Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (review)

Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) was a French Catholic priest and an important member of the community of natural philosophers in the first half of the seventeenth century. Along with his contemporary René Descartes (1596–1650), he is one of the founders of the mechanical philosophy of nature, which they proposed as a replacement for the Aristotelianism that had provided philosophical foundations for natural philosophy since at least the thirteenth century. Gassendi approached the problem of articulating a new philosophy of nature by restoring the philosophy of Epicurus and altering its heterodox aspects to make it compatible with Christian theology. He approached philosophy in the manner of a Renaissance humanist, constantly interacting with classical texts and formulating his own philosophy by engaging with an ancient model. Subsequent generations of natural philosophers, including Robert Boyle (1627–91) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727), regarded him as a seminal figure in the formation of the mechanical philosophy.

Antonia Lolordo urges contemporary philosophers, who have generally been discouraged by Gassendi's erudite, humanist style, to take a new look at Gassendi and to take him seriously as a philosopher. To this end, she concentrates "on the aspects of Gassendi's natural philosophy that count as more philosophical in our sense of the term" (2). Accordingly, after chapters on Gassendi's life and times and philosophical opponents, she considers his theories of perception and knowledge, his ideas about space and time, his theories of matter and motion, his explanations of living things, and his views on faith, reason, and the immaterial soul. In each chapter she gives a detailed account of Gassendi's views and then subjects them to philosophical analysis and criticism.

Anachronistic from the outset, the book fails to convey a historically meaningful portrait of this early modern thinker. Although Lolordo gives clear expositions of Gassendi's arguments on the topics she considers, she does not place them in a broader context, either that of Gassendi's own project or of the philosophical controversies of the time. For example, she undertakes a lengthy discussion of Gassendi's arguments for atomism by considering the soundness of his arguments for their properties, without much attention to Gassendi's aim of restoring Epicureanism. Moreover, as she states at the beginning of the book, her selection of topics mirrors twentieth- and twenty-first-century concerns, rather than those of the early mechanical philosophers. It is this approach that causes her to neglect Gassendi's treatment of occult qualities without explaining the importance of this topic in the programmatic treatises on the mechanical philosophy, such as Gassendi's Syntagma Philosophicum and Descartes's Principles of Philosophy. The aim of these works was to demonstrate that the new mechanical philosophy could explain all qualities, including so-called occult ones such as magnetism, the heliotrope, and the weapon salve.

Gassendi attempted to create a complete philosophy, one that included the three classical subjects, namely, logic, physics, and ethics. Lolordo hardly mentions Gassendi's revision of Epicurean hedonism, in which he redefined pleasure in explicitly Christian terms. For Gassendi, the ultimate pleasure was the beatific vision of God in the afterlife, and divine providence molded the human will so that it could make choices leading to that goal. She vastly underestimates the role theology played in Gassendi's thinking by discussing it under the heading of "Faith and Reason," as if it were a separate topic, rather than seeing that it permeates his philosophical project, as it did for most thinkers in the seventeenth century. For example, she discusses Gassendi's arguments for the immaterial human soul as an example of the mind-body problem rather than situating his discussion in the context of his concern to formulate a mechanical philosophy of nature that would not lead to materialism.

As an exercise in rational reconstruction, Lolordo's book will be of limited interest to historians. Although she clearly explicates many of his ideas, her purpose seems more...