皮埃尔-加森迪:人文主义、科学与现代哲学的诞生

IF 0.2 0 RELIGION
{"title":"皮埃尔-加森迪:人文主义、科学与现代哲学的诞生","authors":"","doi":"10.56315/pscf12-23bellis","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"PIERRE GASSENDI: Humanism, Science, and the Birth of Modern Philosophy edited by Delphine Bellis, Daniel Garber, and Carla Rita Palmerino. London, UK: Routledge, 2023. 416 pages. Hardcover; $160.00. ISBN: 9781138697454. *Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) is one of those names in the history of science whose contribution remains only vaguely understood or remembered. A French Catholic priest, philosopher, mathematician, humanist, and astronomer, Gassendi's advocacy of a theologically re-worked ancient atomic theory of matter was a significant factor in the demise of late medieval Aristotelian conceptions of informed matter. Gassendi was also highly influential in reviving ancient Epicureanism, the hedonist moral philosophy from which modern utilitarianism traces its origins. Advocating a theologically modified form of Sextus Empiricus's ancient skepticism--in which we have knowledge only of observable appearances rather than of metaphysical essences--Gassendi shaped the way modern scientific knowledge came to be understood. Gassendi was thus a key figure in the emergence of modern empiricism, which brought him into prominent conflict with Descartes. *This is a beautifully researched and presented volume by thirteen fine Gassendi scholars. The contributions are divided into three parts: Gassendi's Epicurean Project, Its Genesis and Its Sources; Gassendi the Polemist; and Gassendi's Science and Philosophy in Context. Further, for a book of niche historical interest, the writing is delightfully clear and accessible. However, for theologically interested readers of Perspectives in Science and Christian Faith, this volume has a glaring--yet also illuminating--problem. It is theologically blind. *For the academic specialist in Renaissance studies and early modern science, this volume is eminently solid. The editors and the contributors are all highly credentialed academics who are well respected in Gassendi scholarship circles. The detailed engagement with primary sources, the density of notes and bibliographies, and the scholarly rigor of all contributions are highly impressive. The specialist reader is going to have their understanding of Gassendi incrementally expanded with some interesting new details brought to light, and some existing evaluations in the literature carefully modified and improved. Even so, there are no significant new discoveries in its very carefully researched pages. The great merit of the book is not as a must read for Gassendi specialists, but as an accessible and rich guide for the nonspecialist. *The editors and contributors all seek to demonstrate how important a thinker Pierre Gassendi was. The nonspecialist reader can learn from this book's pages what a powerful influence this remarkable priest and humanist had in his own world, and how that influence remains deeply with us to this day. His influence on significant streams in early modern philosophy, mathematics, science, and theological thinking is deep and lasting. A knowledge of Gassendi is necessary for thinkers interested in understanding the roots of contemporary science and its relation to Christian faith. If you do not know much about Gassendi, I highly recommend reading this book. *Gassendi's legacy is his formative role in modern empiricism, modern hedonic ethics, and modern atomistic materialism. In these domains, Gassendi's influence is remarkably deep. Any good scholarly work that opens our eyes to what he did for us is valuable for helping readers understand the assumption-framing sources of the life-world we now inhabit. But theologically, what Gassendi did for us is more complex than any contemporary historian of modern science can be expected to unpack. *The contributors demonstrate that Gassendi was a very attractive person and thinker, and one cannot help but like him when reading about his life, his scholarship, and his astonishing intellectual and scientific achievements. But any close look at Gassendi cannot fail to notice both how theologically embedded his work is, and also how inexorably his work leads us away from Christian theology itself over the following two centuries. This \"leading away\" is, where recognized, assumed to be obvious \"progress\" in this volume. Gassendi's Christian empirical skepticism, his theologically adjusted form of Democritean atomism, and his complex integration of Epicurean hedonism with Catholic virtue ethics are all remarkable feats of theological innovation. These innovations are latent in the intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century Europe, but it is Gassendi who is the genius who is able to winsomely articulate them. Harnessing forces that have been at work in the Western theological, natural philosophy, and Renaissance mind for some time, this humble man of great learning and astonishing output manifests the intellectually reforming spirit of his times. But the currents are more powerful than this one man. Gassendi could not have known its outcome, but his writings are a significant part of a new movement that firmly takes us out of medieval Christendom and into the secular, and eventually post-Christian, scientific age. The Whigs have labeled this adventure \"Progress,\" but the \"Death of God\" has been integral to it, which Gassendi himself would no doubt have been horrified by. And the process itself is more difficult to understand than any blithe secular optimism or merely positive historical objectivity can account for. *Given how Renaissance and early modern European natural philosophy grew out of Western Christendom, the manner in which it gave birth to a nineteenth-century science that broke entirely free from Christian theology is hard to explain and complex to evaluate theologically. Anti-religious Progressives of the nineteenth century are clearly the heirs of Gassendi in their atheistic skepticism, agnostic empiricism, calculative hedonism, experimental and mechanistic instrumentalism, and materialistic atomism. Yet not only \"they,\" but \"we\" Christian naturalists who accept the validity of Thomas Huxley's domain demarcation between science and theology are Gassendi's heirs. *Gassendi raises significant \"science and religion\" questions for us today that this volume of tightly historical accounts has no interest in. But it is not even that simple, for underneath the contributors' theological indifference is the influence of Gassendi's non-essentialist view of knowledge--in which one can know only observable facts, never essential meanings. Guiding their every evaluation is the assumption that where our modern scientific life-world follows trajectories that trace back to Gassendi, in those trajectories, Gassendi was right. There is no critique of \"us\" in such a \"history\"; this idea makes the volume more of a self-congratulatory hagiography of present post-Christian naturalistic prejudices than anything else. *All the really interesting theological questions about our knowledge of nature that Gassendi throws up, are simply not present. The contributors never consider what a world-shaping metaphysical innovation this new philosophy of matter is. The idea that Aristotelian hylomorphism (where all physical beings are matter-and-form composites) might have gotten something right never comes up. Hylomorphism--today totally displaced by Gassendi's atomism--holds that intelligible qualities, such as purpose and essence, are integral with physical being's material and efficient causalities. But contemporary sciences--and particularly the life sciences--are trying (ironically?) to understand a world without purpose or intrinsic meaning (what then is a mind and a cosmos for? asks Thomas Nagel). What if there really are purposes and essential meanings embedded in nature that we can to some degree know? We cannot follow up those possibilities if we are determined to stick with Gassendi's purely atomist philosophy of matter. And the idea never comes up in this book, that Descartes--though, indeed, totally whipped by Gassendi's skeptical and non-essentialist critiques--may yet have grasped something true about the nature of intelligibility (rational and essential truths) that cannot be explained by an entirely external and phenomenological epistemology. The supposedly objective and merely positivist historical scholars in this volume are all firmly on Gassendi's side. *The glaring problem with the book--at least to a Christian interested in \"science and religion\"--is that it has absolutely no interest in what theological lessons we might learn from better understanding the life and thought of Pierre Gassendi. The book never asks what Gassendi's atomist, hedonist, and epistemic legacy means for theology and science today. But readers who ask those questions will be better equipped to so do by reading this very fine work of (alas, theologically and metaphysically eviscerated) modern historiography about the life and thought of Pierre Gassendi. *Reviewed by Paul Tyson, Senior Honorary Fellow with the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, University of Queensland, Australia.","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"76 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Pierre Gassendi: Humanism, Science, and the Birth of Modern Philosophy\",\"authors\":\"\",\"doi\":\"10.56315/pscf12-23bellis\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"PIERRE GASSENDI: Humanism, Science, and the Birth of Modern Philosophy edited by Delphine Bellis, Daniel Garber, and Carla Rita Palmerino. London, UK: Routledge, 2023. 416 pages. Hardcover; $160.00. ISBN: 9781138697454. *Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) is one of those names in the history of science whose contribution remains only vaguely understood or remembered. A French Catholic priest, philosopher, mathematician, humanist, and astronomer, Gassendi's advocacy of a theologically re-worked ancient atomic theory of matter was a significant factor in the demise of late medieval Aristotelian conceptions of informed matter. Gassendi was also highly influential in reviving ancient Epicureanism, the hedonist moral philosophy from which modern utilitarianism traces its origins. Advocating a theologically modified form of Sextus Empiricus's ancient skepticism--in which we have knowledge only of observable appearances rather than of metaphysical essences--Gassendi shaped the way modern scientific knowledge came to be understood. Gassendi was thus a key figure in the emergence of modern empiricism, which brought him into prominent conflict with Descartes. *This is a beautifully researched and presented volume by thirteen fine Gassendi scholars. The contributions are divided into three parts: Gassendi's Epicurean Project, Its Genesis and Its Sources; Gassendi the Polemist; and Gassendi's Science and Philosophy in Context. Further, for a book of niche historical interest, the writing is delightfully clear and accessible. However, for theologically interested readers of Perspectives in Science and Christian Faith, this volume has a glaring--yet also illuminating--problem. It is theologically blind. *For the academic specialist in Renaissance studies and early modern science, this volume is eminently solid. The editors and the contributors are all highly credentialed academics who are well respected in Gassendi scholarship circles. The detailed engagement with primary sources, the density of notes and bibliographies, and the scholarly rigor of all contributions are highly impressive. The specialist reader is going to have their understanding of Gassendi incrementally expanded with some interesting new details brought to light, and some existing evaluations in the literature carefully modified and improved. Even so, there are no significant new discoveries in its very carefully researched pages. The great merit of the book is not as a must read for Gassendi specialists, but as an accessible and rich guide for the nonspecialist. *The editors and contributors all seek to demonstrate how important a thinker Pierre Gassendi was. The nonspecialist reader can learn from this book's pages what a powerful influence this remarkable priest and humanist had in his own world, and how that influence remains deeply with us to this day. His influence on significant streams in early modern philosophy, mathematics, science, and theological thinking is deep and lasting. A knowledge of Gassendi is necessary for thinkers interested in understanding the roots of contemporary science and its relation to Christian faith. If you do not know much about Gassendi, I highly recommend reading this book. *Gassendi's legacy is his formative role in modern empiricism, modern hedonic ethics, and modern atomistic materialism. In these domains, Gassendi's influence is remarkably deep. Any good scholarly work that opens our eyes to what he did for us is valuable for helping readers understand the assumption-framing sources of the life-world we now inhabit. But theologically, what Gassendi did for us is more complex than any contemporary historian of modern science can be expected to unpack. *The contributors demonstrate that Gassendi was a very attractive person and thinker, and one cannot help but like him when reading about his life, his scholarship, and his astonishing intellectual and scientific achievements. But any close look at Gassendi cannot fail to notice both how theologically embedded his work is, and also how inexorably his work leads us away from Christian theology itself over the following two centuries. This \\\"leading away\\\" is, where recognized, assumed to be obvious \\\"progress\\\" in this volume. Gassendi's Christian empirical skepticism, his theologically adjusted form of Democritean atomism, and his complex integration of Epicurean hedonism with Catholic virtue ethics are all remarkable feats of theological innovation. These innovations are latent in the intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century Europe, but it is Gassendi who is the genius who is able to winsomely articulate them. Harnessing forces that have been at work in the Western theological, natural philosophy, and Renaissance mind for some time, this humble man of great learning and astonishing output manifests the intellectually reforming spirit of his times. But the currents are more powerful than this one man. Gassendi could not have known its outcome, but his writings are a significant part of a new movement that firmly takes us out of medieval Christendom and into the secular, and eventually post-Christian, scientific age. The Whigs have labeled this adventure \\\"Progress,\\\" but the \\\"Death of God\\\" has been integral to it, which Gassendi himself would no doubt have been horrified by. And the process itself is more difficult to understand than any blithe secular optimism or merely positive historical objectivity can account for. *Given how Renaissance and early modern European natural philosophy grew out of Western Christendom, the manner in which it gave birth to a nineteenth-century science that broke entirely free from Christian theology is hard to explain and complex to evaluate theologically. Anti-religious Progressives of the nineteenth century are clearly the heirs of Gassendi in their atheistic skepticism, agnostic empiricism, calculative hedonism, experimental and mechanistic instrumentalism, and materialistic atomism. Yet not only \\\"they,\\\" but \\\"we\\\" Christian naturalists who accept the validity of Thomas Huxley's domain demarcation between science and theology are Gassendi's heirs. *Gassendi raises significant \\\"science and religion\\\" questions for us today that this volume of tightly historical accounts has no interest in. But it is not even that simple, for underneath the contributors' theological indifference is the influence of Gassendi's non-essentialist view of knowledge--in which one can know only observable facts, never essential meanings. Guiding their every evaluation is the assumption that where our modern scientific life-world follows trajectories that trace back to Gassendi, in those trajectories, Gassendi was right. There is no critique of \\\"us\\\" in such a \\\"history\\\"; this idea makes the volume more of a self-congratulatory hagiography of present post-Christian naturalistic prejudices than anything else. *All the really interesting theological questions about our knowledge of nature that Gassendi throws up, are simply not present. The contributors never consider what a world-shaping metaphysical innovation this new philosophy of matter is. The idea that Aristotelian hylomorphism (where all physical beings are matter-and-form composites) might have gotten something right never comes up. Hylomorphism--today totally displaced by Gassendi's atomism--holds that intelligible qualities, such as purpose and essence, are integral with physical being's material and efficient causalities. But contemporary sciences--and particularly the life sciences--are trying (ironically?) to understand a world without purpose or intrinsic meaning (what then is a mind and a cosmos for? asks Thomas Nagel). What if there really are purposes and essential meanings embedded in nature that we can to some degree know? We cannot follow up those possibilities if we are determined to stick with Gassendi's purely atomist philosophy of matter. 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引用次数: 0

摘要

皮埃尔·加森迪:人文主义、科学和现代哲学的诞生,由戴尔芬·贝利斯、丹尼尔·加伯和卡拉·丽塔·帕梅里诺编辑。英国伦敦:劳特利奇出版社,2023年。416页。精装书;160.00美元。ISBN: 9781138697454。*皮埃尔·加桑迪(Pierre Gassendi, 1592-1655)是科学史上那些贡献仅被模糊理解或记住的名字之一。作为一位法国天主教牧师、哲学家、数学家、人文主义者和天文学家,伽桑第主张从神学上重新构建古代物质原子理论,这是中世纪晚期亚里士多德关于信息物质概念消亡的一个重要因素。加桑迪在复兴古代伊壁鸠鲁主义方面也有很大的影响力,这是一种享乐主义的道德哲学,现代功利主义的起源。伽桑第主张对塞克斯图斯·恩披理克斯的古代怀疑论进行神学上的修改——在这种怀疑论中,我们只知道可观察到的现象,而不是形而上学的本质——他塑造了现代科学知识被理解的方式。因此,伽桑第是现代经验主义出现的关键人物,这使他与笛卡尔发生了显著的冲突。*这是由13位优秀的伽桑蒂学者精心研究和呈现的卷。他的贡献分为三个部分:伽桑第的伊壁鸠鲁计划,它的起源和来源;雄辩家伽桑第;以及伽桑第的《语境中的科学与哲学》。此外,对于一本小众历史兴趣的书来说,写作清晰易懂,令人愉快。然而,对于神学感兴趣的读者在科学和基督教信仰的观点,这卷有一个明显的-但也有启发性的-问题。它在神学上是盲目的。*对于文艺复兴研究和早期现代科学的学术专家来说,这本书非常扎实。编辑和投稿人都是高资历的学者,在Gassendi学术界备受尊敬。对原始资料的详细研究,密集的注释和参考书目,以及所有贡献的学术严谨性都令人印象深刻。专业读者将通过一些有趣的新细节逐渐扩展他们对Gassendi的理解,并仔细修改和改进文献中的一些现有评价。即便如此,在这本经过精心研究的书中,并没有什么重大的新发现。这本书的最大优点不在于它是伽桑蒂专家的必读之作,而在于它是非伽桑蒂专家易于理解且内容丰富的指南。*编辑和撰稿人都试图证明皮埃尔·加森迪是一位多么重要的思想家。非专业读者可以从这本书中了解到,这位杰出的牧师和人文主义者在他自己的世界里产生了多么强大的影响,以及这种影响如何深深地影响着我们直到今天。他对早期现代哲学、数学、科学和神学思想的重要影响是深刻而持久的。对于有兴趣了解当代科学的根源及其与基督教信仰的关系的思想家来说,了解伽桑第是必要的。如果你不太了解伽桑第,我强烈推荐你阅读这本书。*伽桑第的遗产是他在现代经验主义、现代享乐主义伦理学和现代原子唯物主义中的形成作用。在这些领域,伽森迪的影响非常深远。任何优秀的学术著作,只要能让我们看到他为我们所做的一切,对帮助读者理解我们现在所居住的生活世界的假设框架来源都是有价值的。但在神学上,伽森迪为我们所做的比任何当代现代科学历史学家都要复杂得多。*作者证明了伽桑第是一个非常有吸引力的人和思想家,当人们阅读他的生活、他的学术成就以及他惊人的智力和科学成就时,人们会情不自禁地喜欢他。但是,任何仔细研究加桑蒂的人都不会不注意到,他的作品是如何嵌入神学的,以及他的作品在接下来的两个世纪里是如何无情地把我们带离基督教神学本身的。在本书中,这种“领先”被认为是明显的“进步”。加森迪的基督教经验怀疑论,他对民主主义原子论的神学调整形式,以及他将伊壁鸠鲁享乐主义与天主教美德伦理的复杂整合,都是神学创新的非凡壮举。这些创新潜藏在17世纪欧洲的知识分子环境中,但天才的伽桑第能够将这些创新巧妙地表达出来。在西方神学、自然哲学和文艺复兴时期的思想中发挥作用已经有一段时间了,这个谦逊的人有着渊博的知识和惊人的成果,体现了他那个时代的智力改革精神。但水流比这一个人更强大。 加桑迪不可能知道它的结果,但他的著作是一场新运动的重要组成部分,这场运动坚定地将我们带出了中世纪基督教世界,进入了世俗的、最终是后基督教的科学时代。辉格党给这次冒险贴上了“进步”的标签,但“上帝之死”是其中不可或缺的一部分,这无疑会让加森迪本人感到震惊。这个过程本身比任何乐观的世俗乐观主义或仅仅是积极的历史客观性所能解释的更难以理解。*考虑到文艺复兴和早期现代欧洲自然哲学是如何从西方基督教世界中发展出来的,它产生了一门完全脱离基督教神学的19世纪科学的方式很难解释,也很难从神学上进行评价。19世纪的反宗教进步派显然是伽桑第的继承者,他们的无神论怀疑论、不可知论经验主义、计算享乐主义、实验和机械工具主义,以及唯物原子论。然而,不仅是“他们”,而且是“我们”接受托马斯·赫胥黎(Thomas Huxley)在科学和神学之间划分领域的有效性的基督教博物学家都是加桑迪的继承人。*Gassendi向今天的我们提出了重要的“科学与宗教”问题,而这本书对这些问题没有兴趣。但事情并没有那么简单,因为在作者对神学漠不关心的背后,是伽桑第的非本质主义知识观的影响——在这种观点下,人们只能知道可观察到的事实,而不能知道本质的意义。他们的每一次评估都是基于这样一个假设,即我们现代科学生活世界所遵循的轨迹可以追溯到伽森地,在这些轨迹中,伽森地是正确的。在这样一部“历史”中,没有对“我们”的批判;这一观点使得这本书更像是一本沾沾自喜的关于后基督教时代自然主义偏见的圣徒传记。*伽桑蒂提出的关于我们对自然的认识的所有真正有趣的神学问题,根本不存在。这些作者从未考虑过,这种关于物质的新哲学是一种如何塑造世界的形而上学创新。亚里士多德的同质论(认为所有的物理存在都是物质和形式的合成物)可能是正确的,但这种观点从来没有出现过。同源论——今天完全被伽桑第的原子论所取代——认为可理解的品质,如目的和本质,与物理存在的物质和有效因果关系是不可分割的。但当代科学——尤其是生命科学——正试图(讽刺地?)理解一个没有目的或内在意义的世界(那么心灵和宇宙是为了什么?)托马斯·内格尔问道)。如果我们在某种程度上知道,自然中真的有目的和基本意义呢?如果我们决定坚持伽桑第的纯原子论物质哲学,我们就无法继续研究这些可能性。这本书中从来没有出现过这样的观点,即笛卡儿——尽管,确实,完全被伽森迪的怀疑论和非本质主义的批判所鞭击——可能已经掌握了一些关于可解性本质的真理(理性的和本质的真理),这些真理不能被完全外在的现象学认识论所解释。在这本书中,那些被认为是客观的、仅仅是实证主义的历史学者都坚定地站在伽桑第一边。*至少对一个对“科学和宗教”感兴趣的基督徒来说,这本书的一个明显问题是,它完全没有兴趣让我们从更好地理解皮埃尔·加森迪的生活和思想中学到什么神学教训。这本书从来没有问伽森迪的原子论、享乐主义和认识论遗产对今天的神学和科学意味着什么。但是,问这些问题的读者,如果阅读这本关于皮埃尔·加森迪生平和思想的现代史学巨著(唉,在神学和形而上学上都被删减了),就能更好地回答这些问题。*由澳大利亚昆士兰大学历史与哲学研究学院高级荣誉院士Paul Tyson审阅。
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Pierre Gassendi: Humanism, Science, and the Birth of Modern Philosophy
PIERRE GASSENDI: Humanism, Science, and the Birth of Modern Philosophy edited by Delphine Bellis, Daniel Garber, and Carla Rita Palmerino. London, UK: Routledge, 2023. 416 pages. Hardcover; $160.00. ISBN: 9781138697454. *Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) is one of those names in the history of science whose contribution remains only vaguely understood or remembered. A French Catholic priest, philosopher, mathematician, humanist, and astronomer, Gassendi's advocacy of a theologically re-worked ancient atomic theory of matter was a significant factor in the demise of late medieval Aristotelian conceptions of informed matter. Gassendi was also highly influential in reviving ancient Epicureanism, the hedonist moral philosophy from which modern utilitarianism traces its origins. Advocating a theologically modified form of Sextus Empiricus's ancient skepticism--in which we have knowledge only of observable appearances rather than of metaphysical essences--Gassendi shaped the way modern scientific knowledge came to be understood. Gassendi was thus a key figure in the emergence of modern empiricism, which brought him into prominent conflict with Descartes. *This is a beautifully researched and presented volume by thirteen fine Gassendi scholars. The contributions are divided into three parts: Gassendi's Epicurean Project, Its Genesis and Its Sources; Gassendi the Polemist; and Gassendi's Science and Philosophy in Context. Further, for a book of niche historical interest, the writing is delightfully clear and accessible. However, for theologically interested readers of Perspectives in Science and Christian Faith, this volume has a glaring--yet also illuminating--problem. It is theologically blind. *For the academic specialist in Renaissance studies and early modern science, this volume is eminently solid. The editors and the contributors are all highly credentialed academics who are well respected in Gassendi scholarship circles. The detailed engagement with primary sources, the density of notes and bibliographies, and the scholarly rigor of all contributions are highly impressive. The specialist reader is going to have their understanding of Gassendi incrementally expanded with some interesting new details brought to light, and some existing evaluations in the literature carefully modified and improved. Even so, there are no significant new discoveries in its very carefully researched pages. The great merit of the book is not as a must read for Gassendi specialists, but as an accessible and rich guide for the nonspecialist. *The editors and contributors all seek to demonstrate how important a thinker Pierre Gassendi was. The nonspecialist reader can learn from this book's pages what a powerful influence this remarkable priest and humanist had in his own world, and how that influence remains deeply with us to this day. His influence on significant streams in early modern philosophy, mathematics, science, and theological thinking is deep and lasting. A knowledge of Gassendi is necessary for thinkers interested in understanding the roots of contemporary science and its relation to Christian faith. If you do not know much about Gassendi, I highly recommend reading this book. *Gassendi's legacy is his formative role in modern empiricism, modern hedonic ethics, and modern atomistic materialism. In these domains, Gassendi's influence is remarkably deep. Any good scholarly work that opens our eyes to what he did for us is valuable for helping readers understand the assumption-framing sources of the life-world we now inhabit. But theologically, what Gassendi did for us is more complex than any contemporary historian of modern science can be expected to unpack. *The contributors demonstrate that Gassendi was a very attractive person and thinker, and one cannot help but like him when reading about his life, his scholarship, and his astonishing intellectual and scientific achievements. But any close look at Gassendi cannot fail to notice both how theologically embedded his work is, and also how inexorably his work leads us away from Christian theology itself over the following two centuries. This "leading away" is, where recognized, assumed to be obvious "progress" in this volume. Gassendi's Christian empirical skepticism, his theologically adjusted form of Democritean atomism, and his complex integration of Epicurean hedonism with Catholic virtue ethics are all remarkable feats of theological innovation. These innovations are latent in the intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century Europe, but it is Gassendi who is the genius who is able to winsomely articulate them. Harnessing forces that have been at work in the Western theological, natural philosophy, and Renaissance mind for some time, this humble man of great learning and astonishing output manifests the intellectually reforming spirit of his times. But the currents are more powerful than this one man. Gassendi could not have known its outcome, but his writings are a significant part of a new movement that firmly takes us out of medieval Christendom and into the secular, and eventually post-Christian, scientific age. The Whigs have labeled this adventure "Progress," but the "Death of God" has been integral to it, which Gassendi himself would no doubt have been horrified by. And the process itself is more difficult to understand than any blithe secular optimism or merely positive historical objectivity can account for. *Given how Renaissance and early modern European natural philosophy grew out of Western Christendom, the manner in which it gave birth to a nineteenth-century science that broke entirely free from Christian theology is hard to explain and complex to evaluate theologically. Anti-religious Progressives of the nineteenth century are clearly the heirs of Gassendi in their atheistic skepticism, agnostic empiricism, calculative hedonism, experimental and mechanistic instrumentalism, and materialistic atomism. Yet not only "they," but "we" Christian naturalists who accept the validity of Thomas Huxley's domain demarcation between science and theology are Gassendi's heirs. *Gassendi raises significant "science and religion" questions for us today that this volume of tightly historical accounts has no interest in. But it is not even that simple, for underneath the contributors' theological indifference is the influence of Gassendi's non-essentialist view of knowledge--in which one can know only observable facts, never essential meanings. Guiding their every evaluation is the assumption that where our modern scientific life-world follows trajectories that trace back to Gassendi, in those trajectories, Gassendi was right. There is no critique of "us" in such a "history"; this idea makes the volume more of a self-congratulatory hagiography of present post-Christian naturalistic prejudices than anything else. *All the really interesting theological questions about our knowledge of nature that Gassendi throws up, are simply not present. The contributors never consider what a world-shaping metaphysical innovation this new philosophy of matter is. The idea that Aristotelian hylomorphism (where all physical beings are matter-and-form composites) might have gotten something right never comes up. Hylomorphism--today totally displaced by Gassendi's atomism--holds that intelligible qualities, such as purpose and essence, are integral with physical being's material and efficient causalities. But contemporary sciences--and particularly the life sciences--are trying (ironically?) to understand a world without purpose or intrinsic meaning (what then is a mind and a cosmos for? asks Thomas Nagel). What if there really are purposes and essential meanings embedded in nature that we can to some degree know? We cannot follow up those possibilities if we are determined to stick with Gassendi's purely atomist philosophy of matter. And the idea never comes up in this book, that Descartes--though, indeed, totally whipped by Gassendi's skeptical and non-essentialist critiques--may yet have grasped something true about the nature of intelligibility (rational and essential truths) that cannot be explained by an entirely external and phenomenological epistemology. The supposedly objective and merely positivist historical scholars in this volume are all firmly on Gassendi's side. *The glaring problem with the book--at least to a Christian interested in "science and religion"--is that it has absolutely no interest in what theological lessons we might learn from better understanding the life and thought of Pierre Gassendi. The book never asks what Gassendi's atomist, hedonist, and epistemic legacy means for theology and science today. But readers who ask those questions will be better equipped to so do by reading this very fine work of (alas, theologically and metaphysically eviscerated) modern historiography about the life and thought of Pierre Gassendi. *Reviewed by Paul Tyson, Senior Honorary Fellow with the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, University of Queensland, Australia.
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