Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

GASSENDI AND HOBBES 227
give special prominence to views, for example about whether the world was
eternal, that showed Epicurus in a better theological light than Aristotle. Of
course Epicurus needed theological correction; but so did Aristotle.
That it made sense for Gassendi to present ideas favourable to the new science
in the form of erudite commentary does not mean that he hit on the most
satisfactory form for such a commentary, or even one that was adequate in his
own eyes. His principal work on Epicurus, Animadversiones in Decimum Librum
Diogenis Laertii (1649), was disorderly and ran to three volumes. Gassendi
allowed it to appear with great reluctance. The posthumously edited Syntagma
Philosophicum (1658), which is generally taken to be the culmination of his
work on Epicurus, is a commentary in part and contains material from redactions
intended to result in a commentary, but it is also and primarily a statement of the
philosophy Gassendi himself arrived at from a starting point in Epicurus. It is
known that he revised the manuscripts incorporated into the Syntagma many
times over a period of decades and that he tried out many different ways of
putting together his material, never finding one that was satisfactory. 6 The point
is that it was reasonable, even shrewd, to choose some form of erudite commentary
as a medium for his ideas, given the hostile elements in the audience he was
addressing. Descartes, who in the Discourse and the Meditations experimented
with quite different and innovative literary styles for the presentation of his
ideas, and who was either misunderstood or criticized for not being explicit
enough as a result, himself turned to something like a scholastic presentation in
the Principles of Philosophy, which was much more widely cited by his
followers and critics in the second half of the seventeenth century than the other
two works. And he toyed with the idea of writing an abrégé of a summa
philosophiae by Eustachius a Sancto Paulo as a vehicle for some of his thought.
What were the main Epicurean ideas that Gassendi expounded? In logic, the
idea that ‘canons’ or precepts for conceiving the real and finding the true were an
antidote to the complexities of Aristotelian dialectic, and the idea that we might
have, through signs, some access to what otherwise are relatively unknowable
things beyond sensory experience; in physics, the idea that the universe is
composed of atoms of matter in the void, and that the substances composed of
these atoms do not realize purposes intrinsic to those substances; in ethics, the
idea that well-being is an unperturbed state, in particular a state of freedom from
pain or of elevated pleasure. To see how these ideas were adapted to the
requirements of a ‘modern’ philosophy, it is necessary to turn to Syntagma
Philosophicum.
Logic
Logic occupies the First Part of the Syntagma, and Epicurus is mentioned in
different connections in each of the two introductory books. In the first of the
two, De origine et varietate logica, Epicurus’s canons for cognitive and practical
judgement are listed as part of a survey of existing logical systems. The second