GASSENDI, PIERRE. - French philosopher, b. 22 Jan. 1592 at Champtercier (Digne), d. in Paris on 24 Oct. 1655. A canon and preacher, he taught theology (1613) and philosophy (1616) at Aix and subsequently, until his death, mathematics in Paris.
His first writing (1624) is against Aristotle and scholastic philosophy (Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristotelem). In later works he deals with atomistic doctrine in an attempt, anything but brilliant and crude, to renew Epicureanism: the Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri (1649) is an exposition of the Greek philosopher's doctrine, while the Syntagma philosophicum, his principal work published posthumously (1658), may be considered his philosophical summa; divided into logic, physics and ethics, besides a special section devoted to method. But more than for these writings, prolix and cumbersome, G. is known even today for his objections to Descartes' Meditations and for the polemical writing (in reply to Descartes) Disquisition metaphysicae, seu dubitationes et instantiae adversus Renati Cartesii metaphysicam et responsa (1644). G. is, more than anything else, an episode in the polemic against Cartesian science, a page in the debate between the empirical and the deductive approach. An admirer of Galileo, whose influence he felt, he intuited the importance of the laws of dynamics; a revaluer of atomism, he drew attention to a theory that suited the new science and stood opposed to Descartes' geometrical mechanism. It should be added that, since the atomic theory entails the admission of the void, he came to maintain philosophically (against the Aristotelians and Descartes) what Torricelli and Pascal had demonstrated experimentally.
From the more properly speculative point of view, G. is of scant interest. His logic has a decided nominalistic and empiricistic tone, while his physics follows Epicurean atomism, rethought according to the theories of the time and above all with the concern to correct those of its assertions that are in the most strident contrast with religion. Thus, for example, he admits creation ex nihilo (the atoms, ungenerated and incorruptible from the natural point of view, were created by God and can be annihilated by God), as well as that the motion of the atoms is caused by God, regulator and orderer of the universe, Providence. Under the influence of Galileo he maintains that it is not motion but the impulse to motion that is constant; and, with Telesio, that all atoms have a sensibility of their own (different from that of animals and men). The principle of sensibility and of life is the soul of the world (a Stoic and also Neoplatonic doctrine). Thus, in G.'s elaboration, Epicurean physics loses its materialistic and mechanistic structure. But more than a critical rethinking, it is a compromise or, if one wishes, a contaminatio of materialism and spiritualism. His doctrine of the soul is also a compromise: besides the soul made of very fine matter there is another in man, the "«intellect»", immaterial and immortal, created by God and infused into the body (Physica, sect. III, I, III, ch. 3). He himself noticed the inconsistency and tried in vain to resolve it: just as man is said to be one, though resulting from body and soul, so the soul is one, though there are two souls in man (cf. ibid., I, IX, ch. 2).
Bibliography10 works
Michele Federico Sciacca