皮埃尔·伽桑狄

作品

• 1644形而上学研究（Disquisitio metaphysica）

  伽桑狄对《沉思集》的第五组反驳、笛卡尔的答辩以及伽桑狄的再驳，逐点展开：心灵只能通过取自感官的观念来认识自身与上帝，而存在可以从任何行动推出，走路和思维都一样。

• 1658哲学体系（Syntagma philosophicum）

  他死后出版的逻辑学、物理学和伦理学体系：伊壁鸠鲁的原子与虚空，但由上帝创造且数目有限；另有不朽的理性灵魂，以及心境平静、身体无痛的幸福。

立场

Gassendi set out to replace Aristotle’s natural philosophy with that of Epicurus, purged of what a Christian could not accept. Matter consists of indivisible atoms moving in a void, but the atoms are created by God, finite in number and set in motion by him; the world is governed by providence, and besides the material soul that humans share with animals there is an immortal rational soul. In the theory of knowledge he took a middle way between dogmatism and Pyrrhonian scepticism: all knowledge starts from the senses, and reason reaches the appearances of things and their probable causes, not their inner essences. This was the basis of his objections to Descartes. The mind, he argued, has no idea of itself or of God that does not come from sensory experience; Descartes could have inferred his existence from any of his actions, not only from thinking; and it is unclear how a mind without extension could be united with a body. He addressed Descartes as “O mind”, and Descartes answered “O flesh”. His ethics follows Epicurus: happiness is tranquillity of mind and the absence of bodily pain. Through the abridgement of his philosophy by his pupil François Bernier (1674–1678) and through Walter Charleton in England his atomism reached Boyle, Locke and Newton, though how much each of them owed to him is still debated.

生平与背景

Pierre Gassendi was born on 22 January 1592 in Champtercier near Digne in Provence, into a farming family. He studied at Digne and Aix, took a doctorate in theology at Avignon in 1614 and became a priest. From 1617 to 1623 he taught philosophy at the University of Aix, and his lectures against Aristotle became the first book of his Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (1624). When the Jesuits took over the college his teaching there ended; he remained a canon, and from 1634 provost, of the cathedral chapter of Digne. Through the antiquarian Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc and the Minim friar Marin Mersenne he joined the learned correspondence of Europe. In 1631 he was the first to observe a transit of Mercury across the Sun, which Kepler had predicted, and in 1640 he had a stone dropped from the mast of a moving galley at Marseille to show, in support of Galileo, that it lands at the foot of the mast. In 1641 he wrote the Fifth Objections to Descartes’ Meditations and in 1644 published the whole exchange with his rejoinders. Appointed professor of mathematics at the Collège royal in Paris in 1645, he gave up teaching after a few years because of illness. He wrote lives of Peiresc (1641) and of Epicurus (1647) and a large commentary on the tenth book of Diogenes Laertius (1649). He died in Paris on 24 October 1655; his Syntagma philosophicum appeared in his collected works (Lyon, 1658).

其他主要作品

• Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (book I, 1624)
• Fifth Objections to Descartes’ Meditations (1641)
• Life of Peiresc (Viri illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc vita, 1641)
• On the Life and Character of Epicurus (De vita et moribus Epicuri, 1647)
• Notes on the Tenth Book of Diogenes Laertius (Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii, 1649)