In earlier chapters, I discussed the reasons why Gassendi considered it necessary to modify Epicureanism in order to render it theologically acceptable. I then argued that a close relationship existed between his voluntarist theology and his empiricist theory of scientific knowledge. In this chapter, I argue that his theories of matter and causality were enmeshed in his epistemology and that they thus indirectly reflected the theological assumptions that informed his entire philosophical enterprise.

Gassendi was not the first advocate of atomism in the seventeenth century, but he was surely the most systematic. His coupling of atomism with the astronomy of Copernicus and the physics of Galileo, as well as his commitment to ridding atomism of the theologically objectionable doctrines traditionally associated with Epicureanism, set him apart from earlier advocates of the atomic theory and probably account for the ultimate success of his project. Like Gassendi, one early-seventeenth-century atomist, David van Goorle (d. 1612) was also concerned to refute Aristotle. Sebastian Basso (fl. 1550–1600) advocated atomism as an alternative to Aristotelianism, which he criticized at length in Philosophiae naturalis adversus Aristotelem (1621).