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What About a Flat Earth? Pierre Gassendi’s Reconstructions of Epicurus’s Atomic Motion and the Shape of the Earth

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Abstract

Epicurus’s opinion on the shape of the earth forms a delicate issue that has animated recent scholarship. Similarly, in the reconstruction of Epicurus’s philosophy by the French polymath Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), the issue emerged under various guises. Interestingly, the question played a particularly puzzling role in Gassendi’s considerations of Epicurus’s atomic motion. By comparing the unpublished manuscript book De atomis (1636–1637) to the published Animadversiones (1649) and Syntagma philosophicum (1658), I will reveal that, in his quest for an accurate presentation of the original theory, Gassendi considerably modified his initial manuscript reconstruction of Epicurus’s atomic movements and developed an account in which the concept of a plane terrestrial surface was indispensable. At the same time, the article will indicate that Gassendi, from his own point of view, also proposed an alternative to Epicurus’s atomic motion in which he reinterpreted the original concepts in such a way that he could abstract himself from the Epicurean swerve of the atoms.

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Notes

  1. Pierre Gassendi, Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii, Lyon, 1649, pp. 672–4. Gassendi quotes from Lucretius, De rerum natura, II.543, 658–9.

  2. F. Montanari, M. Goh, C. Schroeder, G. Nagy and L. Muellner, The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, Leiden, 2015, p. 1483.

  3. Pierre Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in id., Opera omnia, 6 vols, Lyon, 1658, II, p. 4a–b. One might have the impression that, in the Syntagma passage, the Latin terms orbicularis and globosus are similar rather than dissimilar; see, e.g. p. 4b: ‘orbicularem, globosamve … Terram’. All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

  4. For Gassendi’s humanism, see L. S. Joy, Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science, Cambridge, 1988.

  5. F. A. Bakker, Epicurean Meteorology: Sources, Method, Scope and Organization, Leiden, 2016, pp. 162–263 (162–4, 262). Bakker’s conclusions, which are opposed to ‘the strong claims in modern studies about the Epicureans’ commitment to a flat earth’, apply to both Epicurus and his followers. Bakker’s argument is directed against, among other authors, J. M. Rist, Epicurus: An Introduction, Cambridge, 1972, p. 47; D. J. Furley, ‘The Earth in Epicurean and Contemporary Astronomy’, in Epicureismo greco e romano: atti del congresso internazionale, Napoli, 19–26 maggio 1993, ed. G. Giannantoni and M. Gigante, I, Naples, 1996, pp. 119–25; D. N. Sedley, ‘Epicureanism’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Craig, London, 1998 and 2005, pp. 340–50; and David Konstan, e.g. his article on ‘Atomism’, in Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism, ed. P. Mitsis, Oxford, 2020, pp. 59–80 (74).

  6. The passages which are crucial for the present article can be found in Gassendi, Animadversiones (n. 1 above), pp. 211–13, and Gassendi, Syntagma, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), I, pp. 274a–275a.

  7. Bakker, Epicurean Meteorology (n. 5 above), p. 262. Still, Bakker also accentuates the correlations between natural motion, the cosmological system and the terrestrial shape that have prompted Epicurean scholars to consider Epicurus’s atomic motion and his shape of the earth together.

  8. A. LoLordo, ‘Epicurean and Galilean Motion in Gassendi’s Physics’, Philosophy Compass, 3, 2008, pp. 301–14; S. Fisher, Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy and Science: Atomism for Empiricists, Leiden, 2005, pp. 247–87.

  9. For the diverging philological reconstructions and interpretations of Epicurus’s remarks on atomic motion in modern scholarship, see, e.g. D. Konstan, ‘Epicurus on “Up” and “Down” (“Letter to Herodotus” § 60)’, Phronesis, 17, 1972, pp. 269–78, and L. A. B. Wenda, ‘Epicurus’ Letter to Herodotus: Some Textual Notes’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 104, 2008, pp. 171–7. In this article, Epicurus’s atomic motion will be viewed through the lens of Gassendi.

  10. Note that, in the surviving remnants, Epicurus does not explicitly argue for the atomic swerve, which Lucretius invoked in De rerum natura by using the term clinamen. See Rist, Epicurus (n. 5 above), pp. 8, 48. Nevertheless, even though modern scholars have held different opinions on the precise relation between Epicurus’s theories and the developments of his followers, Rist, as well as Bakker, have asserted that the atomic declination was an integral part of Epicurus’s own physics. See ibid., and Bakker, Epicurean Meteorology (n. 5 above), pp. 3, 215. This was also Gassendi’s point of view; for his general belief that the Epicureans remained close to the theories of Epicurus himself, see the remarks in his biographical work, De vita et moribus Epicuri (1647), which can be found in Pierre Gassendi, Miscellanea, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), V, pp. 186b–187a.

  11. R. Pintard, La Mothe Le Vayer, Gassendi, Guy Patin: études de bibliographie et de critique suivies de textes inédits de Guy Patin, Paris, 1943, p. 42; O. R. Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi: nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique, The Hague, 1971, pp. XXIX–XXX.

  12. The eighth chapter covers fols 188v–192v of the Tours MS 709 – the number refers to the shelf mark.

  13. Pierre Gassendi, De vita et doctrina Epicuri, MS Tours, Bibliothèque municipale, 709, 1636–1637, fol. 189r; Pseudo-Plutarch, Placita philosophorum, I.23.

  14. Gassendi, De vita et doctrina Epicuri (n. 13 above), fols 189r–190r, 191v.

  15. Ibid., fol. 188v.

  16. Lucretius, De rerum natura, II.217–24; Gassendi, De vita et doctrina Epicuri (n. 13 above), fol. 189r.

  17. Gassendi, De vita et doctrina Epicuri (n. 13 above), fol. 189r. Implicit in Gassendi’s account here is the idea that all Epicurus’s and Lucretius’s atoms fall equally fast downwards in the void. See, e.g. T. O’Keefe, Epicureanism, London and New York, 2014, p. 26.

  18. Gassendi, De vita et doctrina Epicuri (n. 13 above), fols 189r–189v. In this article, I will mainly concentrate on Gassendi’s disapproval of the declination theory in the limited context of atomic motion. For a discussion of the swerve with respect to Gassendi’s ethics of the free human being, see L. T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe, Ithaca NY, 1996, pp. 136–41. See also C. H. Lüthy and C. Palmerino, ‘Conceptual and Historical Reflections on Chance (and Related Concepts)’, in The Challenge of Chance, ed. K. Landsman and E. van Wolde, Cham, 2016, pp. 9–47 (21–3). See also n. 10 above. For additional analyses of the swerve in modern Epicurean scholarship, see, e.g. P. J. Bicknell, ‘Why Atoms Had to Swerve: An Exploration in Epicurean Physics’, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 6, 1990, pp. 241–76; D. Konstan, ‘Commentary on Bicknell’, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 6, 1990, pp. 277–88; J. S. Purinton, ‘Epicurus on ‘Free Volition’ and the Atomic Swerve’, Phronesis, 44, 1999, pp. 253–99.

  19. Bakker, Epicurean Meteorology (n. 5 above), p. 216.

  20. Gassendi, De vita et doctrina Epicuri (n. 13 above), fols 189v–190r. See, e.g. also O’Keefe, Epicureanism (n. 17 above), pp. 30–31.

  21. Gassendi, De vita et doctrina Epicuri (n. 13 above), fol. 190r.

  22. In the beginning of the seventh chapter of De atomis, entitled ‘De pondere et mobilitate atomorum’, Gassendi refers to the atomic motive principle as a vis; see ibid., fol. 185r. For a point of view which strongly links Gassendi’s atomic impetus to the medieval scholastic theory of impetus, see A. Maier, ‘The Significance of the Theory of Impetus for Scholastic Natural Philosophy’, in On the Threshold of Exact Science: Selected Writings of Anneliese Maier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy, ed. E. Peters, Berlin and Boston, 1982, pp. 76–102 (102). Note that Maier primarily sees a similarity between Gassendi’s natural atomic impetus and the inexhaustible impetus which the 14th-century philosopher Jean Buridan uses in order to account for the motions of the heavens, even though she stresses that, in the case of Gassendi, the impetus produces rectilinear motion, whereas Buridan’s celestial movements are circular. Importantly, as is exemplified by Gassendi’s word choice, his atomic impetus is natural. Roughly put, Gassendi does not principally consider atomic impetus as an impressed force that accounts for violent motion and that differs from gravitas, which accounts for natural downward motion. Quite to the contrary, in Gassendi’s own alternative to Epicurus’s theory, both terms refer to a principle of natural rectilinear atomic motion. For the history of the impetus theory, see, e.g. also M. Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages, Madison, 1659, pp. 505–40; J. Sarnowsky, ‘Concepts of Impetus and the History of Mechanics’, in Mechanics and Natural Philosophy Before the Scientific Revolution, ed. W. R. Laird and S. Roux, Dordrecht, 2008, pp. 121–45; and M. Van Dyck and I. Malara, ‘Renaissance Concept of Impetus’, in Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. M. Sgarbi, Cham, 2019. For an account of how the impetus theory was reinterpreted by the young Galileo, see S. Salvia, ‘From Archimedean Hydrostatics to Post-Aristotelian Mechanics: Galileo’s Early Manuscripts De Motu Antiquiora (ca. 1590)’, Physics in Perspective, 19, 2017, pp. 105–50.

  23. For Gassendi’s dynamic materialism, see Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi (n. 11 above), pp. 210–16. It is interesting to note, in addition, that Bloch, by referring to earlier studies of Alexandre Koyré and Bernard Rochot, remarks that Gassendi’s own perspective on atomic motion comes close to that of Democritus. In fact, it can be argued that Gassendi’s alternative, in which there is no swerve and in which atomic motion takes place in any direction whatever, represents a return to Democritean atomism. Yet, as Bloch highlights, Gassendi’s atomism and his understanding of motion are primarily built on the Epicurean idea that weight is an inseparable property of atoms which is responsible for natural atomic motion. Significantly, Gassendi himself maintains that Democritus did not regard weight as an inseparable atomic property. See Gassendi, Syntagma, in id. Opera omnia (n. 3 above), I, pp. 266b–267a. For the complexity of the notion of atomic weight in Democritus’s system, see, e.g. D. O’Brien, Theories of Weight in the Ancient World: Four Essays on Democritus, Plato and Aristotle. A Study in the Development of Ideas, I: Democritus: Weight and Size. An Exercise in the Reconstruction of Early Greek Philosophy, Paris, 1981, and A. Chalmers, ‘Did Democritus Ascribe Weight to Atoms?’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 75, 1997, pp. 279–87.

  24. See M. J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 191–2. See also A. LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy, New York, 2006, pp. 140–44, where LoLordo discusses the weight of Gassendi’s atoms, and, especially, p. 144, where she challenges Osler’s interpretation by stating that ‘[t]here is clear conceptual space for holding both that matter is genuinely active and that God must create and concur with material activity’.

  25. Nevertheless, the previous footnotes may give an impression of the various questions and topics, ranging from natural philosophical theories on movement in nature to metaphysical and theological issues about the causal explanation of moving (atomic) matter and God’s relation to it, that are relevant to the study of Gassendi’s developments with regard to atomic weight and activity.

  26. Gassendi, De vita et doctrina Epicuri (n. 13 above), fol. 190r: ‘Caeterum, cum ex hisce locis aliqua nos maneant expendenda inferius, Tria quaedam hoc loco adtingenda praesertim sunt. Unum est, an omnes Atomi declinent; Alterum, ut declinatio hujusmodi sit concipienda; tertium, an naturalis motus ponderum per hanc declinationem tollatur’.

  27. Ibid., fol. 190v.

  28. Ibid., fols 190v–191r.

  29. One could argue that the prototypical cosmology that is behind Gassendi’s reference to the ‘common opinion’ is the one that Aristotle developed in De caelo. Very briefly put, in this cosmology, as a result of their heaviness, heavy bodies like stones naturally tend downwards towards the centre of the world, which is also the centre of the spherical earth. See, e.g. Bakker, Epicurean Meteorology (n. 5 above), pp. 177–9. Gassendi’s own account on motion of concrete bodies, as well as his cosmology, considerably differ from the Aristotelian one. For this point, see, for example, LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi (n. 24 above), pp. 158–67. It is interesting to note that, according to Gassendi, in the case of concrete bodies such as stones, gravitas should be considered as an external attraction caused by material effluvia coming from the earth, and not as an internal principle due to which bodies tend downwards. See, e.g. Gassendi, Syntagma, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), I, p. 389a. One can see this as an important illustration of the difference that tends to exist between atoms and concrete bodies in Gassendi’s oeuvre. See n. 8 above. Despite everything, like Aristotle, Gassendi, of course, maintains that the earth is spherical.

  30. Gassendi, De vita et doctrina Epicuri (n. 13 above), fol. 191r.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Ibid.: ‘Verum, videtur Epicurus supposuisse unicam Universi plagam, ex qua Atomi ad perpendiculum ferrentur, eam puta, quae nobis in hac terrae parte degentibus sursum est, adeo ut una atomo concepta incidere in verticem, caeterae omnes parallelis ipsi motibus ferrentur seu ante, seu pone, seu ad dextram, seu ad sinistram, idque incidendo in terram, extra terram, & ultra Mundum, & in infinitum. Hoc nimirum supposito intelligere quoque potuit quasdam ex eadem parte varianteis inclinari ad alias, verum tantilla inclinatione, seu angulo adeo exili, ut paralleli motus ratio insensibiliter variaretur. Seu enim hanc terrae superficiem cum Philosophis vere multis velut planam habuerit, adeo ut neque oppositum Antipodum situm facile admiserit; seu ex variis universi plagis, quae varias terrae facies respiciunt, unam quandam adsumpserit, quae sursum intelligeretur; potuit ista sane illi esse mens’.

  33. One could argue that the first option in the passage quoted directly above, in which the Epicurean earth is regarded as being flat, only points to a resemblance between the terrestrial surface and a plane, without entailing that, for Epicurus, the earth really was flat. In this regard, it could be added that, even if Epicurus considered (or experienced) the terrestrial surface ‘velut planam’, he did not need to be an adherent of a flat-earth theory and could still believe that the earth was, for instance, spherical in reality. Against this argument, however, one might highlight Gassendi’s note on the Antipodes. As he underlines, if Epicurus adhered to a ‘velut planam’ theory, it would be difficult to admit the position and existence of Antipodes, that is, of those people who stand diametrically opposite to us or, more generally, who are the inhabitants of the opposite hemisphere of the earth. This note implies that, in the ‘velut planam’ option, Epicurus is presented as someone who supported the existence of a genuinely flat terrestrial surface. Moreover, it may be added that the Latin ‘velut’ is perhaps simply meant as an allusion to the physical height differences of the terrestrial surface, because of mountains and depressions. For the Greek notion of the Antipodes, see H. Dörrie, ‘Antipodes’, in Brill’s New Pauly, ed. H. Cancik, H. Schneider and M. Landfester, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1574-9347_bnp_e125250 (accessed: 12 November 2019) and n. 41 below.

  34. See the ‘Introduction’ above.

  35. Gassendi, Animadversiones (n. 1 above), pp. 211–13; Gassendi, Syntagma, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), I, pp. 274a–275a. In the Syntagma, the report is part of the book ‘De materiali principio rerum’.

  36. For Gassendi’s history of philosophy, see Joy, Gassendi the Atomist (n. 4 above).

  37. Gassendi, Animadversiones (n. 1 above), p. 212; Gassendi, Syntagma, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), I, p. 274a.

  38. Gassendi, Syntagma, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), I, p. 274b: ‘Ac pronum quidem foret reputare eam fuisse Epicuro mentem, ut existemaverit quamlibet regionem esse habendam sursum, e qua veniret Atomus; quamlibet deorsum, in quam tenderet; hoc est, ut facta v.c. ad nos situmque nostrum comparatione, non modo regio supra verticem diceretur sursum si Atomus accederet illeinc, & regio proinde infra pedes, in quam tenderet, diceretur deorsum; sed regio etiam, quae nobis infra pedes, diceretur sursum, si illeinc Atomus adventaret, & regio quae nobis supra caput, deorsum, si in illam abscederet: Ac pari modo si adveniret ex ortu, tunc regio illa diceretur sursum, & quae opposita ex occasu, deorsum; ac vice versa ista sursum, si ab ea esset motus; illa deorsum, si in eam esset, atque ita de caeteris. Reputari quidem, inquam, istud posset; verum, si ipsi illa mens fuisset, nihil sane fuisset necesse declinationis motum somniare; quando Atomi fuissent satis sibi invicem alias occursurae’. Note that the Animadversiones, pp. 212–13, include exactly the same words, except that the passage there has a slightly different beginning (‘Et cogitari quidem posset eam fuisse Epicuro mentem’) and contains the verb cogitare instead of reputare.

  39. For the possible Democritean aspects of Gassendi’s (published) alternative, see n. 23 above.

  40. Gassendi, Epistolae, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), VI, p. 158b.

  41. Plato, Timaeus, 62c–63a. See also Dörrie, ‘Antipodes’ (n. 33 above), where he remarks that the term was coined by Plato in the passage in question. According to Christine Garwood, however, the term was coined by Pythagoras; see C. Garwood, Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, London, 2007, p. 23, where she also briefly discusses the theological debates about the Antipodes. The confusion seems to arise from the accounts in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, III.24, where Laërtius recalls the claim that Plato was the first philosopher to use the term, and VIII.26, where the term is incorporated in the discussion of Pythagoras’s philosophy. This ambivalence did not remain unnoticed in Gassendi’s works; see Gassendi, Syntagma, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), II, p. 13b.

  42. Gassendi, Syntagma, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), I, p. 136b.

  43. In the letters De motu, Gassendi examines elements from both Galileo’s Dialogo (1632) and his Discorsi (1638). Among other things, in these letters, Gassendi extensively explicates and defends Galileo’s concept of relativity; he challenges the standard arguments against a moving earth, without explicitly endorsing, as he is careful to underline, the Copernican (and Galilean) world system; and he tries to add a causal framework to Galileo’s odd number law of falling bodies in order to corroborate its validity.

  44. Gassendi, Opuscula philosophica, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), III, p. 507b.

  45. In this respect, Aristotle, De caelo, 284b6–286a2, can be seen as another important text in the background.

  46. See, e.g. n. 33 above.

  47. Similarly, on the first day of Galileo’s Dialogo (1632), Sagredo, one of the three interlocutors, declares that the two notions sursum and deorsum ‘are applicable only to the actual world, and imply it to be not only constructed, but already inhabited by us’: Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems – Ptolemaic & Copernican, transl. S. Drake, 2nd edn, Berkeley, 1967, p. 16; Galileo Galilei, Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo Tolemaico e Copernicano, in id., Le opere, Edizione nazionale, Florence, 1890–1909, VII, p. 40.

  48. Gassendi, Syntagma, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), I, p. 136b.

  49. Gassendi, Opuscula philosophica, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), III, p. 507b. Galileo, in his turn, seems to have remained undecided on the issue of the infiniteness of the world and the universe, given mankind’s epistemological limits. See, e.g. A. Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore, 1957, pp. 95–9.

  50. D. M. Miller, Representing Space in the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge, 2016, pp. 14–15.

  51. Gassendi, Syntagma, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), I, p. 137a.

  52. E. Grant, Much Ado about Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge, 1981, p. 183.

  53. For more detailed accounts of Gassendi’s conception of space and its historical foundations, see ibid., pp. 206–15; Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi (n. 11 above), pp. 172–201; D. Bellis, ‘Imaginary Spaces and Cosmological Issues in Gassendi’s Philosophy’, in Space, Imagination and the Cosmos from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, ed. F. A. Bakker, D. Bellis and C. Palmerino, Cham, 2018, pp. 233–60.

  54. For a brief discussion of the notions gravitas and impetus, see n. 22 above. For Gassendi’s manuscript remark about ‘common opinion’, see n. 29 above.

  55. Cf. n. 33 above.

  56. Gassendi, Animadversiones (n. 1 above), p. 213; Gassendi, Syntagma, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), I, p. 274b: ‘Videtur … potius rem sic cogitasse, ut opinatus fuerit, hanc Terrae superficiem, quam incolimus, habendam esse quasi planam, & totum circum horizontem concipiendum esse ut idemmet planum diductum continuatumque & usque in Caelum, & porro in omnem Universi immensitatem. Nempe imaginatus videtur, quae pondera deorsum cadunt tam nobis in Europa, quam aliis in Asia, in Africa, &c. non coitura (si concipiantur motum continuare) in ipso Terrae centro, sed abitura, servato semper motu inter se exquisite parallelo, quandiu motus duraverit. Quare & imaginari [‘imaginatus’ in Animadversiones] videtur, regionem illam quae nobis est sursum, esse eam revera, quae respectu motus Atomorum omnium sursum sit; quatenus circumquaque extenditur supra continuatum, ut iam dictum est, horizontis planum, in quod (infinite protensum) quaecumque adveniunt, advenire superne dicantur, & ultra quod quaecumque tendunt, tendere dicantur inferius; atque id quidem sive id planum isto, quo est loco, conceperimus, sive translatum, aut aliud ipsi parallelum habuerimus supra, supraque, ultra verticem, aut infra, infraque ultra pedes’.

  57. Gassendi, Syntagma, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), I, pp. 274b–275a. The Letter to Herodotus is the first of three letters from Epicurus’s own hand that Diogenes Laërtius included in the tenth book of his Lives. It presents an epitome of Epicurus’s atomist physics. In the Syntagma, Gassendi incorporates a part of his Latin translation, including his own in-text clarifications, of this letter (Laërtius, Lives, X.60), in order to highlight the resemblance between his reconstruction and the ancient source. The second half of Gassendi’s reconstruction, in particular, attempts to capture Epicurus’s original phrasing. For the translated section of the Letter to Herodotus and Gassendi’s philological remarks on it, see also Gassendi, Animadversiones (n. 1 above), pp. 45–6, 421. The Greek section in question is confusing and difficult to read and understand, as Gassendi highlights. Accordingly, it has also received much attention by modern scholars; see n. 9 above. See also, e.g. C. Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, New York, 1964, pp. 311–13; Rist, Epicurus (n. 5 above), pp. 47–8; Bakker, Epicurean Meteorology (n. 5 above), pp. 215–16. The question of the extent to which Gassendi’s reconstruction (dis)satisfies the historical and philological concerns of modern scholarship on Epicurus’s atomic motion is beyond the scope of the present article.

  58. Note that Gassendi also used the word pondus, in the genitive plural (‘ponderum’), when he introduced the three questions on Epicurus’s declination in the manuscript. See n. 26 above.

  59. For the connection in Epicurus’s theory between the gravitas of the atoms and the gravitas of the concrete bodies, see Gassendi, Animadversiones (n. 1 above), p. 314, and Gassendi, Opuscula philosophica, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), III, p. 17b. The latter reference is to a passage from Gassendi’s Philosophiae Epicuri syntagma (1649), which first served as an appendix to the Animadversiones and presented a summary of Epicurus’s philosophy. This work should not be confused with the posthumous Syntagma philosophicum (1658). Clearly, the connection that Gassendi perceives between Epicurus’s atoms and concrete bodies with respect to their βάρος is not maintained in his own view, where the internal motive principle of the atoms is different from the external gravitas due to which bodies are attracted towards the earth. See also n. 29 above.

  60. Galileo Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, transl. H. Crew and A. de Salvio, New York, 1954, p. 251; Galileo Galilei, Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze, in id., Le opere (n. 47 above), VIII, pp. 274–5. For the early modern debates on the issue of the parallel lines of gravity, see D. Bertoloni Meli, Thinking with Objects: The Transformation of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century, Baltimore, 2006, pp. 30–32, 101–2 (where Bertoloni Meli discusses the beginning of the fourth book of Galileo’s Discorsi), 128. See also M. Van Dyck, ‘Gravitating Towards Stability: Guidobaldo’s Aristotelian-Archimedean Synthesis’, History of Science, 44, 2006, pp. 373–407, where he independently makes similar points to Bertoloni Meli.

  61. See Gassendi, Animadversiones (n. 1 above), p. 213, and Gassendi, Syntagma, in id., Opera omnia (n. 3 above), I, p. 275a. Gassendi quotes from Lucretius, De rerum natura, I.1058–9. For the difficulty of admitting the existence of Antipodes in the case of a flat earth, see n. 33 above.

  62. See Gassendi, Animadversiones (n. 1 above), p. 672. It should be noted that the passage on the perpendicularly falling res was not repeated in the Syntagma, when Gassendi introduced his claim that Epicurus was especially pleased by the possibility of an orbicular earth. This can be seen as an additional indication of the less clear way in which Gassendi discussed the topic of Epicurus’s view of the earth’s shape in the chapter ‘De globo ipso telluris’ in the Syntagma. See the ‘Introduction’ above.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the director of the Bibliothèque municipale de Tours, France for granting access to the manuscript De vita et doctrina Epicuri (MS 709) and Delphine Bellis for helping me with the transcription of the manuscript book De atomis. Maarten Van Dyck and Delphine Bellis were so kind to support me throughout the writing process and to share their highly valuable suggestions. I am also grateful to Carla Rita Palmerino, Wim Verbaal and Ivan Malara, who read an early version of the article, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their useful corrections and suggestions. Finally, without the encouragement of the members of the Sarton Centre for History of Science at Ghent University, the article would not have reached its final shape.

Funding

This study was funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Vlaanderen), project 3G010418N.

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    Jo Coture

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Coture, J. What About a Flat Earth? Pierre Gassendi’s Reconstructions of Epicurus’s Atomic Motion and the Shape of the Earth. Int class trad 29, 147–167 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-021-00602-6

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