Dictionary of Scientific Biography

(1624) aimed against the Scholastics; he prudently withheld a second volume. His reputation—and the size of his correspondence—increased, and a canonry at Digne assured his independence (he became provost in 1634).

In Paris in 1624 and again in 1628, he met Mersenne, Mydorge, the du Puy brothers, and Luillier. In 1629-1630 he traveled with the latter in the Low Countries, where he met Isaac Beeckman.

On 7 November 1631 he observed the transit of Mercury, and in his Mercurius in sole visus (1632) he treated the event as a confirmation of Kepler's ideas. He returned to Digne at the end of 1632 and undertook an extensive study of Epicurus' thought, in the course of which he expressed his own. At some junctures he clearly departed from the ancient philosopher, but at others he placed statements inspired by materialism next to affirmations of orthodoxy with which they were difficult to reconcile. He was, however, in no hurry to publish and seems even to have interrupted his researches in 1637 when Peiresc died. He resumed them again under the protection of the new governor of Aix-en-Provence, Louis de Valois, at whose behest he returned to Paris after election to the Assembly of the Clergy, a position he was obliged to renounce in 1641. At the request of Mersenne, he immediately thereafter composed the Cinquièmes objections to the Meditations of Descartes. The Instantiae was published in 1644.

Gassendi's growing influence led Louis de Valois and Cardinal Alphonse de Richelieu, archbishop of Lyons, to appoint him professor of mathematics (i.e., astronomy) at the Collège Royal in Paris in 1645. He published a Leçon inaugurale and a Cours, in which he set forth the system of Copernicus, while prudently falling back on that of Tycho. He taught for only a short time, however. His health was uncertain, and in 1648 Louis de Valois called him back to Provence, where he spent several years. His Animadversiones of 1649 contains a portion of his works on Epicurus together with the Greek text and translation of book 10 of Diogenes Laertius.

In Paris once again in 1653, Gassendi produced a third version of his great work entitled Syntagma philosophicum, but he did not resume teaching. He died at the home of his host, Habert de Montmort, and was buried at St. Nicolas des Champs on 26 October 1655.

Gassendi's Opera omnia was published in six volumes by his friends in Lyons (1658), according to a plan he had established himself. The first two volumes contain the Syntagma; the third, a series of scientific works; the fourth, the astronomical lectures and observations; the fifth, the Lives of Astronomers and Epicurean works, as well as the Life of Peiresc; and the sixth, the Latin correspondence he had selected to preserve. The Animadversiones was not reprinted in its original form until 1675.

Although he excited the curiosity and attention of others, Gassendi did not seek to do so. He was not the leader of the “libertines” and the future “philosophes.” Olivier Bloch, in his authoritative thesis, sees in Gassendi a belated humanist rather than an avantgarde thinker.1 There is no reason to question the sincerity of his testimonies of allegiance to a church of which he was a respected dignitary, as were his best friends, Peiresc and Mersenne. His true intellectual master was Galileo. In the Exercitationes of 1624 Gassendi had demonstrated his philosophic independence, and as early as 12 July 1625 he wrote to Galileo that he shared his Copernican ideas. But he never had to suffer the anxieties of the great Florentine. His choice of Epicurean atomism as a framework for the exposition of his ideas appears to have been more a revolt against Scholasticism than the expression of any profound conviction. Moreover, his erudition embraced all doctrines, including those of the church fathers, whereas he rejected such important elements of Epicureanism as the vertical fall and swerving of atoms.

Gassendi's eclecticism was that of a skeptic assured that no one doctrine penetrates to the essence of things—indeed, this is a constant aspect of his thought. Yet he proceeded as would a historian for whom the human mind had exhausted all possibilities, in contrast to Descartes, who wrote as if unaware that anyone had ever done philosophy before him. Gassendi's first published letter (to Pibrac, 8 April 1621) reveals an extreme diversity in what he chose to adopt and a great deal of personal assurance; he rejected only dogmatism, even when Epicurean. Bound by no fixed viewpoint, he could more easily go along with the traditions of his peasant milieu. If his morality preached happiness, his method for attaining it was conformist. A worldly type like Saint-Évremond thought him timid. A fanatic like J.-B. Morin consigned him to the flames. Descartes accused him of nothing less than materialism—thereby contributing more than slightly to the suspicion in which he was held. Gassendi, in turn, treated Descartes as a dogmatist. Moreover, he disappointed the materialists. Gassendi wished, Karl Marx declared, to put a nun's habit on the body of Lais.2 In reality, Gassendi, believing Aristotle's metaphysics to be pagan, attempted to establish a metaphysics that would be Christian, but in harmony with the fundamentally anti-Aristotelian contemporary science.