GASSENDI, PIERRE (1592–1655)

GASSENDI, PIERRE (1592–1655), French Catholic priest and philosopher. Born in Provence on 22 January 1592, Gassendi was admitted to the clerical state in 1604 and received his doctor of theology degree at the University of Avignon in 1614. He studied philosophy and theology at the college of Aix-en-Provence, where he later taught from 1616 to 1622. He published his first book, Exercitationes Paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos, in 1624, a work in which he criticized Aristotelianism by using the skeptical arguments of the ancient philosopher Sextus Empiricus (fl. c. 200 C.E.). Having rejected Aristotelianism, Gassendi undertook the task of creating a new, complete philosophy, one that included the three traditional areas: logic, physics, and ethics. Writing in the style of the Renaissance humanists, Gassendi chose the ancient atomist and hedonist Epicurus (341–271 b.c.e.) as his model. Before European intellectuals could accept the philosophy of Epicurus, it had to be purged of various heterodox notions, such as materialism and the denial of creation and providence.

Gassendi worked on his Epicurean project from the 1620s until his death. The massive, posthumous Syntagma Philosophicum (1658) is the culmination of this project. It consists of three parts: "The Logic," "The Physics," and "The Ethics." In "The Logic," Gassendi presented his theory of knowledge, which he had first articulated in the Exercitationes. His empiricist theory of knowledge was an outgrowth of his response to skepticism. Accepting the skeptical critique of sensory knowledge, he denied that we can have certain knowledge of the real essences of things. Rather than falling into skeptical despair, however, he argued that we can acquire knowledge of the way things appear to us. This "science of appearances" is based on sensory experience and can only attain probability. It can, nonetheless, provide knowledge useful for living in the world. Gassendi denied the existence of essences in either the Platonic or Aristotelian sense and identified himself as a nominalist.

In "The Physics," Gassendi presented a Christianized version of Epicurean atomism. Like Epicurus, he claimed that the physical world consists of indivisible atoms moving in void space. Unlike the ancient atomist, Gassendi argued that there exists only a finite, though very large, number of atoms, that God created these atoms, and that the resulting world is ruled by divine providence rather than blind chance. Deeply involved in the natural philosophy of his time, Gassendi tried to provide atomistic explanations of all the phenomena in the world, including the qualities of things, inanimate bodies, plants, and animals. In contrast to Epicurus's materialism, Gassendi enriched his atomism by arguing for the existence of an immaterial, immortal soul. He also believed in the existence of angels and demons. His theology was voluntarist, emphasizing God's freedom to impose his will on the creation.

Adopting the hedonistic ethics of Epicurus, which sought to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, Gassendi reinterpreted the concept of pleasure in a distinctly Christian way. He believed that God endowed humans with free will and an innate desire for pleasure. Thus, by utilizing the calculus of pleasure and pain and by exercising their ability to make free choices, they participate in God's providential plans for the creation. The greatest pleasure humans can attain is the beatific vision of God after death. Based on his hedonistic ethics, Gassendi's political philosophy was a theory of the social contract, a view that influenced the writings of Hobbes and Locke. His emphasis on free will—both human and divine—led him to reject astrology, which he considered absurd, and other forms of divination that entailed any kind of hard determinism in the world.

Gassendi was an active participant in the philosophical and natural philosophical communities of his day. He corresponded with Galileo during his troubles with the church, and interacted with both Hobbes and Descartes. He conducted experiments on various topics in natural philosophy, wrote extensively about astronomy, corresponded with important natural philosophers, and wrote a treatise defending Galileo's new science of motion. Gassendi's version of the mechanical philosophy rivaled that of Descartes, with whom he engaged in an extensive controversy following the publication of the latter's Meditations in 1641.

Gassendi's philosophy was promulgated in England in several books published in the 1650s by Walter Charleton (1620–1707) and in France by François Bernier's Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi (1674). A younger generation of natural philosophers, including Robert Boyle (1627–1690) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who accepted the mechanical philosophy, faced a choice between Gassendi's atomism and Descartes's plenism. John Locke (1632–1704) absorbed many of Gassendi's ideas about epistemology and ethics, which thus had considerable influence on the subsequent development of empiricist epistemology and liberal political philosophy.

See also Aristotelianism ; Astronomy ; Boyle, Robert ; Cartesianism ; Charleton, Walter ; Descartes, René ; Determinism ; Empiricism ; Epistemology ; Free Will ; Galileo Galilei ; Hobbes, Thomas ; Humanists and Humanism ; Locke, John ; Logic ; Mechanism ; Natural Philosophy ; Neoplatonism ; Newton, Isaac ; Philosophy ; Physics ; Political Philosophy ; Reason ; Scientific Method ; Scientific Revolution ; Skepticism: Academic and Pyrrhonian .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Gassendi, Pierre. Opera Omnia. Lyon, 1658; reprinted Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt, 1964.

——. The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi. Translated by Craig Brush. New York, 1972.

Secondary Sources

Osler, Margaret J. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994.

Sarasohn, Lisa T. Gassendi's Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe. Ithaca, N.Y., 1996.

Margaret J. Osler