The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655-1715

435 Pages·2016·21.42 MB·English

by  Thomas M. Lennon

THE BATTLE OF THE GODS AND GIANTS
STUDIES IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
M. A. Stewart and David Fate Norton, Editors
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Copyright © 1993 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Pnnceton University Press,
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All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lennon, Thomas M.
The battle of the gods and giants : the legacies of Descartes and Gassendi,
1655-1715 / Thomas M. Lennon.
p. cm. — (Studies in intellectual history and the history of philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-07400-3
1. Gassendi, Pierre, 1592-1655. 2. Descartes, Rene, 1596-
1650. 3. Locke, John, 1632-1704. I. Title. II. Series.
B1887.L46 1993
194—dc20 92-26088 CIP
This book has been composed in Linotron Times Roman
Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources
Printed in the United States of America
1 3579 10 8642
L 0C,

Contents
Preface ix
Note on Documentation xiii
I. The Philosophical Terrain 3
1 The Gassendist Failure 3
2 The Gassendist Success 26
3 The Interminable Battle 34
4 Other Wars 52
II. The Giants of the Seventeenth Century 63
5 Dramatis Personae 63
6 Mind versus Flesh 106
7 Gassendist Theories of Space: Apotheosis and
Annihilation 117
8 PhysicalandMetaphysicalAtomism 137
III. Locke: Gassendist Anti-Cartesian 149
9 Locke and Gassendi 149
10 Locke and Descartes 163
11 Enthusiasm 169
IV. The Gods of the Seventeenth Century 191
12 Descartes's Idealism 191
13 Malebranche's Realism 210
14 Malebranche s Idealism 229
V. Ideas and Representation 240
15 Two Patterns of Ideas 240
16 Arguments for Representationalism 248
17 Two Versions of the Causal Argument 255
VI. The Untouchable and the Uncuttable 274
18 Space and Solidity 276
19 Simple and Complex Ideas 288
viii CONTENTS
20 Primary and Secondary Qualities 298
21 Powers 304
22 Matter and Creation 309
23 TheBestialSouI 314
VII. Innateness, Abstraction, and Essences 334
24 innateness 334
25 Essences and Abstraction 340
26 The Polemic with Stillingfleet 354
VIII. Philosophy and the Historiography
of Philosophy 367
27 DissimulationandMeaning 368
28 What Locke Said 374
29 Two Camps of Historians 378
30 History and Interpretation 383
Works Cited 393
Index 411
Preface
THIS IS A HISTORY of philosophy that examines the period defined by the death
dates of Gassendi and Malebranche. It explores what in my view is most of
philosophical interest in the period, namely, the contest between the philoso­
phies of Gassendi and Descartes as the appropriate scientific image of the world
to replace the commonsense, manifest image associated with Aristotle and his
scholastic epigones. Primarily because of the recrudescence of skepticism and
the emergence of the New Science—contradictory circumstances that nonethe­
less reinforced each other—the world was thought to be other than as it is
perceived to be. A main concern will thus be the dialectic of appearance and
reality, which, while involving a broad range of philosophical issues, in this
period focused on the analysis of space, the things in it, and how we know
them. Not often explicit, but almost always implicit at the core of these analyses
is the grand metaphysical question of why there exists anything at all.
While the period here studied postdates the death of Descartes, some account
of his relevant views is obviously necessary. This is especially so since my
overall interpretation, although anticipated by Cousin and perhaps others in the
nineteenth century, is highly controversial. Few of the components of this
interpretation seem to me problematic, yet no one has quite put them together in
this fashion. The key to my idealist interpretation of Descartes is, in any case,
that for him the ontological analysis of material things is the same as Mal-
ebranche's ontological analysis of the mental representations of material
things. Descartes's things are Malebranche's perceptions of things. (Not inci­
dentally, many late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century debates over the
nature of ideas saw each side accuse the other of confusing things with our ideas
of things.) Moreover, the material things of which our perceptions are represen­
tations according to Malebranche turned out to be, as Berkeley most notably
argued, ontologically and epistemologically idle. Thus, Descartes's view as I
interpret it is, however controversial, most characteristic of Cartesianism. The
extent to which Malebranche may be taken as the later standard-bearer of
Cartesianism may of course be debated—as it was by Arnauld—but as to the
idealism here attributed to Descartes, other Cartesians such as Desgabets and
Regis were only more explicit.
This work is not about Cartesianism, however, but its contest with Gassend-
ism. Long neglected, Gassendi is now beginning to approach the prominence
he once enjoyed. Translations have made his difficult texts more accessible, and
the analyses by Rochot a few decades ago, and more recently by Bloch, Joy, and
others, have shown their importance. As with Descartes's philosophy, the con-