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  • Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy
  • Lisa T. Sarasohn
Antonia LoLordo . Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. x + 283. Cloth, $75.00.

After a spate of monographs on Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) in the mid-1990s, the scholarly discussion of this most difficult (or at least difficult to translate) French philosopher has largely been confined to the pages of scholarly journals. Except for Sylie Taussig's fine translation of Gassendi's Latin letters into French, and an issue of Dix-septième siècle devoted to the thinker, no major book-length study has appeared. Antonia LoLordo fills this gap in Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy. Her aim is "defamiliarizing the early modern philosophic landscape" by introducing Gassendi as a major player in a diverse topography of thought. In her analysis, LoLordo articulates and critiques the philosophic content of Gassendi's various works, as well as challenging the interpretations of some of his modern exegetes, most notably, O. R. Bloch and Margaret J. Osler.

LoLordo focuses on Gassendi's natural philosophy, epistemology, and ontology. Her contention that Gassendi "was a central figure in seventeenth-century philosophy" will come as no surprise to those familiar with the course of early modern philosophy. LoLordo systematically treats Gassendi's major and minor works, especially his early anti-Aristotelian critique, the Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos, and the statement of his own philosophy, the 1655 Syntagma Philosophicum. Her discussion of Gassendi's theory of signs and its relation to his probabilistic natural philosophy is perspicacious; she contests Richard Popkin's argument that Gassendi was a "mitigated skeptic" who accepted only probable knowledge of appearances. LoLordo argues that the skepticism expressed in Gassendi's early work gave way to a more positive evaluation of the reliability of human knowledge later. We can reason from effects to an evident knowledge of causes, even if their internal natures remain occult.

Thus, the manifest signs we see in the world allow us to assume as evident the existence of atoms and void. Gassendi believed that motion provides indisputable evidence for an Epicurean ontology. He argued that motion was an infused property of atoms and their concretions, given by God as a way of locating secondary causation in the created world. LoLordo challenges Osler's argument that Gassendi's emphasis on God's power precluded any sort of real activity on the part of atoms. The inherent motion of atoms and corpuscles, their vibrations and textures, are somehow responsible for the production of qualities from quantitative characteristics. While some ideas about nature are probable rather than evident, like Copernicanism, others are indubitable.

LoLordo argues that Gassendi's semi-probabilistic epistemology freed him to accept with great equanimity the various difficulties presented in trying to articulate a material natural philosophy and retain Catholic orthodoxy, particularly in relation to doctrines concerning the incorporeal soul and divine immateriality. He was not concerned with their possibly heterodox content. One can "simply suspend judgment," an epistemological stance, LoLordo argues, which is perfectly consistent with the Epicureanism Gassendi was rehabilitating for a Christian audience. LoLordo minimizes the impact of theological concerns on Gassendi, either as an impetus in developing his physics, as Osler argues, or [End Page 485] as leading him to a kind of "double-truth," as Bloch maintains. Instead, "Gassendi's natural philosophy was put forward for its own sake" as an alternative to the soon-to-be rejected Aristotelianism of the schools.

It is unclear what putting forward a doctrine "for its own sake" means in the contest of Gassendi's reformed atomism. Although LoLordo knows the philosophic milieu of the early seventeenth century, which she often recounts in a kind of graduate-student-preparing-forher-comprehensives sort of way, she is not sensitive to the historical context of Gassendi's work. She dismisses topics which do not interest her, such as ethics and pedagogy, because they are of little interest to a modern philosophic sensibility. In doing so she misses the coherence of Gassendi's philosophic program, which he presented as a "syntagma," a compendium which functions as an entire system, just...

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