HoP 481 True Fool’s Gold: Pierre Gassendi

History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps

Peter Adamson

Society & Culture, Society & Culture:philosophy, Philosophy

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Gassendi’s path from skepticism to “baptized Epicureanism.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich.
0:21.4	Online at History of Philosophy.net.
0:24.3	Today's episode, True Fools Gold, Pierre Gassandie.
0:29.8	We all admire visionary thinkers, the type we credit with being ahead of their time.
0:35.0	But I've always had an additional soft spot for those who seem
0:37.9	a bit behind their time, those who can see the value in things that have gone out of use,
0:42.8	or at least out of fashion. Maybe that's because I'm a fan of silent films that were made
0:47.5	about a century ago, or maybe it's because I'm a historian of philosophy. Either way,
0:52.8	I can't help warming to Pierre Gassandie, who was something of a historian of philosophy. Either way, I can't help warming to Pierre Gassendi,
0:55.5	who was something of a historian of philosophy in his own right. Though a major figure of 17th century
1:01.4	philosophy, in many ways he seems to belong to an earlier era, namely the Renaissance. Like many a
1:08.2	humanist of the 15th and 16th centuries, he was at first educated in the scholastic
1:12.8	system, but then turned against Aristotelianism. In its place, he sought inspiration in Hellenistic
1:18.8	philosophy. This, too, is familiar from the history of humanism, think of Machiavelli's interest in
1:24.3	Epicureanism, John Fresco Pica la Mirandola, praising the value of skepticism,
1:29.4	and Lipsius making stoicism the core of his own ethics of constancy.
1:34.5	Gassandi was at first especially impressed by the skeptics, writing,
1:39.2	After I had been given to see how great a gulf divides the spirit of nature from the human mind, what else could
1:45.2	I think but that the inner causes of natural effects totally elude human investigation.
1:51.2	But as his career developed, he moved away from skepticism and toward Epicureanism.
1:56.7	Or at least that's the usual story. As usual, the real story is in fact somewhat more complicated.
2:03.5	There's no doubting Gassandi's credentials as a humanist scholar, his antipathy toward Aristotelianism,
	...

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