Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

226 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
GASSENDI
When Hobbes warns against relying on authors and insists on reaching
conclusions from evident first principles, he may seem to reflect the intellectual
style of early modern philosophy better than Gassendi does by his use of
Epicurus. But this impression may have more to do with a certain kind of
historiography than with the facts of intellectual life in the 1600s. The usual
histories of this period of philosophy emphasize novelty, revolution and
methodological principles that seem to prepare the way for nineteenth- and
twentieth-century science. Bacon’s, Galileo’s and Descartes’s writings lend
themselves particularly well to this conception of a time of decisive intellectual
change, a time that ushered in modernity and saw out tradition, and these
writings tend to be discussed to the exclusion of works of other seventeenthcentury
figures—even figures whom the canonical moderns respected and took
for allies, such as Gassendi. The standard histories may not only be criticized for
overlooking the celebrity and influence that Gassendi enjoyed in his own day;
they may not only be criticized for making this celebrity hard to understand once
it is pointed out; they may also be criticized for missing the strengths of the
traditional form of presentation used by Gassendi in the context of the early
seventeenth century.
Many of those who promoted the new science and attacked the old philosophy
did so in books that they knew would meet hostility from the church and the
schoolmen. By choosing for some of his works the literary form of the erudite
rehabilitation of an ancient authority like Epicurus, Gassendi was employing the
methods that the doctors of the church had used to appropriate Aristotle. Again,
by being comprehensive in his treatment of Epicurus’s critics Gassendi gave the
impression of being an even-handed exponent of his chosen author, in contrast
with sycophantic followers of Aristotle. He discussed the views of Epicurus in the
context of the antagonisms between the ancient Greek schools of philosophy,
including the Peripatetics, and so he was able to revive a sense of Aristotle and
his school as representing just one way of thinking among others during a period
in which Greek philosophy was sectarian, and when no one sect had any special
authority. Again, by showing that the genuine Epicurus had been completely lost
in the lore about Epicurus, Gassendi was able to introduce to intellectual life a
virtually new figure, not just a relatively familiar one who deserved a second
hearing. Apart from the novelty of the Epicurus that Gassendi revived, there was
the relevance of his views to the topical issues of the anomalies in Aristotle’s
physics, and the significance of scepticism. In relation to scepticism,
Epicureanism seemed to claim less, and so to be less vulnerable to sceptical
criticism, than Aristotelianism. This was the lesson of Gassendi’s exposition of
Epicurean canonics as a preferred logic. In relation to seventeenth-century
physics, Epicurean explanations avoided some of the anomalies that Aristotelian
explanations were increasingly embarrassed by. 5 At the same time, it could be
regarded as a comprehensive natural philosophy.Finally, Gassendi was able to