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Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 (2002) 529-533



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The History of Philosophy and the History of Philosophy:
A Plea for Textual History in Context


There are at least three ways to write the history of philosophy. Some historians of philosophy emphasize the context and development of ideas, concentrating on the intellectual, social, and personal factors that affect the way philosophers have thought about their subject. Some contextualists limit their accounts to intellectual factors. 1 Others take account of broad social and cultural factors as well. 2 Analytic philosophers take a critical approach, considering the logic and merit of the arguments of past philosophers almost as though they are engaging in contemporary debates. 3 Others use the ideas of historical figures to support their own philosophical agendas. 4 I examine the merits and difficulties of developing a truly contextualized approach to the history of philosophy by using the writings of the French philosopher, Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) as an example.

What, then, is context? Context can be understood in several different ways, ranging from the context provided by text itself to the broad social context within which the philosopher worked. At the most basic level, the context is the text itself. The most acontextual philosophers take a snippets approach to historical figures. Interested in ideas about necessity or arguments for the existence of God [End Page 529] or the mind-body problem, they mine the writings of historical figures for their views on these questions to reconstruct their arguments. Often they extract snippets without even considering the author's aim for the text as a whole. This approach has frequently characterized discussions of Gassendi's philosophy. His major work, the Syntagma Philosophicum, is a massive treatise in difficult neo-Latin, daunting to all but the hardiest (or most foolish) of scholars. Consequently, of those philosophers who deal with Gassendi at all, many rely on the bits that have been translated into English or French, and seldom consider the work as a whole. But the work as a whole is what gives the parts their meaning. Gassendi wanted to develop a complete philosophy to replace Aristotelianism. Because he pursued philosophy in the manner of the Renaissance humanists, Gassendi accepted the ancient idea that a complete philosophy consists of three major parts: logic, physics, and ethics. 5 He organized his magnum opus accordingly. 6 In the manner of the humanists, he sought an ancient model for his philosophizing. For a variety of reasons, he selected the atomist and hedonist Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) as his model. As a Catholic priest, Gassendi found it necessary to transform Epicureanism into a theologically acceptable philosophy. The project of baptizing Epicurus is thus the aim and goal of the Syntagma Philosophicum. 7

Gassendi's Epicurean project is the key to understanding his arguments and assertions in the Syntagma Philosophicum. For example, he was not so much concerned to prove the existence of God, something he more or less took for granted, as he was to establishing the rule of divine providence in the world as a refutation of Epicurean anti-providentialism. 8 Similarly, he was not concerned with the mind-body problem in the manner of modern philosophers. Rather, he wanted to prove the immortality of the soul to refute Epicurean (and Hobbesian) mortalism. In so doing, he argued for the existence of an immaterial, immortal soul, thereby stipulating the limits to his mechanization of nature. 9

Gassendi's considerations of atomism were addressed to the concerns of early seventeenth-century natural philosophers. While he was genuinely interest in articulating a new philosophy of nature to replace Aristotle's and to find a convincing answer to the skeptics, 10 he had another concern, largely foreign to the twentieth century, and that concern was theological. In the aftermath of the Reformation, the Humanist revival of a multitude of ancient philosophies, the skeptical crisis, and the decline of Aristotelianism, which had been closely linked to both natural philosophy and theology, European thinkers had profound...

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