Pierre Gassendi, 1592-1655: An Intellectual Biography (review)

430 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY standards of clarity and rigor. This is particularly true of their discussion of the nature of causal relata in chapter seven. Here Beauchamp and Rosenberg are not so much explicating the text which, to be charitable, is underdeveloped on these matters , but showing how Hume's fundamental notions can be developed within the general framework of the Humean position. In chapters three and four, the authors undertake the important philosophical task of defending Hume against standard criticisms. In chapter three they take over an argument from Donald Davidson in order to show how a Humean can respond to the claim that a causal relation can hold in a particular case without instancing any general law. The answer, which is short, sweet, and correct, is that a singular causal judgment does imply, on Hume's analysis, the existence of some regularity which this sequence instances, but it does not entail that the predicates used to describe or pick out the causal terms themselves always specify the appropriate covering law. Chapter four deals with the problem of how a Humean can distinguish causal from accidental regularities. This is transformed into the different but related question of how a Humean can explain the apparent ability of causal laws to support contrary to fact conditionals. The general strategy here is to locate the difference between nomological generalizations and accidental regularities in the attitude which we take to the regularity (or role that we assign to it) rather than in any difference in objective content. This, of course, is a characteristically Humean response that accords , for example, with Hume's own treatment of necessary connections and moral characteristics. This study has some tendency to diminish the richness of Hume's thought through ignoring John Passmore's warning that Hume's philosophy cannot be reduced to a single viewpoint. This is more than compensated for, however, by the authors' ability to show that Hume's philosophy is not simply historically significant, but also a position that still commands philosophical attention. ROBERT J. FOGELIN Dartmouth College Howard Jones. Pierre Gassendi, ~592-z655: An Intellectual Biography. Bibliotheca Humanistica & Reformatorica, volume xxxiv. Nieuwkoop, Netherlands: De Graaf, 1981. Pp. 320. Hfl. 9~. We should certainly welcome any serious attempt to come to grips with the career and significance of Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655 ), reckoned by some of his contemporaries one of the reigning triumvirate of European philosophers.' Before 1981, there existed only one book-length study of Gassendi in English--G.S. Brett's The Philosophy of Gassendi, published in 19o8 and badly in need of replacement. ~ Otherwise, of Craig B. Brush, ed. and trans., The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi, New York/London: Johnson Reprint, 1972, p. vii. G.S. Brett, The Philosophyof Gassendi, London: Macmillan, 19o8. BOOK REVIEWS 43~ scholars writing in English, we owe most to Richard H. Popkin and his former collaborator Prof. Craig B. Brush. 3 Any work dealing with Gassendi must certainly take into account the line of French scholarship running from Henri Berr to Bernard Rochot and culminating in O.R. Bloch's immense study, La Philosophie de Gassendi, published in 1971.4 Moreover, to respect the nature of Gassendi's concerns and to be useful to historians of ideas and the rise of seventeenth-century science, it must also situate itself in the wider debate concerning the nature and origins of seventeenth-century, and thus modern, "empiricism," a term Jones tends to employ with unsettling innocence.5 The absence of any firmly established critical tradition in English creates difficulties for the author of such a work, but even allowing for this, Jones's book, I think, disappoints in both respects. To give it its due, it is nothing if not a solid substitute for Brett; its arrangement in three sections is effective enough, opening with a brief biography of Gassendi, then focusing on Gassendi's attacks on Aristotle (1624), Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1634) and Descartes (1641), and closing with an assessment of Gassendi's life-long revaluation and synthesis of Epicureanism, an enterprise that Jones as a classicist is bound to admire. It is in connection with Gassendi's Epicureanism that Jones's chief thesis develops. Of...