HoP 481 True Fool’s Gold: Pierre Gassendi

Peter Adamson· Host0:00

[instrumental music] 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. Online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, True Fool's Gold: Pierre Gassendi. We all admire visionary thinkers, the type we credit with being ahead of their time, but I've always had an additional soft spot for those who seem a bit behind their time, those who can see the value in things that have gone out of use, or at least out of fashion. Maybe that's because I'm a fan of silent films that were made about a century ago, or maybe it's because I'm a historian of philosophy. Either way, I can't help warming to Pierre Gassendi, who was something of a historian of philosophy in his own right. Though a major figure of 17th century philosophy, in many ways he seems to belong to an earlier era, namely the Renaissance. Like many a humanist of the 15th and 16th centuries, he was at first educated in the scholastic system, but then turned against Aristotelianism. In its place, he sought inspiration in Hellenistic philosophy. This too is familiar from the history of humanism. Think of Machiavelli's interest in Epicureanism, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola praising the value of skepticism, and Lipsius