Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

GASSENDI AND HOBBES 229
Syntagma that follows De logicae fine and that serves as transition from logic to
physics. The Institutio is in four parts, corresponding to the four ways in which
good thinking brings one closer to the truth and so to achieving the goal of logic.
There are canons for (1) forming clear ideas, (2) forming propositions, (3)
making sound inferences and (4) ordering or organizing correctly, by which
Gassendi means methods of discovery and of instruction. Of the four sets of
canons, it is the first and last that have the most philosophical interest. The third
set consists almost entirely of rules for simplifying Aristotelian syllogistic.
Gassendi has moved from the extreme hostility to syllogistic that he expressed in
the Exercitationes to a guarded acceptance of its value in the last chapter of De
logicae fine, and in the canons he suggests ways of improving Aristotelian logic
rather than arguing that it should be scrapped altogether. The tedium of the rules
for simplifying syllogistic is relieved by canon 16, which has some deflationary
remarks about the strength and source of knowledge conferred by so-called
‘scientific syllogisms’. These remarks are in keeping with Gassendi’s adoption in
De logicae fine of a via media between dogmatism and scepticism. The second
set of canons—concerned with forming propositions—is once again mainly on
Aristotelian lines.
The remaining two sets of canons, on forming clear ideas and on method
respectively, have closer connections with Gassendi’s physics than the other two
sets, and also reflect more clearly the influence of Epicurean canons that
Gassendi has discussed earlier in the logical books of the Syntagma. The first set
is to do with ideas or images of things in abstraction from the operations of
affirming or denying propositions about those things. Canons 1, 7, 8 and 18 tell
us what we are to aim at in our ideas. Accuracy and vividness are desirable
(canons 1 and 10); the greater the number of things of which we have ideas the
better (canon 18); and, above all, ideas should be ‘complete’ (ibid.).
Completeness in singular ideas or ideas of individuals is a matter of the
comprehensiveness of parts and attributes registered:
Since a particular thing…is also some kind of whole made up of its own
parts, just as a man is made up of a head, trunk, arms, legs and the other
smaller parts from which these are made, and is also some kind of subject
endowed with its own attributes, adjuncts, properties or qualities, just as
the same man is endowed with size, shape, colour, strength, wit, memory,
virtue, wisdom and so on, it is quite clear that the idea of this man will be
the more complete the more parts and attributes of him it represents.
(IL, 91)
Gassendi recommends ‘anatomy, chemistry and the other sciences’ as means of
acquiring more perfect singular ideas. More perfect general ideas are acquired
the more particulars are known to be covered by a given genus. An idea of
mankind that is at first confined to Europeans, Africans and Asians becomes
more perfect if it comes to extend to Americans. In the ideal case an idea of a