GASSENDI, PIERRE
(1592–1655)

Pierre Gassendi, the leading French seventeenth-century skeptical and Epicurean philosopher and scientist, was born at Champtercier, a Provençal village in France. He studied at Digne and Aix-en-Provence and was appointed professor of rhetoric at Digne at the age of twenty-one. In 1614 he received his doctorate in theology at Avignon. He was ordained a priest in 1616 and was appointed professor of philosophy at Aix. From 1617 to 1623 he lectured on Aristotle's philosophy, developing a forceful critique of it. His first published work, Exercitationes Paradoxica Adversus Aristoteleos (1624), was intended to be followed by six more parts, of which only the second part, published posthumously, was written. It contains both an attack on Aristotle's thought and portions of Gassendi's mitigated skepticism.

After a year in Digne, during which he performed various ecclesiastical duties, Gassendi visited Paris for a brief period in 1625 and became friendly with such avant-garde thinkers as Francois de La Mothe le Vayer and Marin Mersenne. He continued the astronomical researches that he had begun in Provence, and, with the mathematician Claude Mydorge (1585–1647), observed a lunar eclipse. Gassendi's careful astronomical records from 1618 to 1655 were published after his death. He also engaged in many scientific studies with his patron, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Pieresc (1580–1637). His discovery of the perihelion of Mercury was an important support for the Copernican theory at the time.

Gassendi returned to Paris in 1628, remained there until August 1629, and then spent nine months in Flanders and Holland, where he met many leading scientists and scholars. He spent the next years partly in Paris and partly in Provence, publishing scientific works on astronomy and physics and presenting skeptical attacks on Herbert of Cherbury and the Rosicrucian Robert Fludd. He undertook an intensive study of Epicurean atomism, a subject in which he had been interested for some time. The results of this study were to form a basic part of his later writings.

In 1634 Gassendi was elected provost of the Cathedral of Digne. In 1641 he was sent to the assembly of the French clergy in Paris and during this visit taught philosophy to the young Molière (1622–1673). Gassendi was appointed to the chair of mathematics at the Royal College (now the Collège de France) in 1645, but because of ill health he was away from his post from 1648 to 1653. He fell ill in 1654 and died the following year.

Except for his early attacks on Aristotelianism, Fludd's Rosicrucianism, and Herbert of Cherbury, Gassendi's philosophical works date from the 1640s onward. In 1641, at the request of Mersenne, Gassendi wrote his objections to René Descartes's Méditations ("Fifth Set of Objections"). Descartes's testy answer led Gassendi to expand his criticism into the bulky Disquisitio Metaphysica, finished in 1642 and published in Amsterdam in 1644. He published three works on Epicurus and his philosophy between 1647 and 1649: De Vita et Moribus Epicuri (1647), Animadversiones in Decimum Libri Diogenis Laertii, qui est de Vita, Moribus Placitisque Epicuri (1649), and Syntagma Philosophiae Epicuri, cum Refutationibus Dogmatum, Quae Contra Fidem Christianum ab eo Asserta Sunt (1649). His most important philosophical writings appeared only posthumously, in the 1658 edition of his complete works. His overall treatment of philosophical problems appears in Syntagma Philosophicum (Opera, volumes 1 and 2) and in the second part of his first work, the Exercitationes, which presents his constructive or mitigated skepticism.

Exercitationes

Gassendi's thought developed from a fairly thoroughgoing skepticism, strongly influenced by Sextus Empiricus, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Pierre Charron, and Francisco Sanches, to what he called a via media between skepticism and dogmatism. The via media involved both a fundamental epistemological skepticism and a hypothetical form of Epicurean atomism that was modified to eliminate those aspects of Epicurus's thought that conflicted with Christian doctrine. In the first part of the Exercitationes Gassendi, following in the tradition of Francesco Patrizi and Peter Ramus, tried to show all the erroneous or dubious aspects of Aristotelianism. The second part set forth an attack on all those who claimed to have discovered necessary and indubitable knowledge of the real nature of things. Our knowledge of the world, Gassendi insisted, comes only from sensory experience. We are unable to arrive at absolutely true first principles and real or essential definitions, since inductions from experience can never yield certain universal prepositions. No matter how much data are gathered, a negative instance may still turn up in the future. Even if we somehow managed to discover some genuine definitions and first principles, no further scientific knowledge about nature could be gained by employing syllogistic reasoning, since, as the Greek Pyrrhonists had shown, the truth of the premises of a syllogism depends on antecedent knowledge that the conclusion is true. Either the conclusion is part of the evidence of the premises or the syllogism establishes nothing, since it is not known whether the premises are true.

In the concluding section Gassendi launched his strongest attack on the possibility of gaining necessary knowledge about the world. Using the arguments of the ancient skeptics, he tried to show that all that we can know is how things appear, not how they really are in themselves. We can know that honey seems sweet, but we cannot find out if it really is sweet. On the basis of appearances we cannot tell what the real nature of things must be that produces such effects on us. Sense experience varies too much to provide any means for determining what reality is like on the basis of what is perceived. We lack any means of reasoning from experience to what has caused it. We are not even able to establish any criterion of true knowledge. Hence, we can only conclude that nothing can be known about reality. However, in this early work Gassendi insisted that we can develop useful sciences about appearances. As long as we restrict our conclusions to the world of experience, we will neither come in conflict with divine truth, nor accept any dubious dogmatic theory about unperceived reality. Such theories, whether metaphysical or mathematical, are presumptuous conjectures that have no value whatsoever.

Objections to Descartes

In his middle period Gassendi challenged those who claimed to have discovered some means of knowing the real nature of things. He employed various skeptical arguments against Renaissance naturalists and against such leading "new philosophers" as Herbert of Cherbury and Descartes. Gassendi's two letters against Herbert's De Veritate (in which the latter claimed to have refuted skepticism) used arguments about diversity of experience and disagreements among individuals to counter Herbert's common notions and common consent theory. In the "Fifth Set of Objections" and the Disquisitio Metaphysica, Gassendi turned skeptical argumentation against Cartesianism. He tried to show that Descartes's method of doubt illustrated what the skeptics had claimed for centuries. Then Gassendi challenged Descartes's positive dogmatic conclusions. Gassendi contended that the vaunted Cartesian criterion of true knowledge (that of clarity and distinctness) was useless, since people often think that they clearly and distinctly perceive something and then turn out to be wrong. Hence, to employ this criterion, another criterion would be needed to determine when something really is clear and distinct and does not merely appear to be so. In addition, another criterion would be necessary to employ this second criterion, and so forth.

The culmination of Gassendi's attack, which Descartes called the objections of objections, was his posing the possibility that all knowledge, even if it were clear and distinct, might not be about anything outside of our minds. If this could be the case, then all the knowledge purported to be found by Descartes might be imaginary or fictitious. Descartes saw this suggestion as a fundamental challenge to his system and as a denial of the possibility of gaining knowledge about any reality other than our own thoughts. His reply consisted in refusing to take the objection seriously, since if one did, "it follows that there is nothing that we can in any way comprehend, conceive or imagine, that should be accepted as true, that is to say that we have to shut the door completely on reason, and be content to be monkeys, or parrots, and no longer men" (Descartes, Oeuvres, C. Adam and P. Tannery, eds. vol. IXA, 212).

Mitigated Skepticism

In his later writings Gassendi attempted to develop a mitigated skepticism that would show how we could possess worthwhile knowledge about the world of appearances and how a science of this world could be developed, using Epicurean atomism as a hypothetical model.

Gassendi's mature theory about our knowledge of the world appears in his Syntagma Philosophicum, published in 1658 after his death. The work is enormous, containing 1,600 folio pages, printed in double columns. It is divided into three general sections, the first dealing with logic and theory of knowledge, the second with the natural world, and the third with ethics. Because of his skepticism, Gassendi did not regard metaphysics as a serious subject and so he omitted it entirely from his book.

At the outset, Gassendi seeks to establish a way to knowledge that is between the doubts of the skeptics and the complete assurances of the dogmatists. Neither the view that we can know nothing nor the view that we can know everything is tenable. The skeptics admit that we can know how nature appears to us. But they deny that we can know more than this. On the contrary, the dogmatists claim that we can know the real nature of things, which are not apparent to us. This, Gassendi contends, is exaggerating the power of the human mind. However, between skepticism and dogmatism there is a third possibility, which has been called constructive or mitigated skepticism, an acceptance of the thesis that although in a fundamental sense we cannot gain certain knowledge of the nature of reality, we can nevertheless gain a type of knowledge that we need have no reason to doubt and that will suffice to enable us to understand the world.

This limited knowledge is obtained first by accepting what is obvious to us, our sense experience, plus certain obvious conclusions from it, such as that things exist. Signs found in sense experience enable us to know about other matters not immediately obvious to the senses. The ancient Greek skeptics had admitted that, on the basis of the constant conjunctions found in experience, we could judge that certain things temporarily not apparent to us were the case, such as when we see smoke, we can judge that there is a fire. In addition, we are also able to judge, by means of our reasoning ability, that particular sense experiences indicate that the world has certain features, even though we are never able to perceive these features. Thus, we can judge from the appearance of sweat on the skin that it has pores.

Long before the invention of the telescope, Democritus was able to judge from the white color of the Milky Way that it is composed of an innumerable quantity of stars. This type of reasoning, which leads us to knowledge about the world, is based on a careful and cautious evaluation of our sense information by our reason, plus inferences, made from this information, based on careful reasoning and on certain general principles that we have learned from experience. The conclusions we reach in this way about the nature of the world are beyond doubt and are ultimately evaluated in terms of future information gained from experience (as in the case of the Milky Way) and from these conclusions in explaining the course of our experience. We do not discover the absolute truth in this way, but only a faint shadow of it. This faint shadow will turn out to be the most satisfactory scientific explanation that can be given of experience in terms of the hypothesis (confirmed by experience and reasoning) that the world is composed of atoms in motion.

In terms of this theory of knowledge Gassendi examines various logical systems, ancient and modern, to state the best method for attaining limited knowledge. Many of the classical devices, Gassendi finds, are practically useless. The philosophies of Francis Bacon and Descartes have serious defects, Gassendi claims. Our senses can err, and we cannot, no matter what we do, attain real knowledge of the inner nature of things. But a logical method that is based on sense information carefully analyzed on general, unquestionable principles gained from experience and careful reasoning, and constantly checked and verified, can serve as the instrument for attaining what truth is possible.

Atomism

According to Gassendi what we can know about the world consists of a modified form of the atomism of Epicurus, modified in terms of the science of the time and the religious principles Gassendi maintained that he accepted. (Whether Gassendi was a sincere Christian has been, and still is, debated among scholars.) After surveying and criticizing the views of various philosophers about the nature of the world, Gassendi offers as the most probable theory (but not as the necessarily true one) the view that the actual components of the universe are indivisible atoms, moving in empty space. The supposed atoms are assumed to have been eternally created by God, to have different shapes, and to be moving at different rates of speed. Gassendi did not want mathematically describable atoms, since he feared this would lead to some sort of mathematical metaphysics. His atoms had features like those of ordinary experience. The atoms collided and presumably the result of all the collisions is the world that we perceive. A mechanical model related to our experience can then allow us to find empirical laws, make predictions, and explain relationships between different kinds of phenomena. In so relating the phenomenal world to the atomic world, there is no longer any need for Aristotelian purposes.

Appealing to the recent findings of scientists such as Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647) and Blaise Pascal, Gassendi insists that the essential feature of atoms is solidity. In addition, they have the properties of extension, figure, and weight. They are conceived of as having the kinds of configurations found in ordinary experience, like those of wagon wheels and houses, rather than mathematically describable sizes and shapes. Gassendi had a distrust of those who maintained that nature was to be described in mathematical terms, since he felt that they were probably advocating some type of Platonic metaphysical theory about the nature of reality.

God has created the atoms and given them an impulse to move downward. They move at different rates of speed, and for this reason they collide with one another. The collisions change the courses of the atoms, causing still further collisions, and so on. The various changes that take place in the world, both on the apparent and on the nonapparent level, can be accounted for by the movements of the atoms, their collisions, and their combinations. Thus, the real world is conceived as a mechanism made up of small moving parts, the atoms. The qualities and movements of the atoms suffice to account for changes in the real world and the way in which the world appears to us. The qualities that we perceive, the colors, sounds, tastes, smells, and so on (the so-called secondary qualities), are not actually properties of real objects. Instead, they are the ways we perceive various atomic movements when they affect our sense organs.

Gassendi begins to modify his Epicurean theory when he discusses the cause of the movement of the atoms. He accepts the Scholastic thesis that the primary cause of motion is God. The evidence that God exists is the almost universal natural belief in a deity and the conclusion drawn from observing the order in the universe, namely, that there must be an orderer or designer of the world. That there are some atheists is dismissed by Gassendi as similar to the existence of blind people. That a few people lack the normal, natural human faculties and beliefs is no reason to doubt the reliability of the faculties and beliefs of the rest of humankind. Both the senses and our reasoning ability give us an adequate basis for accepting the view that there is a God.

One's conception of God is that of an omniscient and omnipotent being who is all-wise and all-good. He is the author and providential guide and cause of everything that exists and everything that happens in the world. Gassendi specifically rejects Epicurus's view that everything can be explained and accounted for solely in terms of the atoms and their motions. Where, he asks, do the atoms come from, and what makes them move? Furthermore, if the world were produced only by "the fortuitous concourse of atoms," why is it that the atoms never, by themselves, make a house, or a temple, or a book? Each of these seems to require a designer to organize the atoms in a specific way, and so does the universe in general.

Turning from physical events to mental ones, Gassendi attempts to give an atomic explanation of the nature of the soul. First, he exhibits his vast erudition by examining the opinions of many different ancient philosophers on the subject. Then he offers the theory that seemed most probable to him; namely, that the animal soul is a material object. Though we cannot see the soul, reason convinces us that it must exist. The various processes that occur in living beings, such as nutrition, sensation, and movement, could not take place were there not a soul. But what is the soul like? It is a tenuous material substance existing in the body. It is like a subtle fire, giving life to corporeal things somewhat as fire warms objects.

The human soul, however, is more complex than the animal soul, being composed of two parts. The first is the irrational soul, which is material and is like the soul of any other living thing. It accounts for the vegetative and sensitive processes that exist in man. This part of the human soul comes to us from our parents. Besides this, we possess another feature of our souls, the rational element that, Gassendi insists, contrary to Epicurus's view, is not corporeal and is not derived from other human beings, but only from God. The rational part of our souls, which is responsible for our higher intellectual activities, is also immortal. Epicurus had argued for the mortality of the soul, but Gassendi strongly insists that only the animal soul is mortal. As evidence for his belief in the immortality of the rational soul, Gassendi contends that the fact that it is immaterial suffices to show that it is immortal. Furthermore, the universal agreement of humankind on this point is offered as another proof, as well as the view that the divine and just government of the world would seem to require human immortality for a proper system of rewards and punishments to function.

Gassendi apparently believed that there was no conflict between his atomism and his views about man and God. Hence, Catholicism could be compatible with a strictly material account of the natural world. And although Gassendi was a heliocentrist he tried to present his astronomical views in such a way that they did not conflict with those of the church in its condemnation of Galileo Galilei.

Gassendi's atomism was as complete a scientific theory as any other offered in the first half of the seventeenth century. It rivaled Descartes's. However, as science developed later on, Gassendi's picture was replaced by that of Isaac Newton and others. No important discoveries are attributed to Gassendi's great scientific program.

Human Psychology

In his discussion of human psychology Gassendi presents a theory to explain how the various mental processes take place. This section culminates with an examination of the sources of all of our knowledge, which, to some extent, anticipates the views that appear in John Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690).

The faculties of sensation and imagination are common to humans and animals. Gassendi even asserts that sensation occurs to some extent in plants and minerals. Sensation occurs by means of a physical process involving material particles affecting a sense organ and causing a sensation, which is a physical event in the brain. The faculty of the imagination, which includes the memory as well, operates on traces or remains of the physical sense impressions. These traces are conceived of as waves in the brain that are actuated by other motions in the body and then cause further movements in the brain, giving rise to sensations or feelings similar to the original sensation that caused the wave. Much of the account offered by Gassendi is close to that presented by his contemporary, the materialistic philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

The imagination has three functions: apprehension, judgment, and reasoning. We can apprehend, as a result of the wave motions, the exact experiences and sensations that have occurred. Because of movements inside and outside us, the various waves can be agitated at later times, so that we can now be aware of what we experienced yesterday. Also, different features of different experiences can be apprehended at the same time, giving rise to apprehensions of objects that have never, as such, been experienced. Thus, for example, our apprehension of a centaur results from our previous sense experience of a horse and a man, plus the simultaneous activation of part of the remaining wave that came from each of them. Judging and reasoning, which Gassendi insists takes place in both humans and beasts, involves comparing apprehensions and associating them together according to their relations in actual experience. The faculties of judgment and reasoning put various apprehensions into an ordered sequence based on the experienced sequences of sensations, plus the natural instinct that makes us expect certain consequences to follow from what we have experienced.

Up to this point the detailed psychological theory that Gassendi presents is much like that later developed by the British empiricists from Locke to John Stuart Mill. But Gassendi also insists that there is another mental faculty that exists in humans, but not in other animals, that of intelligence or understanding, which belongs to our rational souls. By means of intelligence we are able to know things that cannot be experienced in sensation, such as God, space, and time. By this faculty we are also able to know the abstract essences of things, which transcend the powers of the imagination. Thus, for example, the imagination can know what "man" is, in terms of the sensations received. But, the essence of man, what it is that makes him what he is, can be known only by the intelligence. Lastly, this highest mental faculty is capable of self-consciousness. It can reflect on its operations and those of the imagination and make us aware that we see, we think, and so on.

In terms of this theory of the nature of the soul Gassendi next offers his opinion about the origin of our ideas. He repudiates completely the theory of Descartes and of Herbert of Cherbury that we possess innate ideas. Instead, Gassendi insists on the principle accepted by Aristotle and Epicurus, that there is nothing in the understanding that was not first in the senses. At the outset, the mind is a tabula rasa, a blank tablet. All the particular ideas that the mind ever knows, such as that of the sun, either come directly from sense experience or result from combinations of elements furnished by the senses. General or abstract ideas are formed by the intelligence from the collection of sense materials. In this case the sense information is necessary, but not sufficient to account for general ideas, such as that of "man." The intelligence goes beyond the actual sense-data in forming a unique idea from all the particular sensations. With regard to ideas of incorporeal things, which cannot be known by the senses, sense experience and the imagination furnish the occasion for the understanding to gain this knowledge. Because of certain experiences the understanding thinks, reflects, abstracts, and arrives at ideas, such as that of God. The senses provide some of the basic materials for these ideas and provide the context in which the understanding reasons to reach a conception of an incorporeal being.

Thus, all ideas either come from the senses or result from intellectual activities that are either caused or occasioned by sense information. However, in the cases of abstract ideas and ideas of incorporeal things, the actual content does not derive from any particular sense experiences. General principles, such as "The whole is greater than the part," are formed by induction from various particular experiences. When all of our experiences exhibit the same characteristics, we reach a general conclusion, which then becomes the basis of all further reasoning.

Ethics and Religion

The last part of Syntagma deals with ethics. Gassendi's theory is only a slightly modified version of Epicurus's hedonism. Gassendi holds that every pleasure, considered in itself, is a good and that all things that are considered good have value only in terms of the pleasure they produce. A completely pleasurable life is one without pains and troubles. Ultimately, for Gassendi, such a life can be achieved only by God. We can mitigate the pains in our lives as much as possible and thus attain a relatively good life.

A major problem in interpreting Gassendi's contribution is that of assessing his intentions and actual beliefs. There has been great debate whether Gassendi was really a Christian. He has been seen both as the founder of modern materialism, a leading skeptic and libertine, and as a serious Christian trying to find a via media between his faith and the new science. There have been long debates, especially in French literature, about the so-called Le cas Gassendi. He was a close associate of some of the leading French freethinkers and took part in retreats with them where they boasted of being able to speak freely on all subjects. Gassendi was also a close friend of some leading church figures such as Mersenne. Gassendi and Mersenne shared similar views about science and its foundations. They agreed that science could not refute skepticism and each offered a form of mitigated skepticism as a way of carrying on useful science without metaphysics. Nobody ever questioned Mersenne's religious sincerity, and he remained in closest touch with Gassendi. No charges were ever made at the time about any heretical opinion or activity on the part of Gassendi.

Arguments about how to evaluate Gassendi still go on. Researches into his few theological writings go one direction, his materialism points another way, and his associations with leading figures of the time, ranging from Hobbes to Pascal, allow for many interpretations. Gassendi was a priest all his life and he was friendly with the most orthodox and the most unorthodox figures of his time. His philosophical system represented a cautious and careful attempt to explain the world in keeping with both the results of the new science and the official views of the Catholic Church. He may have seen, as few others of his time did, the importance of the values of his religious tradition, of the classical heritage, and of the new science, and at the same time fully appreciated what the skeptics had shown about man's fallible nature. Unlike Montaigne, Charron, and La Mothe Le Vayer (all of whom he admired), he did not wish to destroy the fruits of human efforts along with man's presumptuous and dubious claims. More like Sanches, he wanted to find a constructive resolution to the skeptical crisis of the Renaissance, but not in the form of the new dogmatisms of Herbert of Cherbury or Descartes. Living within a major religious tradition, he tried to show that by discarding Aristotelianism and by accepting the wisdom of the skeptics along with certain elements of Epicureanism, faith and the new scientific discoveries could coexist.

Gassendi adapted various features of the philosophy of Epicurus to the state of knowledge of his day, and he modified certain portions of Epicurus's theory that were not in keeping with the Christian religion. The result was a semiskeptical, semiempirical theory that portrayed the world in terms of an atomic structure. Gassendi's philosophy remained important throughout the seventeenth century and was the chief modern alternative to Descartes's. It began to lose its appeal and importance after the development of Newton's scientific theories. Many of the basic elements of later English philosophy appear in Gassendi's views, and he probably had great influence on such thinkers as Hobbes and Locke.

Influence and Significance

Gassendi was one of the foremost philosophers and scientists of the early seventeenth century. He was the most important rival and critic of Descartes, and he had a crucial role in the revival of the ideas of the ancient Greek skeptics and atomists. Gassendi began his intellectual career as a skeptic; a staunch follower of Sextus Empiricus and Montaigne. Gradually, he mitigated his skepticism in the face of the scientific revolution of the time, in which he played a major role, and he adopted more and more of a materialistic explanation of the world based on the ancient theory of Epicurus. Though a prominent Catholic priest of his day, Gassendi developed one of the first completely mechanistic and materialistic theories of modern times.

Gassendi's ideas had much influence in the seventeenth century. Although he published his work in huge Latin tomes, a French abridgement was made in the latter part of the century and many portions of his work appeared in English. His ideas were being taught in Jesuit schools in France, English universities, and even newly founded institutions in North America. Because of the close similarity between Gassendi's skeptical empiricism and some of the major portions of Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, there has been a good deal of discussion about whether Locke was influenced by Gassendi or used some of his works. It has been discovered that one of Gassendi's main works on Epicurus appeared in English in 1659 in Thomas Stanley's History of Philosophy, a work that Locke knew. Locke had also met a few of Gassendi's disciples in France, so it is possible that some influence occurred.

Gassendi's atomism never connected itself with basic scientific findings, so that modern atomism had to start elsewhere. There has been more interest in Gassendi in recent years. Many conferences were held for his 400th birthday in 1992, with explorations of many aspects of his thought and activities, and his scientific researches are proving important in the history of botany, geology, and other fields. There is growing interest in his critique of Cartesian philosophy and he is now being seen as a genuinely original thinker of the first rank.

See also Aristotelianism; Aristotle; Atomism; Bacon, Francis; Charron, Pierre; Common Consent Arguments for the Existence of God; Descartes, René; Epicureanism and the Epicurean School; Epicurus; Fludd, Robert; Galileo Galilei; Herbert of Cherbury; Hobbes, Thomas; La Mothe Le Vayer, François de; Locke, John; Materialism; Mersenne, Marin; Mill, John Stuart; Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de; Newton, Isaac; Pascal, Blaise; Patrizi, Francesco; Pyrrho; Ramus, Peter; Renaissance; Sanches, Francisco; Sextus Empiricus; Skepticism, History of.

Bibliography

works by gassendi

Exercitationes Paradoxica Adversus Aristoteleos (1624). Amsterdam: Apud Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1649.

Petri Gassendi Diniensis ecclesiae praepositi … Opera Omnia. 6 vols. Lyon, France: Sumptibus Laurentii Anisson, & Ioan. Bapt. Deuenet, 1658.

Lettres familières à François Luillier pendant l'hiver, 1632–1633, edited by Bernard Rochot. Paris: J. Vrin, 1944.

Recherches métaphysiques. Translated and edited by Bernard Rochot. Paris: J. Vrin, 1962. Originally published as Disquisitio Metaphysica in 1644.

works about gassendi

Bernier, François. Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi. 7 vols. Paris: Fayard, 1992. French translation of some of Gassendi's major texts.

Bloch, Olivier R. La philosophie de Gassendi: Nominalisme, matérialisme, et métaphysique. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971. Careful study of Gassendi's philosophical development.

Centre International de synthèse. Pierre Gassendi, 1592–1655, sa vie et son oeuvre. Paris: A. Michel, 1955. Lectures on Gassendi by Bernard Rochot, Alexandre Koyré, Georges Montgrédien, and Antoine Adam. Some excellent discussions of his philosophical and scientific views.

Gregory, Tullio. Scetticismo ed empirismo: Studio su Gassendi. Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1961. Important study emphasizing Gassendi's materialism and skepticism.

Hess, Gerhard. "Pierre Gassendi, Der Französische Späthumanismus und das Problem von Wissen und Glauben." Berliner Beiträge zur Romanischen Philologie 9 (1939): 1–99. Important study of Gassendi's views on faith and reason.

Joy, Lynn Sumida. Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Study of Gassendi's humanistic development of his scientific theories.

Kroll, Richard W. F. The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. The impact of Gassendi's ideas in Restoration England.

Murr, Sylvia, ed. Gassendi et l'Europe. Paris: J. Vrin, 1997. Essays by many scholars on the 400th anniversary of Gassendi's birth.

Osler, Margaret. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Contrasts Descartes's philosophical theology with that of Gassendi's.

Pintard, René. Le libertinage érudite dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle. Geneva, Switzerland: Slatkine, 2000. New edition of Pintard's 1943 work. Gassendi is examined in relation to the libertins, and an irreligious interpretation of his views is offered.

Popkin, Richard H. The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. This is a newly revised and enlarged edition of Popkin's 1979 work, The History of Scepticism: From Erasmus to Spinoza. Depicts Gassendi's place in the history of skepticism.

Rochot, Bernard. "Le cas Gassendi." Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France 47 (1947): 289–313. Defense of Gassendi's religious sincerity against the accusations of Pintard.

Rochot, Bernard. "Gassendi et le Syntagma Philosophicum." Revue de synthèse 47 (1950): 67–79. Study of Gassendi's philosophy of science and scientific method.

Rochot, Bernard. Les travaux de Gassendi sur Epicure et sur l'atomisme, 1619–1658. Paris: J. Vrin, 1944. Important study of Gassendi's development. Contains a critical bibliography.

Turner, Anthony, and Nadine Gomez. Pierre Gassendi: Explorateur des sciences. Catalogue from the exhibit on Gassendi at the Musée de Digne, Digne-les-Bains, France, May 19–October 18, 1992. Portrays the many scientific interests Gassendi had.

Richard Popkin (1967, 2005)