Gassendi’s Epicurus

This version of Gassendi’s Life and Doctrine of Epicurus comes from Volume III of Thomas Stanley’s 1660 “History of Philosophy.” Due to size limitations, it is presented here in several parts. Please note that this version contains typos, and should be checked against the PDF of the original here. [Note re the PDF version: At the time this was published, the Herculaneaum busts of Epicurus had not been recovered, and apparently Stanley – or his publisher – was not aware of Epicurus’ true appearance. The etching of Epicurus at the beginning of this book is not an accurate depiction of Epicurus.]

It should also be remembered when reading Gassendi’s commentary that he was a priest, and his statements and interpretations should be treated with caution necessarily associated with such a point of origin. Gassendi is attempting to put as “christianized” a face as possible on Epicurus. As stated on Wikipedia, “His best known intellectual project attempted to reconcile Epicurean atomism with Christianity.”

Beginning in 1645, Gassendi was chair of mathematics at the Royal College in Paris, and his position almost certainly was subject to scrutiny by the church. Wikipedia also cites the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy for the proposition that “There remains some controversy as to the extent to which Gassendi subscribed to the so-called libertinage érudit, the learned free-thinking that characterised the Tétrade, the Parisian circle to which he belonged, along with Gabriel Naudé and two others (Élie Diodati and François de La Mothe Le Vayer). Gassendi, at least, belonged to the fideist wing of the sceptics, arguing that the absence of certain knowledge implied the room for faith.”

It is in epistemology, however, rather than ethics, that Norman DeWitt’s “Epicurus and His Philosophy” contains an important criticism of Gassendi:

“It is an even worse mistake to have confused the tests of truth with the content of truth, that is, the tools of precision with the stones of the wall. This was the blunder of Pierre Gassendi, who revived the study of Epicurus in the seventeenth century. It was his finding “that there is nothing in the intellect which has not been in the senses.” From this position John Locke, in turn, set out as the founder of modern empiricism. Thus a misunderstanding of Epicurus underlies a main trend of modern philosophy. This astonishing fact begets an even greater concern for a correct interpretation, which may cause Locke to appear slightly naive.”

…

The mistake of Gassendi, to which Locke fell a prey, was in confusing the test of knowledge with the source of knowledge. Epicurus based his Ethics upon his Physics and as a basis of his Physics he laid down the Twelve Elementary Principles, derived chiefly from his predecessors, the truth of which he made no pretence of deriving from sensation. Moreover, the test of the truth of all inferential conclusions was not single but triple, Sensations, Anticipations (innate ideas), and Feelings. The mind of the newborn infant, so far from seeming to him a blank tablet, was thought to have dimly inscribed upon it, as the venous system is outlined in the embryo, the patterns of the thoughts of the mature man. Locke’s theory of cognition, compared to that of Epicurus, is naive.”

As further evidence of this caution, it is useful to compare Gassendi’s statements regarding Epicurean ethics with those presdented in the letter of Cosma Raimondi. Raimondi, even though writing two hundred years before Gassendi, is much more direct in describing how Epicurean philosophy contradicts Stoic and Platonic and Aristotelian positions, a conflict which is only implicit in the material that follows.