Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

GASSENDI AND HOBBES 223
Though they were friends, then, and though their views coincided up to a
point, Hobbes and Gassendi also had some unsurprising doctrinal differences.
We shall see more of the differences to do with theology and materialism later.
But there were also others. They differed in important ways in their attitudes
toward the ancients. Gassendi was a critic of Aristotle throughout his intellectual
life and a critic also of the neo-Aristotelian doctrines of the scholastic curriculum.
In the preface to his first published work, Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus
Aristoteleos, he says that he was disappointed that the philosophy that he was
taught brought him none of the freedom from vexation that writers such as
Cicero promised the subject could provide. Still, Gassendi did not believe that a
better overall philosophy was to be found in his own age, and those of his
contemporaries whom he did admire, such as Pierre Charron, made use of ancient
rather than modern doctrine to criticize Aristotle. In Charron’s case the ancient
doctrine employed was pyrrhonism. Gassendi followed Charron’s lead in his
lecture courses in the university of Aix. Pyrrhonist arguments were used in
criticism of the whole range of Aristotle’s philosophy, and the material for these
lectures was the basis in turn for the first volume of the Exercitationes, which
appeared in 1624. Book II of this work contained arguments suggesting that
science in Aristotle’s sense, that is, demonstrative knowledge of the necessity of
observed effects based on knowledge of the natures or essences of substances,
was beyond human capacities, while a more modest science, presupposing no
essences of substances and no knowledge of essences and ending up only in
probabilistic conclusions about effects, was possible. Books IIIV were devoted to
would-be refutations, inspired by pyrrhonism, of Aristotelian doctrines in
physics, astronomy and biology. Book VI was an attack on Aristotle’s
metaphysics. Finally, Book VII expounded the non-Aristotelian moral
philosophy of Epicurus.
A second volume of the Exercitationes was planned, but it was suppressed by
Gassendi for reasons that still are not well understood. He may have become
dissatisfied with sceptical arguments, believing that they fuelled a potentially
endless controversy about Aristotelian science without putting anything in its
place. He may have come to the conclusion that others, such as Patrizi, had
already criticized Aristotle so thoroughly as to make more of the Exercitationes
redundant. He may have found in Mersenne’s writings a more sophisticated and
satisfactory approach to the questioning of Aristotle. 3 Or again, he may have
taken his cue from the increasingly severe reaction of the educational
establishment in Paris to challengers of the learned authorities: in 1624 the
Sorbonne managed to prevent the public defence in Paris of a number of theses
against Aristotle. Whatever his reasons for holding back the second volume,
Gassendi did not cease to make use of the ancients in working out an anti-
Aristotelian philosophy of science. Within a few years of the publication of the
first volume, and perhaps on the advice of Mersenne, he was already studying
Epicurus and contemplating the rehabilitation of his philosophy as a rival to
Aristotle’s. He was confirmed in this plan by a journey he made in December