gassendi, Pierre. Disquisitio metaphysica: seu dubitationes, et instantiae: Adversus Renati Cartesii Metaphysicam, & Responsa. Amsterodami (sic): Apud Johannem Blaeu, 1644. Gassendi, Pierre. Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre les Aristotéliciens. Edited and translated by Bernard Rochot. Paris: J. Vrin, 1959. Gassendi, Pierre. Epistolica exercitatio, in qua principia philosophiae Roberti Fluddi medici reteguntur. Parisiis: Apud Sebastianum Cramoisy, 1630b. Gassendi, Pierre. Examen de la philosophie de Robert Fludd. Edited and translated by Sylvie Taussig. Paris: S.É.H.A./ Milano: Archè, 2016. Gassendi, Pierre. Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos. In quibus praecipua totius Peripateticae doctrinae fundamenta excutiuntur… Amstelodami: Apud Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1649c. Gassendi, Pierre. Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos. In quibus praecipua totius Peripateticae doctrinae fundamenta excutiuntur… HagaeComitum: Apud Adrianum Vlacq, 1656b. Gassendi, Pierre. Exercitationum paradoxicarum adversus Aristoteleos liber alter. Hagae-Comitum: Apud Adrianum Vlacq., 1659a. Gassendi, Pierre. Exercitationum paradoxicarum adversus Aristoteleos libri septem… Gratianopoli: Ex Typographia Petri Verderii Typog. Regij, 1624. Gassendi, Pierre. Institutio astronomica juxta hypotheseis tam veterum quam Copernici et Tychonis… Parisiis: Apud Ludovicum de Heuqueville, 1647b. Gassendi, Pierre. Institutio astronomica juxta hypotheseis tam veterum quam Copernici & Tychonis… Londini: Typis Eliz. Flesher. Prostant apud Gulielmum Morden, Bibliopolam Cantabrigiensem, 1675b. Gassendi, Pierre, Institutio astronomica, juxta hypotheseis tam veterum quam recentiorum… Londini: Impensis Hen. Dickinson, Bibliop. Cantab., 1683 Gassendi, Pierre. Institutio astronomica juxta hypotheses tam veterum quam Copernici & Tychonis… Hagae-Comitum: Apud Adrianum Vlacq, 1656c. Gassendi, Pierre. Institutio astronomica juxta hypotheses tam veterum quam Copernici & Tychonis… Amstelaedami (sic): Apud Janssonio-Waesbergios, 1680. Gassendi, Pierre. Institutio astronomica juxta hypotheses tam veterum quam Copernici & Tychonis… Cantabrigiae: Ex officina Joann. Hayes, 1702. Gassendi, Pierre. Institutio astronomica juxta hypotheses tam Veterum quam Recentiorum: cui accesserunt Galilei Galilei Nuntius Sidereus, et Johannis Kepleri Dioptrice. Londini: Typis Jacobi Flesher, prostant apud Gulielmum Morden, bibliopolam Cantabrigiensem, 1653.

380 Bibliography Gassendi, Pierre. Institutio astronomica juxta hypotheses tam Veterum quam Recentiorum: cui accesserunt Galilei Galilei Nuntius Sidereus, et Johannis Kepleri Dioptrice. Amsterdami (sic): Typis Jacobi Devalda, 1682. Gassendi, Pierre. Institutio Logica (1658): A Critical Edition with Translation and Introduction. Edited and translated by Howard Jones. Assen: Van Gorcum Limited, 1981. Gassendi, Pierre, Institutio logica, et philosophiæ Epicuri syntagma. Londini: Ex officina Rogeri Danielis, 1660a. Gassendi, Pierre. Institutio logica, et philosophiæ Epicuri syntagma. Londini: Ex officina Johannis Redmayne, 1668. Gassendi, Pierre. La Logique de Carpentras. Edited and translated by Sylvie Taussig. Turnhout: Brepols, 2012. Gassendi, Pierre. “Lettre sur le livre de Lord Édouard Herbert, Anglais, De la vérité.” Introduced and translated by Bernard Rochot. In Actes du congrès du tricentenaire de Pierre Gassendi (4–7 août 1955), edited by Comité du tricentenaire de Gassendi, 251–285. Paris: PUF, 1957. Gassendi, Pierre. Lettres familières à François Luillier pendant l’hiver 1632–1633. Edited by Bernard Rochot. Paris: J. Vrin, 1944. Gassendi, Pierre. Lettres latines. Edited and translated by Sylvie Taussig, 2 vols. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004. Gassendi, Pierre. Logica in quatuor partes distributa. Oxoniae: E Theatro Sheldoniano, 1718a. Gassendi, Pierre. Mercurius in sole visus, et Venus invisa, anno 1631. Pro voto et admonitione Keppleri… Parisiis: Sumptibus Sebastiani Cramoisy, 1632. Gassendi, Pierre. Metaphysica disquisitio anti-Cartesiana… Ultrajecti: Apud Guilielmum van de Water, 1691. Gassendi, Pierre. Notitia ecclesiae Diniensis. Parisiis: Apud Viduam Mathurini Dupuis, 1654a. Gassendi, Pierre. Novem stellae circa Iovem visae. Parisiis: Apud Sebastianum Cramoisy, 1643. Gassendi, Pierre. Opera omnia. 6 vols. Reproduction of 1658 Edition with introduction by Tullio Gregory. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1964. Gassendi, Pierre. Opera omnia in sex tomos divisa. Lugduni: Sumptibus Laurentii Anisson, & Ioan. Bapt. Devenet, 1658. Gassendi, Pierre. Opera omnia in sex tomos divisa curante Nicolao Averanio. Florentiae: Apud Joannem Cajetanum Tartini, & Sanctem Franchi, 1727. Gassendi, Pierre. Oratio inauguralis habita in regio collegio die Novembris XXIII a Petro Gassendo... Parisiis: Apud Ludovicum de Heuqueville, 1645. Gassendi, Pierre. Parhelia, sive soles quatuor, qui circa verum apparuerunt Romae, die XX. mensis martii, anno 1629. Parisiis: Antonius Vitray, 1630c. Gassendi, Pierre. Phaenomenum rarum, et illustre, Romae observatum, 20 Martii, anno 1629. Amstelodami: Apud Hesselum Gerardi, 1629. Gassendi, Pierre. Philosophiae Epicuri syntagma, continens canonicam, physicam, & ethicam… Londini: Ex officina Rogeri Danielis, 1660b. Gassendi, Pierre. Recherches métaphysiques, ou Doutes et instances contre la métaphysique de R. Descartes et ses réponses. Edited and translated by Bernard Rochot. Paris: Vrin, 1962.

Bibliography  381 Gassendi, Pierre. Romanum calendarium compendiosè expositum. Accessit corollarium de romano martyrologio. Parisiis: Apud Viduam Mathurini Dupuis, 1654b. Gassendi, Pierre. Sentimens sur l’eclipse qui doit arriver le 12. du mois d'Aoust prochain. Paris: Antoine Vitré, 1654c. Gassendi, Pierre. Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri, cum refutationibus dogmatum quae contra fidem christianam ab eo asserta sunt… Hagae-Comitis: Ex typographia Adriani Vlacq, 1659b. Gassendi, Pierre. Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri, cum refutationibus dogmatum quae contra fidem christianiam ab eo asserta sunt… Amstelaedami: Apud Janssonio-Waesbergios, 1684. Gassendi, Pierre. The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility, Being the Life of the Renowned Nicolaus Claudius Fabricius, Lord of Peiresk, Senator of the Parliament at Aix. Translated by William Rand. London: J. Streater for Humphrey Moseley, 1657. Gassendi, Pierre. The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi. Translated by Craig B. Brush. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972. Gassendi, Pierre. The Vanity of Judiciary Astrology, or Divination by the Stars… London: Humphrey Moseley, 1659c. Gassendi, Pierre. Tractat, Von der Scheidewand des Hertzens… in Severi Pinaei Carnut Notae virginitats. Oder wahre Kenn-Zeichen von denen Geheimnissen der Jungferschafft… Translated by Christoph Hellwig. Frankfurt: Stöffels Erben, 1718b. Gassendi, Pierre. Tychonis Brahei, Equitis Dani, astronomorum coryphaei vita. Authore Petro Gassendo…Accessit Nicolai Copernici, Georgii Peurbachii, & Ioannis Regiomontani astronomorum celebrium vita. Parisiis: Apud Viduam Mathurini Dupuis, 1654d. Gassendi, Pierre. Tychonis Brahei, Equitis Dani, astronomorum coryphaei vita. Authore Petro Gassendo…Accessit Nicolai Copernici, Georgii Peurbachii, & Ioannis Regiomontani astronomorum celebrium vita. Hagae-Comitum: Ex typographia Adriani Vlacq, 1655a. Gassendi, Pierre. Vie et mœurs d’Épicure. Edited and translated by Sylvie Taussig. Paris: Éditions Alive, 2001. Gassendi, Pierre. Vie et mœurs d’Épicure. Edited and translated by Sylvie Taussig. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2006. Gassendi, Pierre. Viri illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc, senatoris aquisextiensis vita. Parisiis: Sumptibus Sebastiani Cramoisy, 1641. Gassendi, Pierre. Viri illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc, senatoris aquisextiensis vita. Hagae Comitis: Sumptibus Adrianai Vlacq, 1651. Gassendi, Pierre. Viri illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc, senatoris aquisextiensis vita. Hagae-Comitum: Ex typographia Adriani Vlacq, 1655b. Gassendi, Pierre. Viri illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc, senatoris aquisextiensis vita. Quedlinburg: Sumptibus Gottlob Ernesti Strunzii, 1705, reis. 1706, 1708. Gassendi, Pierre. Von der Scheidewand des Hertzens… in L. Christoph von Hellwig, Thur. weyland Med. Pract. in Erffurt Zwey ins teutsche übersetzte Tractate Als Severi Pinaei Von denen wahren Kennzeichen und Geheimnissen Der Jungferschafft… Translated by Christoph Hellwig. Erffurt: Johann Jacob Spieß, 1724.

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Notes 1 We limit ourselves to manuscript works, for Gassendi’s manuscript correspondence is scattered in various libraries (Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine in Carpentras, Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aixen-Provence, Österreischische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, etc.) and no complete inventory has been published yet. 2 We list all of Gassendi’s printed works until 1727 (date of the second and last edition of his Opera omnia), as well as all other posterior editions and translations quoted in this volume.

Index

Pages followed by n refer notes. accident 9, 76, 84, 87, 181, 182, 189n59–189n60, 204, 227, 241–244, 247–249, 253, 256n13, 257n27, 259n65, 259n69, 313 Aenesidemus 79, 90, 94 aggregation (commistio) 93, 94, 110, 117–119, 135n57, 313–314, 319–320, 325–329, 336, 349, 358 Agrippa, Marcus Vipsanius 86, 88, 90, 95, 101n71 air pressure 247 Allen, James 92, 136n78 Ambrose 112 animal soul 10, 317–322, 335–336, 342–345 antiquarianism 2, 5, 106 Arcesilaus 76, 82, 90, 99n38 Aristotelianism 7, 41–42, 49–50, 55–56, 59, 61–65, 65n3, 67n51, 77, 98n13, 106, 113, 126–127, 132, 171, 257n17, 294, 341 Aristotelian(s) 1, 6, 8, 29, 41–49, 52–54, 56, 62–63, 66–67n43, 67n46, 75–76, 78–79, 81, 84, 94–95, 99n28, 100n43, 100n44, 110, 112, 118–119, 121–122, 127–128, 131, 136n83, 193, 216–221, 229, 241–242, 244–245, 247, 250, 256n8, 270, 295–296, 312–313, 319, 321, 324–326, 330n5, 340, 348 Aristotle 2, 9, 24–25, 41–50, 53–57, 59, 61–63, 65n3, 67n46, 68n55, 76, 78, 81, 83, 90–91, 111, 116, 119, 126–127, 152–153, 155–159, 161n12, 215, 217–219, 224, 226, 231, 241–242, 244, 248, 250–251,

253, 255, 258n47, 269, 293, 313, 323, 339 Arnauld, Antoine 8, 101n70, 205, 206, 209, 216 astrology 10, 24, 28, 33, 61, 172, 268, 292, 296–297, 304, 306n24, 337, 358, 361n21 astronomy 1, 8, 10–11, 21–26, 28–31, 33–34, 41, 57–58, 63, 77, 80, 83, 94, 103n105, 129, 173–175, 178–180, 186n36, 193, 217, 262n107, 292–299, 301, 304, 305n5, 334–335, 337–341, 357–358 atom 10–11, 29, 61, 76–77, 92–95, 100n44, 109–111, 115–120, 131, 135n57, 148, 204, 241, 269, 277–279, 283, 287n45, 287– 288n47, 289n55, 295, 301–302, 313–315, 318–321, 326–329, 334, 336, 341–342, 345–353, 355–358, 367n107, 368n116, 368n126 atomism 1, 5, 11, 22, 78, 92–94, 102n92, 106–107, 109, 111–114, 116, 118–120, 125, 130–131, 134n31, 135n57, 135n61, 148, 266–269, 279, 295, 301, 304, 317–318, 321–322, 328, 334–336, 342, 346, 348–354, 357–358, 368n116, 368n126 attraction 203, 247, 272, 274, 276, 280, 282–283, 293, 303, 329, 352 Bacon, Francis 90, 112, 128, 180, 188n56, 226, 335, 337, 340, 358 Bacon, Roger see Roger Bacon Barancy, François de 28

Index  407 Barberini, Maffeo (Pope Urban VIII) 178 Barbier, Guillaume 60 Barrow, Isaac 255n1, 335, 345 Basson, Sébastien 55, 112 Bathurst, Ralph 341–342, 345, 362n41 Baxter, Richard 335, 344, 364n56 Bayle, Pierre 87, 130 Beale, John 340 Beeckman, Isaac 25, 112, 114, 119, 129, 170, 175–176, 179–180, 182, 185n29, 187n49, 188n57 Bellis, Delphine 9, 14n22, 70n108, 102n98, 161n9, 162n25, 257n23, 260n80, 261n100, 305n5, 367n104 Bentham, Jeremy 131 Bernier, François 2, 21, 23, 28, 31, 33, 61–65, 130, 255, 261n88, 269, 279, 326, 336 Bible see Scripture biography 1, 3, 6, 21–24, 31, 33–34, 41, 51, 68n62, 106, 114, 124, 292, 338 Bitaud, Jean 52–53, 55, 78 Bloch, Olivier René 4–5, 70n103, 98n6, 103n123, 106, 113, 124, 126, 137n116, 137n117, 160n2, 209n14, 234n13, 236n76, 248–249, 259n62, 279, 287n47, 288n50, 307n43, 308n53, 320–321, 327, 332n48, 363n44 Bodin, Jean 55 body 7, 9–10, 42, 76–77, 87, 92, 94, 107, 109–111, 117–118, 120, 122, 125–127, 131–132, 135n57, 149–150, 153, 155, 159, 165n64, 175, 179–180, 182, 189n59, 202–207, 231, 241–246, 248–249, 252–255, 256n13, 257n27, 258n29, 261n88, 262n121, 266–270, 272–279, 282, 289n55, 293–296, 299, 303, 312–315, 319, 321–330, 339, 342–343, 346–350, 352–355, 357–358, 365n70 Bonne de Lesdiguières, François de 29 book of nature 83, 298 Boulliau, Ismaël 23, 26–27 Boyle, Robert 11, 139n143, 232, 334–336, 338–339, 341, 345, 347, 350–358, 361n21, 361n25,

366n101, 367n104, 367n107, 367n109, 367n111, 367n112, 368n125, 368n126, 369n139 Brahe, Tycho 11, 30, 83, 173–174, 178, 186n36, 245, 269, 283, 300–301, 304 Brundell, Barry 98n13, 102n92, 119 Bruno, Giordano 112, 245, 258n37 Buffier, Claude 232 Burnyeat, Myles 87 Campanella, Tommaso 36n4, 75, 78, 83, 99n15, 102n91 Canguilhem, Georges 318 canon 1, 12n9, 106–107, 115, 117–121, 128, 130, 132, 221–224, 226–227, 230–232 Canon (ecclesiastical) 24, 35, 41, 43, 50, 171, 178 canonic 29, 96, 114, 161n13, 222, 236n78 Caramuel de Lobkowitz, Juan 28, 35 Carneades 76, 80–81, 90, 155 Carpentras 3, 37n42, 216, 221, 224 Cassini, Giovanni Domenico (Jean-Dominique) 129 Castelli, Benedetto 268 category 42, 45, 79, 203, 218, 242, 244, 249, 256n9, 345 Cavalieri, Bonaventura 274–275 Cavendish, Charles 338–340 Cavendish, Margaret 348 Cavendish, William 338 celestial spheres 250, 292–293, 300 chaos 302 Chapelain, Jean 27, 35 Chapelle, Claude-Emmanuel Luillier 31 Charles I, King of England 27 Charleton, Walter 130, 232, 237n117, 255n2, 259n59, 334–335, 340, 348–350, 352, 357–358, 369n143 Charpentier, Marc-Antoine 55 Charron, Pierre 67n53, 67n55, 78, 98n13 chemistry 114, 118, 195, 203, 246, 302, 308n61, 319, 336, 340, 342–344, 349, 353 Cristina of Lorraine 187n41, 268 Christine of Sweden 29, 33 Church 24, 27, 32, 42, 50–51, 55–56, 63, 112, 120, 125–126, 144–145, 155, 206, 300–301, 304

408 Index Cicero, Marcus Tullius 7, 43, 47, 49, 75, 80, 90–91, 98n12, 99n30, 138n127, 144–150, 155, 157, 160, 161–162n14, 162n25, 164n51, 215, 217 Clarke, Desmond 121 Clave, Etienne de 52–53, 55, 68n69, 78, 320 Clavelin, Maurice 278, 287n41 clear and distinct perception 8, 86, 88, 195–197, 205, 207–209, 211n74 Clericuzio, Antonio 11, 139n143, 363n42, 363n43, 363n45, 366n92, 367n107 Clerselier, Claude 194, 205–207 cogito 85, 87–88, 202–204 cold 220, 313, 330n6, 335, 343, 349, 354–356, 363n41 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 131 continuity 243–244, 267, 274–276, 278–279, 283, 288n51, 357 contractarianism 106, 116, 138n132 Copernicanism (Copernican theory) 28, 42, 61, 83, 100n49, 130, 138n141, 173–174, 177–179, 186n36, 187n46, 256n9, 267– 270, 293, 297, 299–300, 304, 307n43 Copernicus, Nicolaus 1, 21, 30, 92, 102n87, 177, 182, 185n23, 278, 299–300, 341 corpuscles 10–11, 92, 94–95, 97, 112, 125, 135n57, 203–204, 312–315, 317–322, 324–329, 336, 341–344, 346–350, 353–358 correspondence 3, 6, 22–23, 26–27, 29, 33, 58, 113–114, 124, 129, 138n140, 338, 348 corruption 111–112, 136n75, 313, 321 cosmology 9–10, 22, 42, 128, 176, 179, 206–208, 217, 241, 245, 250, 256n9, 262n107, 267–268, 270, 283, 292, 301, 303–304 craftsman’s knowledge 7, 77, 83–84, 324 creation/creatures 4, 9, 77, 84, 93, 102n94, 115–121, 128–130, 135n48, 136n84, 170, 177–178, 180, 189n59, 200–201, 243–243, 250–255, 257n17, 277, 298, 301–302, 315, 321–323, 326, 336, 349–351, 356–358

criterion 8–9, 80, 86, 88, 90, 95–96, 108, 113, 120, 155, 196–197, 216, 218, 222–224, 231, 337 crystal 118–119, 319–321, 326, 329 Cudworth, Ralph 344, 363n52 Curley, Edwin M. 85 Daedalus 50 Dante Alighieri 112 Darmon, Jean-Charles 123–124, 237n101 deduction 78, 88, 123, 225, 227, 229, 231–232, 316, 318, 343 Dee, John 172 degrees of speed 273–276, 279 Democritus 29, 33, 91, 107, 109–112, 134n36, 150, 163n37, 266, 284n5, 314, 324, 367n107 Descartes, René 1–2, 7–8, 22, 27–28, 32, 41, 75, 77, 84–90, 100n57, 100n62, 101n70, 102n91, 112, 115, 119, 126, 128, 145–146, 151–153, 164n43, 176, 182, 187n45, 189n59, 193–209, 216, 226, 232, 236n89, 241, 260n77, 274, 292, 294–295, 297, 301, 312, 315–316, 318, 334–335, 338–339, 341, 344–345, 347– 349, 351–352, 354, 357–358, 364n54 determinism 111, 120, 346 D’Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry (Baron) 131 dialectic/dialectics 8, 44–45, 78, 178, 215–218, 222, 225 Digby, Kenelm 11, 102n91, 338, 340–341, 348, 366n79 dimensions 189n59, 205, 243–244, 252, 254, 278 Diodati, Elia (Élie) 25–26, 337 Diogenes Laertius 3, 29, 82, 84, 99n20, 103n118, 111, 133n4, 184n10, 210n23, 225 dogmatism 7, 10, 47, 49, 51, 56, 75–76, 78–81, 83, 85–86, 89–90, 96, 115, 134n26, 182, 199, 293–296, 304, 351, 367n104 doubt 76–79, 85–90, 96–97, 113, 187n45, 195–196, 198–199, 201–203, 224, 236n74, 261n88, 294–295 doxography 21, 102n92 Du Prat, Abraham 21, 23, 31

Index  409 Duchesneau, François 10, 330n2 Dupuy, Pierre 114, 267, 270 Durandus 44 earth 42, 83, 87, 92, 100n49, 110, 173–175, 178–179, 181, 221, 245, 258n32, 267–268, 272–274, 276–278, 280–283, 293–296, 299–304, 313, 341–342, 356 elements 42, 313–315, 319, 321, 323, 329–330, 342, 348–349 Elzevir, Ludovicus 60, 217 Empedocles 317 empiricism 1, 5–6, 9, 11, 14n35, 75–77, 81–82, 85, 87, 89–91, 94, 96–97, 106, 112, 114, 118, 130–131, 186n37, 216–218, 232, 234n12, 246, 261n100, 292, 301, 304, 312, 334, 336–337, 345, 350, 358 Engelken, Heinrich Askan 232 Epicureanism 1–3, 6–7, 9, 11, 25, 27, 29, 43, 58–61, 63, 70n103, 75–77, 81, 84–85, 92–93, 96, 100n38, 106–132, 144–146, 149–150, 154, 188n56, 216–217, 221–225, 241, 244–245, 248–249, 256n9, 258n30, 259n67, 289n55, 292, 301, 312, 314–315, 322, 327, 334–335, 340, 343–345, 348, 352–353, 357–358, 367n109, 367n111 Epicurus 1–3, 5–9, 22, 25–26, 29, 32–34, 41, 43, 58–59, 83–84, 90–91, 93, 96, 102n98, 103n118, 107, 109, 111, 114–115, 117–121, 123–124, 126, 130–131, 133n2, 134n26, 136n78, 138n141, 144–160, 217, 221–226, 241, 248–250, 255, 256n9, 258n47, 287n45, 287n47, 301, 313, 317, 322, 329, 334–336, 339–340, 342, 344–345, 347–352, 357, 367n104, 367n112 epigenesis 323, 325, 327–328, 330 epistemology 1, 5, 8, 75–76, 78, 80, 84–85, 93, 108–109, 129, 171, 176, 180–182, 209n14, 216, 234n12, 236n76, 253, 300 Erasmus of Rotterdam, Desiderius 78, 112, 125 erudition 1–2, 4, 102n92, 114, 159, 241, 267

essence 8, 76–77, 79, 82, 87–88, 97, 113, 169–170, 181–182, 195, 201–204, 208, 227–228, 272, 320, 352 Estienne, Henri 75 eternity 8–9, 116, 120, 136n75, 145, 176, 199–201, 254, 349 ethics 3, 5, 7, 29, 43, 82, 106, 108–109, 112, 116–117, 120–121, 127, 129–130, 132, 144–152, 156, 217, 345, 348, 350 Evelyn, John 338, 350 existence 8–9, 11, 22, 83–84, 87–89, 91, 93, 95, 102n102, 110, 116, 145, 182, 187n45, 195, 197, 201, 203–204, 206–208, 218–219, 222–224, 241, 244, 246–247, 250–251, 253, 282–283, 293, 302, 326–328, 335–337, 345–348, 350, 352, 355, 357 experience 6, 22, 46, 76, 79, 81, 83–84, 87, 89, 91–92, 95–96, 107–108, 113, 120, 153, 196, 198, 202, 207, 217–218, 220–221, 224, 284n5, 293, 315, 323, 327, 343, 347 experiment 9–11, 26, 31, 35, 51, 55, 76, 79–85, 92, 112, 118–119, 129, 220–221, 234n12, 237n100, 243, 245–247, 253, 266–268, 270, 274–275, 302–303, 312, 319, 335–336, 339–340, 346–347, 350–355, 358 extension 110, 204–206, 243, 252, 254, 352, 357 Faur de Pibrac, Henri du 48–50 fermentation 342 Féronce, Elzear 29 Fesaye, Philibert 24 final causes see teleology Fisher, Saul 5, 7, 77, 93, 98n6, 99n31, 101n84, 102n96, 103n124, 209n14, 210n23, 211n76, 234n12, 237n100, 287n45, 327, 331n32, 331n46, 366n88 Fludd, Robert 7–8, 11, 26, 28, 31, 33–34, 83, 102n91, 126, 169–173, 176–182, 302, 308n61, 319, 335–337 Fonseca, Pedro da (Petrus) 252, 256n13, 260n86, 261n91 Fontanier, Jean 51

410 Index force 146, 179, 181, 185n19, 244, 246, 268, 272, 276–278, 282, 294, 314, 317, 320–323, 343; attractive (vis attrahens) 118, 272–276, 282; impelling (vis impellens) 221, 272–273, 276–277; motile (vis motrix) 117, 272, 320–321, 328–329 fortune 62, 107–108, 110 Frederick V (Winterkönig) 172 free fall: law of 9, 249, 270, 273, 275–276; cause of 9, 253, 267–269, 275–276, 282, 295 freedom 35, 107, 113, 127, 147, 153, 155, 159, 176, 180 freedom of philosophizing 42–43, 82, 98n12, 146, 148–149 Frey, Jean-Cécile 53, 67n46 friendship 25, 33, 35, 108, 122, 124, 153 Funkenstein, Amos 77 Gaffarel, Jacques 26–27, 58 Galen 317 Galilei, Galileo 1, 4, 7, 9–10, 25–26, 29, 34, 41, 61, 83, 94, 100n49, 112, 129, 134n31, 138n141, 145, 170, 176, 178–180, 182, 187n43, 193, 205, 245, 249, 253, 262n107, 266–270, 272–276, 278–284, 298–300 Galluzzi, Paolo 268 Garau, Rodolfo 8–9, 13n19, 236n87 Garber, Daniel 6, 68n69 Gaukroger, Stephen 118, 128–129 Gaultier de la Vallette, Joseph 24–25, 28–29, 33, 48 Gellibrand, Henry 337 generation 10–11, 94, 116, 312–314, 319, 322–330, 335–336, 341, 349, 354, 356, 358 Genesis 55, 169–171, 181, 184n13, 298, 301 geocentrism 250, 293, 299–300, 303 geometry 82, 171, 175–176, 193, 221, 231, 266, 268, 298, 315, 318, 320, 329, 341 Gilbert, William 185n19, 302 God 4, 8–9, 24, 30, 43, 59, 77, 83, 85, 88–89, 93–94, 102n98, 107–109, 116–118, 121, 128–130, 135n48, 136n84, 176–178, 186n37, 195, 199, 201–202,

206–208, 211n70, 220, 243–244, 250, 253–255, 257n17, 262n107, 277–278, 288n47, 294–298, 301–302, 307n36, 308n60, 314–315, 321–322, 326, 328, 337, 349–352, 356–358, 366n100, 367n102 Gorham, Geoffrey 242 Gorlaeus, David 55, 112 Grant, Edward 255 gravity (weight) 10, 93, 110, 118, 247, 266–267, 274–276, 278, 280–281, 283, 298, 301–303, 309n64, 313–315, 318, 320, 352, 357 Gregory of Rimini 44 Gregory, Tullio 4, 14n22, 100n44, 126, 187n43, 285n12, 305n5 growth 10, 319, 323, 326–327, 357 Gventsadze, Veronica 127 Haak, Theodore 337–338 happiness (tranquility) 7, 47, 144–147, 149–153, 155–157, 159–160 harmony 170–173, 175–177, 179–180, 295, 298–299, 316, 321, 327 Harriot, Thomas 334 Hartlib, Samuel 11, 334, 338–339, 344, 357 Harvey, William 31, 312, 335, 337, 341, 359n7, 359n8 Hatch, Robert 292 heliocentrism 29, 138n141, 174, 176–178, 245, 250, 258n32, 262n107, 283, 297, 300–301, 304 Helvétius, Claude Adrien 131 Henry, François 23 Herbert, Edward Lord of Cherbury (Herbert of Cherbury) 11, 26, 35, 84, 335–337 heredity 120, 324–326 Hermetic philosophy 8, 169, 171–172, 180, 182 Hero of Alexandria 246 Hervet, Gentian 75 Hevelius, Johannes 27–28, 35 highest good 7, 144, 146, 149–156, 158–159 Highmore, Nathaniel 341 Hill, Nicholas 55, 334 history of philosophy 1, 12n9, 22, 115, 123, 131, 156, 336 history of science 1–2, 12n9, 266–267

Index  411 Hobbes, Thomas 11, 28, 35, 101n84, 102n98, 109, 122, 146, 257n17, 334–335, 338–341, 345–348, 350, 365n70 Honorable, right (honestum) 153–154, 156–157, 159, 161n14 Hortensius, Martinus (Martin van Den Hove) 175–176, 179, 185n29, 185n30, 186n32 humanism 1–2, 9, 33, 41, 51, 63, 78, 106, 124–125, 132, 133n19, 199, 215–217, 241, 255 Hume, David 87 hylozoism 320 hypothesis 7–8, 10, 76–77, 79, 82–83, 85, 89, 93–94, 97, 102n92, 102n98, 102n101, 103n105, 103n110, 103n119, 110, 125, 174, 177–178, 182, 186n36, 197–199, 210n23, 237n99, 243, 257n17, 266, 276, 278–279, 292, 294–297, 299–302, 304, 313–317, 319, 321, 323–325, 327, 337, 352–353, 355 Iamblichus 171 image 119, 121, 123, 162n29, 185n30, 207, 225, 227, 298, 313, 320 imaginary (spaces and times) 244, 251–252, 257n23, 277 imagination 8, 43, 75, 111, 123, 195, 201–202, 205, 207, 225–226, 244–245, 252, 254, 261n91, 266, 274, 294, 302, 343–345 immensity 9, 177, 243–246, 254, 263n122, 300 immobility 243, 245, 254, 261n88, 293, 299 immortality 116–117, 120, 144, 161n8, 195, 206, 343–344, 363n48 impetus 266, 272, 277–279, 314 Inchofer, Melchior 178, 187n45, 187n46 Index (Congregation of the) 173, 178, 181 induction 78, 88, 219, 224, 237n99, 315 inertia: principle of 9–10, 118, 266–267, 269, 276–279, 283, 346, 357 infinite / infinitude / infinity 83, 86, 88, 92–93, 95–96, 109–110, 116, 128, 180, 189n59, 207, 243–245,

251, 254, 258n33, 258n37, 274, 276, 283, 345, 348, 357 influence 1, 5–7, 9, 11, 49, 64–65, 97n3, 97n4, 112, 127, 130–131, 139n143, 139n144, 156, 172, 215–216, 227, 232, 233n6, 234n11, 257n17, 296, 298, 302–303, 320, 325, 331n24, 335–336, 341–343, 345, 348, 351–352, 357–358 intellect 5, 8, 46, 80, 85, 89–91, 95–96, 146–147, 176, 184n13, 195, 198–202, 207–208, 209n13, 216, 220, 222, 223, 225, 243, 261n91, 318, 351–352, 358 intuition 8, 88, 199 Irenaeus 44 James I, King of England 172 Jerome 112 Jesuit(s) 25, 41, 50, 178, 181, 215, 244, 268, 295, 346 Johnson, Monte Ransome 126, 128, 160n1 Jones, Howard 101n75, 102n92, 113, 119 Joshua (Book of) 251, 262n107, 299 Joy, Lynn 5, 54, 68n62, 78, 102n92, 103n124, 118, 123–124, 236n88, 258n47, 360n17 judgment 76, 82, 85, 90, 98n12, 111, 138n141, 149, 154–155, 159, 174, 197–199, 216, 218, 222–223, 230–231, 315 justice 109, 116, 122, 127, 138n127 Justin Martyr, Saint 44 Kepler, Catharina 173 Kepler, Johannes 8, 26, 119, 129, 169, 170–182, 266, 267, 280, 282–283, 296, 298–300, 337, 341 Khunrath, Heinrich 171, 183n7 Knowledge 6, 33–34, 45–46, 76–92, 97, 109–110, 113, 116–117, 121, 124, 126–127, 145–146, 159, 169, 175–176, 203, 207, 217–222, 224–225, 230–232, 254, 293–294, 312, 316, 324–325, 327, 329, 337, 344, 356, 358; Aristotelian concept of 42, 81, 219–220; clear and distinct 86–87; empirical 80–82; of existence vs. knowledge of essences 8, 77, 203–204, 208; Jewish 26;

412 Index maker’s 77, 84; practical knowledge 156–157; as scientia 45, 78, 80; search for 24, 33–34, 81, 127; theory of 6, 77, 110, 112, 117, 130, 132, 216 Kors, Alan Charles 128 Koyré, Alexandre 9–10, 170, 241, 266–267, 276, 278, 284, 284n5, 287n46 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de 131 La Mothe Le Vayer, François de 1, 25, 184n18, 350 Lactantius 112 Lansberge, Johan Philip 175–176, 179 Latin (Gassendi’s use of) 2–3, 75, 102n102, 160n1 Launay, Gilles de 126, 134n36, 255 Launoy, Jean de 61–65, 71n118 Lautaret, David de 33 Le Cazre, Pierre (Cazré, Pierre Le) 9, 27, 94, 268–269, 275, 281–283, 292, 295–297 Levitin, Dmitri 367n104, 367n109, 369n145 Libertinage/Libertine 1, 4, 6, 13n21, 22, 55, 114, 126, 344 Liceti, Fortunio 27 light 119, 170, 172, 179, 245, 247, 296, 300, 313, 318, 335–336, 346–347, 350, 354, 365n70; of reason 43; natural 208; of knowledge 97 Lipsius, Justus 49 Llull, Ramon 90, 226 Locke, John 1, 139n143, 232,336,343,359n3 logic 3, 8–9, 42–43, 60, 78, 90, 120, 123, 131–132, 146–147, 193, 195, 215–240, 253 LoLordo, Antonia 5, 8, 92, 126, 288n47, 289n55 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) 33, 107, 110–111, 11, 122, 322, 335, 350, 384, 366n97 Luillier, François 3, 23, 25, 29, 31, 33, 35, 63, 114, 267 Luther, Martin 112 magnetism 118, 179, 185, 203, 247, 272, 276, 282, 302–303, 350 Malet, Antoni 345 Malformation 325

Mars (parallax) 173–174 Martel, Thomas 21, 23 Martin, Edme 23 materia subtilis see subtle matter material soul see soul materialism 4–5, 22, 98n6, 106–107, 120, 126, 287n47, 327, 334, 346, 348 matter 92–94, 109–110, 112, 116, 118, 129, 169, 171–172, 206, 279, 301, 313–317, 323, 325, 328, 336, 342–356; active (materia actuosa) 10, 112, 318, 322, 334, 342–343, 349, 352; celestial 175, 180; divisibility of 11, 345, 347; flower of (flos materiae) 319–320; sublunary 243, 342 matter theory 93–94, 112, 114, 117–119, 125, 129–130, 193, 246, 304, 335–336, 340–341, 353, 358 Matthias, Emperor 172 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis de 131 Mazarin, Jules (Cardinal) 61 mechanical philosophy 11, 110–112, 118, 274, 295, 334, 342, 344, 348, 353, 355–356, 358 mechanics 4, 9, 241, 245, 249, 267, 270, 358 mechanism 77, 224, 272, 276, 282, 296, 312, 314–330, 334–335, 344, 347, 358 medicine (physiology) 82, 94, 107, 156, 316, 322, 336–337, 343, 348, 359n8 Mehl, Édouard 7–8 Mellan, Claude 26 memory 34, 48, 108, 198, 344; of the past 88, 91 mercury 246–247, 347, 353 Mercury/Mercurius 26, 174–175, 292, 296, 303, 337 Mersenne, Marin 1, 3, 8, 26, 28–30, 33, 35, 54–57, 77–78, 83, 114, 169–182, 193–194, 195, 274, 334, 336–338, 341, 346–348, 357 Metaphysics 4–5, 43, 70n106, 75–76, 78, 82–83, 85, 89, 109–111, 112, 126, 129, 132, 182, 193, 218, 261n100, 318, 321 method (philosophical and scientific) 2, 7, 21, 77, 84–86, 90, 93, 110, 120, 124, 126, 130, 146, 160, 170,

Index  413 196, 200, 203, 217–218, 220, 226, 230–232, 355 methodology 5, 8, 155, 195, 202–204, 208–209, 231, 303 Michael, Fred 8, 216, 229 Mill, John Stuart 131 Mind 8–9, 33, 45, 80, 87–89, 91, 94, 111, 123, 136n74, 74, 159, 172, 176–178, 193, 195, 197–200, 202–206, 216, 218, 226–228, 244–245, 248–250, 252, 255, 294, 299, 343 mind-body relationship 202–206, 343 minimum of space 274, 278 minimum of time 274, 278 mobility 279, 288n47, 322, 327–328, 345 molecule 10, 301, 302, 312, 314, 319–321, 323, 326–330, 349, 353, 356, 358 Montaigne, Michel de 25, 49, 75, 79, 112 Montmor, Henri Louis Habert de 23, 29, 30, 35, 113 More, Henry 335, 344 More, Thomas 125 Morin, Jean-Baptiste 9, 28, 33, 54–55, 60–63, 65, 115, 126, 268–269, 283, 284n9, 285n14, 297 motion 42, 61, 91–92, 94–95, 110–111, 179, 181, 204, 224, 242–245, 248, 250–253, 255, 260n86, 261n88, 266–284, 301,313–314, 318–322, 325, 327–329, 344, 358; accelerated 94, 268, 270–277; atomic 10–11, 93, 109–110, 117–118, 269, 278–279, 341–342, 345, 348–355; of the Earth 83, 100n49, 267, 280–283; projectile 9, 267, 269–276 music 30, 157, 171, 298 natural acceleration see free fall natural philosophy 4–5, 7, 10–11, 43, 52, 107, 115–116, 121, 124, 126, 129–130, 132, 144, 292, 296, 301–302, 312, 315, 334– 335, 340, 343, 345, 348, 351, 357–358 Naudé, Gabriel 1, 25, 27, 29, 33, 63, 83, 350 neo-academicism 76, 80–82, 90 Neuré, Michel 23, 28, 32, 284n9

Newton, Isaac 1, 9, 11, 241, 255, 261n90, 263n129, 276, 336, 357–358 Nicole, Pierre 8, 216 niter 355 Noël, Etienne 346 nutrition 318–319, 322, 325, 327 observation(s) 7, 10, 11, 13n21, 21, 23, 25–26, 30–31, 35, 57–58, 82, 91–93, 112, 120, 129, 170, 173–176, 193, 217–218, 221, 226, 230, 245, 292–293, 295–296, 302–304, 314–315, 335, 337, 339–340, 355, 358 organic bodies 312–313, 316, 318, 320–330 Origen 178, 184n13, 185n22 Orthodoxy 55, 63, 81, 99n28, 102n96, 169, 193 Osler, Margaret 4, 12n8, 106, 116, 126, 128, 189n59, 210n39, 262n116, 187n47 Oxford University 11, 335–336, 340–345 Paganini, Gianni 6, 10, 138n132, 257n17, 258n28 Palmerino, Carla Rita 9, 113, 211n54, 258n32, 308n54 Panurge, Vincent (Morin, Jean-Baptiste [pseud. Vincentius Panurgius]’) 28, 285n14 Paracelsus 171 Parker, Samuel 335, 345 Pascal, Blaise 246 Patin, Guy (Gui) 3, 30 Patrizi da Cherso, Francesco 49, 52, 55, 64, 67n54, 256n8, 256n13 Paul, Saint Vincent de 35 Pav, Peter Anton 277–278, 284 Payne, Robert 340, 346 Pecquet, Jean 31, 312 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de 1–3, 23–28, 30, 32–33, 35, 51, 58–59, 114, 124, 299, 336–338 Pell, John 338–339, 360n18 Pereira, Benedictus de 181 Petit, Pierre 246 Petty, William 11, 338–339, 341, 352, 368n116 phenomenon 89, 97, 127, 220, 351 Philodemus 107, 136n78

414 Index Physics 3, 5, 9, 29, 42, 76, 92–94, 109–111, 114, 117, 120, 125, 129–130, 132, 146–148, 170, 178, 205, 218, 224–225, 232, 244, 266, 277, 283, 299, 312, 315, 317, 322, 335, 345–346 Physiology see medicine Pico della Mirandola, Gianfrancesco 49, 67n55 Pintard, René 3–5, 13n20, 13n21, 113, 124, 126 place 242–244, 252–254, 256n10, 256n13, 263n123, 293, 302, 325 Plato 2, 9, 43, 90, 161n12, 226, 254–255, 262n116, 298 pleasure (voluptas) 35, 43, 83, 107–109, 111, 120–122, 127, 130–132, 146–160 Pliny the Elder 43 Plutarch 31, 43, 147 Politics 27, 33, 122, 172 Porphyry 171 Portner, Johan Albrecht 23 Poterie, Antoine de la 21, 23, 29, 38, 46, 56, 64, 217 Power, Henry 352 preformation 325–327, 330 probability 76–77, 81, 97, 124, 316 Proclus 171, 178 projectile see motion proportion 172, 180, 224, 254, 269, 273, 275 proposition 42, 45, 48, 88, 90, 96, 197, 218–219, 221, 225–230 providence 109, 116–117, 120–121, 127–129, 144, 161n8, 349, 358 prudence 108–109, 117, 122, 127 psychology 103n110, 123, 154, 216 Puteanus, Erycius (Eerrijk de Putte) 58, 114 Pyrrho (of Elis) 22, 55, 76, 90, 99n38 Pyrrhonism 6, 13n22, 42, 46–47, 55, 57, 76–78, 81–83, 91, 97, 98n12, 98n13, 99n28, 113, 199, 219–220 quantity 95, 181–182, 188n59, 204, 242–243, 253 Quillet, Claude 23 Quintilian, Marcus Fabius 91 Ramée, Pierre de la (Petrus Ramus) 49, 62–63, 67n55, 78, 90, 226 Rand, William 338, 360n16

rectitude (honestas) 147, 156, 159 Rheita, Anton de 338, 360n18 Rheticus, Georg Joachim 177, 185n23 Richelieu, Alphonse de 28–29 Richelieu, Armand Jean de Plessis (Cardinal) 27, 69n80 Risse, Wilhelm 215 Rochot, Bernard 5, 13n21, 66n42, 113, 217, 245, 255n2 Roger Bacon 44 Rothmann, Christoph 177, 178 Rutherford, Donald 7 sage 24 Saint-Évremond, Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis de 29, 131 Sakamoto, Kuni 10, 183n6 salt 119, 246, 342–343, 349, 353 Sanches, Francisco 77–79, 81 Sarasohn, Lisa 5, 134n31, 161n9, 346 Schickard, Wilhelm 3, 53, 59, 129, 174, 186n32 Schmaltz, Tad 282 Schmitt, Charles 49, 67n55 Schuhmann, Karl 244 Schurman, Anna Maria van 35 scientia 45, 220; apparentialis 90, 100n43; experimentalis 10, 293–294, 296 Scripture 171, 177–178, 187n43, 268–269, 298–299 seeds of things (semina rerum) 301, 320–321, 356, 358 Séguier, Pierre 35 Seminal: aggregates 329; force 320–321; forms 323; matter 323, 356; molecule 327–328; preformation 327; principles 341, 349, 356–357 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 43, 49, 147, 150, 163n38, 163n42 Sennert, Daniel 112 sensation 8, 45, 76, 79–80, 84, 103n110, 109–112, 116, 120–121, 123, 193, 195, 198–204, 216–218, 221, 223–224, 226–228, 231, 246, 279, 293, 299, 321 senses see sensation sensibility 220, 226, 317–320, 322, 327, 329, 345

Index  415 Sextus Empiricus 75–76, 78–79, 81–82, 88–92, 96, 98n13, 99n28, 147, 210n23, 220 sexual reproduction 323–324, 327, 329–330 sign 7, 77, 89–92, 95–97, 101n75, 101n84, 102n98, 103n119, 120–121, 136n78, 223–224, 230–231, 297 skepticism 4, 6–8, 10, 45, 47, 49, 54–55, 57, 59, 75–97, 113–114, 134n26, 181, 197–199, 293–294, 334, 336–337; Academic 76–78, 80–82, 90, 145; mitigated 11, 145, 161n9, 162n25, 335; Pyrrhonic 42, 76–78, 81–83, 90–91, 97, 210n23, 220 Smith, John 344, 364n54 Smith, Thomas 338 Snel van Royen, Willebrord (Snellius) 58, 176 Sorbière, Samuel 6, 21–24, 27–28, 33, 59–60, 64, 70n108, 113, 249, 339, 347 soul 10, 42–43, 56, 83, 91, 107–110, 112–113, 116–117, 119–120, 128–129, 146–147, 157, 159, 181, 206, 221, 223, 225, 294, 298–299, 313, 317–330; immaterial 13n20, 117, 119–120, 128, 335; immortality of the 144, 161, 195, 316; material (animal, corporeal) 4, 10, 11, 13n20, 42, 111, 119–120, 128, 312, 317–322, 327, 329, 335–336, 342–345, 358; of the world 322, 336 sources 2, 4–7, 9, 23, 49, 76, 120, 122, 126–128, 146, 151, 159, 242, 255, 277, 284, 349 space 9, 11, 42, 83, 92, 102n98, 110, 195, 241–255, 266, 269–270, 272–275, 276–277, 313, 335, 345–350, 354, 357 spirit 172, 222–223, 320, 342, 355; freedom of the 113 spontaneous generation 322, 324, 326, 328–329, 348, 356 Stanley, Thomas 130 Steuco, Agostino 178 Stillingfleet, Edward 335, 345 Stoicism 7, 76, 127, 147 Stuart, Elisabeth 172 Suárez, Francisco 250–252

substance 9, 76, 87, 112, 119, 181–182, 203–204, 206–207, 231, 241–244, 247, 249, 256n13, 303, 313, 318–320, 344–345, 347, 355 substantial form 10, 314 subtle matter (materia subtilis) 119, 258n54, 274, 347 sulphur 343, 353 Sun 23, 26, 87, 91, 173–175, 180, 184n14, 185n22, 198, 217–218, 223, 282–283, 294, 296, 299–300, 302–303, 347 Syllogism 45, 79, 88, 90, 100n43, 200, 219, 222, 228–230 Tamizey de Larroque, Philippe 26 Taussig, Sylvie 3, 6, 124, 292 Taxil, Nicolas 6, 22–23, 30, 33 teleology 127, 315–316, 356, 367n106 Ten Modes 197–198, 210n23, 223 Tertullian 44 Tetrapharmakos (τετραφάρμακος) 107, 133n4 Texture 92, 95, 319, 322–323, 326, 328–329, 343, 350, 354 theology 4, 24, 41, 53, 85, 112, 132, 170, 177–178, 182, 346, 348, 350 theosophy 180 thinking/thought 87, 111, 177, 195, 204–205, 208, 242, 249 thought experiment 243, 247, 253, 302, 344 tides 9–10, 100n49, 258n32, 267–269, 280–283 time 9, 83, 92,109, 171, 201, 206, 222, 241–255, 266, 269–270, 272–275, 277–278, 280–282, 301, 319 Torricelli, Evangelista 246 tranquility (ataraxia) 47, 122, 146, 150, 156, 159 truth(s) 5, 8–10, 22, 33–35, 43, 45–47, 51, 56–57, 78–80, 82, 84–85, 87–90, 92, 115, 117, 120, 123, 126, 128, 129, 132, 145, 146–147, 159, 176–177, 181, 195, 202, 205, 209, 216, 218, 220, 222–225, 227–228, 230, 253, 267–268, 293, 337; eternal 8, 176, 189n59, 199–201, 210n35; truth rule 8, 175, 195–197

416 Index Uffelmann, Heinrich 232 utility 117, 121–123, 137n117 vacuum 9, 31, 42, 83, 91–93, 102n98, 109–110, 117, 148, 179, 241–249, 254, 256n9, 277, 335, 345–348, 350, 358 Valla, Lorenzo 121, 215 Valois, Louis Emmanuel de 24, 26–27, 29, 33, 35, 63, 114, 124, 128 Varro, Michel 269 Venus 91, 300 Viau, Théophile de 51 Villon, Antoine 52–55, 67n46, 78 virtue 22, 43, 51, 108–109, 112, 117, 120–122, 124, 127, 131, 147–150, 152–154, 156–160, 318, 325, 349 Vives, Juan Luis 49, 78 Vlacq, Adriaan 23 void see vacuum Walæus, Johannes 31 Waquet, Françoise 33 Ward, Seth 340–341 Warner, Walter 334 Webster, John 340–341 Wendelin, Godefroy 129

Westfall, Richard 276, 357 Willis, Thomas 11, 341–344 Wilson, Catherine 119 wisdom 7, 21, 51, 124, 146–147, 156, 159 world: annihilation of the 243, 247, 253; center of the 293, 299–300; concept of the 172; creation (genesis) of the 10, 179, 182, 243, 251, 253, 298, 301–304, 348, 350; God and the 107, 116, 121, 130, 176, 298, 337, 349–350; ethereal 343; existence of the 87, 89; harmony of the 177; (in)finity of the 83, 243–246; knowledge of the 88, 107, 116, 120–121, 218–219, 302, 337; physical (natural) 92–93, 107, 110–110, 116–119, 129, 169, 176, 243, 253, 293, 298–299, 301, 326, 329, 349; soul of the 322, 336; system of the 94, 293 Yates, Frances 172 Zabarella, Francesco 112 Zeno of Elea 90, 226