Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy

G.A.J. Rogers, Tom Sorell, Jill Kraye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135227517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Seventeenth-century philosophy scholars come together in this volume to address the Insiders--Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, and Hobbes--and Outsiders--Pierre Gassendi, Kenelm Digby, Theophilus Gale, Ralph Cudworth and Nicholas Malebranche--of the philosocial canon, and the ways in which reputations are created and confirmed. In their own day, these ten figures were all considered to be thinkers of substantial repute, and it took some time for the Insiders to come to be regarded as major and original philosophers. Today these Insiders all feature in the syllabi of most history of philosophy courses taught in western universities, and the papers in this collection, contrasting the stories of their receptions with those of the Outsiders, give an insight into the history of philosophy which is generally overlooked.

Part I
Outsiders

1
Becoming an Outsider

Gassendi in the History of Philosophy

Margaret J. Osler

Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) was an influential member of the community of natural philosophers during the first half of the seventeenth century. As a young man, he taught philosophy at the University of Aix; he enjoyed the friendship, collaboration and patronage of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637); and he developed a reputation for his contributions to astronomy. He devoted much of his scholarly life to restoring the philosophy of the ancient Greek atomist and hedonist Epicurus (342–270 BC) by showing how it could be made compatible with Christian theology. He moved in the highest intellectual circles, accepting patronage from Louis-Emmanuel de Valois, count of Alais, the governor of Provence, who was closely connected to the royal family.¹ He was named professor of the Collège Royal in 1645, thanks to Cardinal Richelieu.² He and René Descartes (1596–1650) were friends until their bitter dispute following the publication of the latter’s Meditationes in 1641. He corresponded with many of the notable scholars, natural philosophers and intellectuals of his day and became a close friend of the intellectual broker Marin Mersenne (1588–1648).

Despite Gassendi’s eminence during his lifetime, his later reputation has suffered. He is often judged by comparison to Descartes, who has attracted far more attention from philosophers and historians of philosophy. Gassendi’s declining reputation presents certain paradoxes to the historian attempting to understand his role in early modern philosophy. His contemporaries viewed both him and Descartes as advocates of the new, mechanical philosophy. Despite taking the seemingly radical step of restoring the heterodox philosophy of Epicurus, Gassendi acquired a reputation for conservatism during the Enlightenment for adopting the humanist approach to ancient works, whereas Descartes was viewed as the creator of a new approach to philosophy. Because the two philosophers had engaged in direct controversy in the ‘Objections and Replies’ to Descartes’ Meditations (1641), Gassendi’s philosophy has continued to be compared to Descartes’. Among twentieth- and twenty-first-century analytic philosophers, that controversy is practically the only context within which Gassendi’s name arises. Yet, ironically, despite Descartes’ reputation as the founder of modern philosophy and his status as a national icon in France,³ modern philosophy probably owes more of its substance to Gassendi’s ideas.

Gassendi wrote in the style of Renaissance humanism.⁴ Accordingly, he sought an ancient model on which to build a new philosophy of nature.⁵ The classical systems available to him included Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Sceptics. One might well ask why Gassendi, a Catholic priest, undertook the task of reviving and Christianising the most flagrantly pagan of the ancient philosophies, that of Epicurus, infamous for his materialism and his reputed atheism. One possible explanation for Gassendi’s attraction to Epicurus lies in the seemingly paradoxical fact that he found it easier to accommodate Epicureanism than any other ancient philosophy to his voluntarist theology and providentialist ethics:⁶ ‘I seemed to observe that many more difficulties are more easily explained from his [Epicurus’] physics of atoms and the void and from his morality of pleasure than from the positions of the other philosophers’.⁷ Gassendi carried out his project of Christianising Epicureanism in several works, the culmination of which was his posthumous Syntagma philosophicum.⁸

Gassendi’s thorough exposition of his Christianised version of Epicureanism in the posthumously published Syntagma philosophicum (1658) was a version of the ancient philosophy modified in light of his voluntarist theology and providential account of the creation.⁹ Gassendi divided this massive work into three parts, each part dealing with one of the traditional divisions of philosophy: Logica, Physica and Ethica. The result was a complete philosophy involving an empiricist theory of knowledge, an atomist philosophy of nature and a hedonistic ethics.

In order to make Epicureanism acceptable as an alternative to Aristotelianism, Gassendi had to deal with its theologically objectionable components. Accordingly, he argued for a single, incorporeal God instead of Epicurean polytheism, which had included a corporeal conception of the gods. He replaced the Epicurean denial of all divine interference in the world with an explicitly providential theology. He argued for the creation ex nihilo of a finite world instead of the Epicurean claim of the infinitude and eternity of atoms and the universe. He denied the plurality of worlds and attributed the cause of the world to God’s intelligent creative act rather than to the blind chance of the ancient atomists. He believed that final causes play an important role in natural philosophy, especially in the realm of living things. And he argued for the immateriality and immortality of the human soul.¹⁰

In the first part of the Syntagma philosophicum, the ‘Logica’, Gassendi spelled out his approach to epistemology, a task he had initiated in his first published work, the Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (1624). He questioned whether sensory knowledge could serve as the basis of demonstrable, certain knowledge, what the Aristotelians had called scientia: ‘I want only to observe that Aristotelian demonstration, being based on the senses and the senses being very deceptive and uncertain, how much certainty can there be in the demonstration and in science?’¹¹ Gassendi’s sceptical critique of the senses in the Exercitationes followed the arguments of Sextus Empiricus (fl. c. AD 200) quite closely.¹² Not satisfied with the suspension of judgment advocated by the ancient sceptics, Gassendi sought a middle way, which Richard Popkin has happily called ‘mitigated skepticism’:¹³

We would do best to hold some middle way between the Skeptics … and the dogmatics. For the dogmatics do not really know everything they believe they know, nor do they have the appropriate criteria to determine it; but neither does everything that the Skeptics turn into the subject of debate seem to be so completely unknown that no criteria can be found for determining it.¹⁴

Accepting the force of the sceptical arguments but not content with sceptical conclusions, he redefined the epistemic goal of science as probability. Accepting probability is the acknowledgment of our own limitations rather than a terrible compromise. Gassendi was thereby rejecting the traditional Aristotelian and Scholastic conception of scientia or demonstrative knowledge.¹⁵

On what epistemological foundation did Gassendi think such probable knowledge was based? Despite the cogency of the sceptical critiques of the senses, Gassendi thought that sensation provides a reliable basis for knowledge. He believed that ‘[a]ll the ideas that are contained in the mind derive their origin from the senses … The intellect or mind is a tabula rasa in which nothing is engraved [prior to sensation]’.¹⁶ Ideas may come into the mind directly from sensation or they may be the product of the action of the mind on those directly received. The mind forms this second kind of idea by the processes of conjoining, enlarging, diminishing, transferring, adapting, analogising and comparing.¹⁷ However complex the process by which the mind transforms the ideas coming directly from sensation, the fact remains that sensation—directly or indirectly—is the only source of ideas in the mind.

Properly understood, sense never fails. That is to say, the content of a sensation, considered in itself without reference to anything else, is what it is; in that sense it is free from error. Drawing on Epicurus, Gassendi distinguished between truths of being and truths of judgement. ‘True’, in this first sense, refers to the genuineness of things, not to the truth or falsity of propositions. Accordingly, fool’s gold is not false gold but true fool’s gold, and a painting of a man is not a false man but a true image of a man.¹⁸

The second kind of truth, ‘truth of existence’, applies to propositions. Truth and falsity, in this sense, apply to judgments about the external referents of our sensations:

Secondly … there, is a certain truth which consists in the conformity of the judgment and statement with the thing judged and reported in the statement; and it is this truth for which there is in fact a falsehood opposed to it, consisting obviously in the discrepancy between the judgment and statement and the thing judged and reported in the statement.¹⁹

It is only in this second sense of ‘truth’ that it makes sense to speak about error. Error arises when we make mistaken judgments about the referents of our sensations.

It is on the basis of this distinction between truths of being and truths of judgment that Gassendi claimed the infallibility of the senses:

It is not the senses themselves but the intellect which makes the error; and when it makes a mistake, it is not the fault of the senses but of the intellect whose responsibility it is as the higher and dominant faculty before it pronounced what a thing is like to inquire which of the different appearances produced in the senses (each one of them is the result of a necessity that produces them as they are) is in conformity with the thing.²⁰

Gassendi’s middle way led him to maintain that even if we cannot have science in the Aristotelian sense of demonstrative knowledge about real essences, we can achieve a science of appearances. Given his view that sense itself cannot fail—that is to say, that we have reliable knowledge of the appearances, if not of the intimate natures of things—he claimed that ‘the conditions for science exist, but always an experimental science … based on a...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Outsiders
• Part II Insiders
• Contributors
• Index