GASSENDI, Pierre. - French philosopher, b. Jan. 22, 1592 at Champtercier (Digne), d. in Paris Oct. 24, 1655. Canon and preacher, he taught theology (1613) and philosophy (1616) at Aix and later, until his death, mathematics in Paris.
His first work (1624) is against Aristotle and Scholastic philosophy (*Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristotelem*). In his later works he deals with atomistic doctrine in an attempt—hardly ingenious or critical—to renew Epicureanism: the *Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri* (1649) is an exposition of the doctrine of the Greek philosopher, while the *Syntagma philosophicum*, his principal work published posthumously (1658), may be considered his mature philosophy; divided into logic, physics, and ethics, it also includes a special section devoted to method. But more than these elaborate and labored writings, Gassendi is still known today for his objections to Descartes’ *Meditations* and for his polemical work (in reply to Descartes) *Disquisitio metaphysica, seu dubitationes et instantiae adversus Renati Cartesii metaphysicam et responsa* (1644). Gassendi, more than anything else, is an episode in the controversy against Cartesian science, a page in the debate between the empirical and the deductive approaches. An admirer of Galileo, whose influence he felt, he grasped the importance of the laws of dynamics; as a reappraiser of atomism, he drew attention to a theory that suited the new science and stood in opposition to Descartes’ geometric mechanism. Moreover, since atomic theory implied the admission of a void, he came to support philosophically (against the Aristotelians and Descartes) what Torricelli and Pascal had demonstrated experimentally.
From a more properly speculative standpoint, Gassendi is of little interest. His logic has a distinctly nominalist and empiricist tone, while his physics follows Epicurean atomism, rethought in light of contemporary theories and above all with the concern to correct those assertions of it that were in glaring contrast with religion. Thus, for example, he admits creation *ex nihilo* (atoms, ungenerated and incorruptible from a natural standpoint, were created by God and can be annihilated by Him), as well as the fact that the motion of atoms is caused by God, the regulator and ordainer of the universe, Providence. Under Galileo’s influence, he maintains that it is not motion itself but the impulse to motion that is constant; and, with Telesio, that all atoms possess a kind of sensibility of their own (distinct from that of animals and men). The principle of sensibility and of life is the world-soul (a Stoic and also Neoplatonic doctrine). Thus, in Gassendi’s elaboration, Epicurean physics loses its materialistic and mechanistic structure. But this is less a critical rethinking than a compromise or, if one prefers, a contamination of materialism and spiritualism. Even his doctrine of the soul is a compromise: besides the soul made of the most subtle matter, there is in man another soul, the intellect, immaterial and immortal, created and infused by God into the body (*Physica*, sect. III, bk. III, ch. 3). He himself was aware of the inconsistency and tried in vain to resolve it: just as it is said that man is one despite being composed of body and soul, so the soul is one despite there being two souls in man (cf. *ibid.*, bk. IX, ch. 2).