1592-1655

French Natural Philosopher, Mathematician, and Priest

Pierre Gassendi is best known as the seventeenth-century rehabilitator of the atomism of the ancient Greek moralist and natural philosopher, Epicurus (341-270 B.C.). Gassendi found in atomism a way both to combat the extreme skepticism that had pervaded French intellectual life since the late sixteenth century and to overturn Aristoteleanism, which was the dominant philosophy and "science" of both the church and learned culture. Gassendi thus straddled a thin line between orthodox and heterodox ideas: on the one hand an ordained priest in search of certainty amid the skepticism brought about by a revival of ancient Greek Pyrrhonism and the disillusioning experience of the French Wars of Religion (1559-1598); on the other hand something of an iconoclast, whose stated goal was to overturn the metaphysical assumptions that had underpinned the church and intellectual authority since the Middle Ages...