The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley

Author:Simon Critchley [Critchley, Simon]
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Autobiography, Death, Social Science, Death; Grief; Bereavement, Modern, General, Philosophers, Family & Relationships, Biography, History of Ideas & Popular Philosophy, Biography & Autobiography, Philosophy, Philosophers - Death, History & Surveys, Death & Dying
ISBN: 9781847080103
Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 2008-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

Pierre Gassendi

(1592-1655)

We briefly met Gassendi above (see Epicurus). Apparently, Moliere was a student of Gassendi and was inspired by his teacher to translate Lucretius' On the Nature of the Universe into French. "Gassendism" was very influential and the main rival to Cartesianism in the seventeenth century as an alternative to Scholasticism. Indeed, Gassendi raises what Descartes called "the objection of objections" against his philosophy: namely that all knowledge, even if clear and distinct, as Descartes always emphasized, might be about nothing outside our own minds and have no contact with reality. Descartes replies with characteristic irritation by refusing to take the objection seriously, saying, if true, "then we have to shut the door completely on reason, and be content to be monkeys, or parrots, and no longer men." (This is a terrible slur on both monkeys and parrots.)

The core of Gassendi's philosophy is what he calls "mitigated scepticism." This consists in the rather improbable attempt to reconcile the atomism and materialism of Epicurus with the revealed truths of Christianity. This is an audacious task, particularly when Gassendi argues like a libertine that the highest good is "voluptuousness."

Although he died of a long illness from lung disease, it is perhaps an appropriate immortality for an atomist like Gassendi that his name was given to a large crater on the moon.

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