Table Of ContentIDEAS IN CONTEXT
GASSENDI THE ATOMIST
Advocate of history in an age of science
IDEAS IN CONTEXT
Edited by Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, Quentin Skinner
and Wolf Lepenies
The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions
and of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that
were generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within
the contemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed
studies of the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by dif-
ferent audiences, it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development
of ideas in their concrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions
between the history of philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and
politics, and of literature, may be seen to dissolve.
Titles published in the series:
Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Philosophy
in History
J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History
M. M. Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits: Bernard Mandeville's Social
and Political Thought
Anthony Pagden (ed), The Languages of Political Thought in Early-Modern
Europe
David Summers, The Judgment of Sense
Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit 1770-
1807
Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order
Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe
This series is published with the support of the Exxon Education
Foundation.
GASSENDI THE ATOMIST
ADVOCATE OF HISTORY IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE
LYNN SUMIDAJOY
Assistant Professor of History and of Philosophy
Vanderbilt University
righi of the
of Cambridge
it uml ull
W all manner <>t book v
<<//>!•
Hcnn
The inn
ami published < ont
since IM4.
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE
NEW YORK NEWROCHELLE
MELBOURNE SYDNEY
PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcon 13,28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa
http://www.cambridge.org
© Cambridge University Press 1987
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1987
First paperback edition 2002
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Joy, Lynn Sumida.
Gassendi the atomist.
(Ideas in context)
Bibliography.
Includes index.
1. Gassendi, Pierre, 1592-1655. 2. Atomic theory -
History. 3. Science - History. 4. Philosophy, Ancient.
5. Atomic theory - Historiography. I. Title. II. Series.
B1887J69 1988 194 87-10899
ISBN 0 52130142 4 hardback
ISBN 0 52152239 0 paperback
For Janet and Jitsuo Sumida
CONTENTS
Preface page ix
List of illustrations xiii
INTRODUCTION
1 Other atomists, other skeptics, and other Epicureans: the
problem of determining the context of Gassendi's career 3
PART 1 HUMANIST HISTORIOGRAPHY
2 Refuting Aristotle is not enough: how to acquire the skills
of a French humanist 25
3 Gassendi's Life of Peiresc: the humanist's unattainable goal
of writing a universal history 41
4 The growth of Gassendi's Epicurean project from
biography and commentary to a history of philosophy 66
PART 2 PHYSICS AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
5 Unrecognized cultural baggage: the incoherence of
contemporary debates about atoms 83
6 Uncertainties of observation and explanation: the role of
optical anomalies in astronomy 106
7 Skepticism is based on bad history: Gassendi interprets
Epicurus' arguments concerning the existence and qualities
of atoms 130
8 Epicurus' conception of proof and Gassendi's historical
justification of an atomist metaphysics and physics 165
vii
viii Contents
9 Between culture and nature: was Gassendi a historian, a
scientist, an empiricist? 195
List of abbreviations used in the notes 227
Notes 228
Index of names 30 3
PREFACE
The writing of a book on Gassendi is necessarily a synthetic task.
Gassendi not only expounded many subjects, but he did so in a
manner which can only be fully understood by recognizing his own
synthetic aims as a scholar. The variety of contemporary academic
fields which must be brought together to explain his work includes
the history of science, the history of philosophy, the history of his-
toriography, classical scholarship, and French history. Moreover,
this task is made even more daunting by the challenge of deciphering
Gassendi's formidable texts, composed in a difficult late-Renaissance
Latin style interlaced with Greek, and by the challenge of stating
their significance for the modern reader. Anyone who follows
Gassendi down the labyrinthine trails of his work would be unable to
progress very far without the signposts and advice offered by fellow
scholars from diverse academic fields concerning the intellectual
geography of his writings. I have thus incurred many debts in the
preparation of this study.
Several sections of the present book were begun as chapters of my
Ph.D. dissertation in the Department of the History of Science at
Harvard University. At Harvard I had the immense good fortune of
reading Gassendi for the first time while I was a member of John
Murdoch's seminar on ancient Greek and medieval atomism. Pro-
fessor Murdoch's handling of these abstruse topics convinced me
that perhaps even Gassendi's apparently unintelligible passages
might be rendered intelligible through patient application. I am also
grateful to my other teacher, I. Bernard Cohen. His seminars on the
science of the seventeenth century made this period one of abiding
interest to me. While at Harvard, my work on Gassendi was supported
by a fellowship from the American Association of University
Women.
IX
x Preface
As a faculty member of both the History and Philosophy Depart-
ments of Vanderbilt University, I received further encouragement
in developing substantial new sections of the present book. These
sections focus on Gassendi's relations with the seventeenth-century
European community of historians and on the philosophical import
of his conception of the history of philosophy. This widening of the
scope of the book was made possible by an academic leave which was
jointly supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and
the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt.
I wish to express my thanks to several colleagues at other insti-
tutions who have also aided this study. Margaret Osier generously
commented on the manuscript, raising a number of pertinent
questions. The late Charles Schmitt made various suggestions which
proved extremely useful during the revision of the book. Marjorie
Grene has taken a special interest in this project and has extended
my discussion of the relationship between Gassendi and Descartes in
her own recent book on Descartes. Lorraine Daston reviewed an
earlier version of the manuscript I am also grateful for helpful sug-
gestions from Richard Westfall, Orest Ranum, and Richard KrolL
The editors of the Ideas in Context series have been most helpful
in bringing this book to publication. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schnee-
wind, and Quentin Skinner, through the creation of their series,
have provided a forum for the exploration of issues in the his-
toriography of philosophy in which Gassendi's history of philosophy
can meaningfully be discussed. Furthermore, constructive criticism
by an anonymous referee for the Cambridge University Press
improved this book substantially.
My debts to fellow Gassendi scholars are acknowledged in the
notes, especially the notes to Chapter 1, of this book. However, I
want here to pay my respects to the outstanding tradition of French
scholarship on Gassendi and his intellectual friends which has
dominated research in this area for nearly a century. The exacting
standards of scholarship set in the works of Philippe Tamizey de
Larroque, Cornelis de Waard, Rene Pintard, Robert Lenoble,
Bernard Rochot, and, more recently, Olivier Bloch are a measure
against which all other studies of Gassendi may be judged. Their
works have aided other Gassendi scholars in more ways than one.
Olivier Bloch, for example, has assembled in his La philosophie de
Gassendi (The Hague, 1971) an indispensable current bibliography of
Gassendi's manuscripts and published writings as well as important
books and articles about Gassendi printed before 1971 in various
languages. Rene Pintard, in his La Mothe le Vayer, Gassendi, Guy Patin
