Atomism in the Renaissance

Abstract

Strictly speaking, there was no such thing as “Renaissance atomism.” Although an ever-increasing number of philosophers in the period 1400–1650 came to invoke atoms, corpuscles, particles, minima, or other invisibly small structures in their writings, these little entities were never central enough to any philosophical current to warrant defining it under such an exclusive label as “atomism.” The particles that one finds in Renaissance texts on natural philosophy, metaphysics, alchemy, medicine, theology, cosmology, numerology, and other disciplines are moreover defined in so many radically different ways that it is implausible to view them as belonging to the same category. Finally, the reasons why such particles were propagated are similarly disparate. Apart from mathematical, physical, medical, or alchemical reasons, one also finds metaphysical, theological, antiquarian, historiographical, or numerological ones. At any rate, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Aristotelian concept of an infinitely divisible matter had come under fire from various sides. By the middle of that century, as a consequence of the writings of authors such as Sébastien Basson, David Gorlaeus, Jean-Chrysostôme Magnen, Etienne Des Claves, and more importantly René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Kenelm Dibgy, and Thomas Hobbes, the Aristotelian principles of matter, form, and privation looked discredited, at least inside and outside universities in Northern and Western Europe. As the microstructure of matter came to assume center stage in the natural philosophical debate, the term “atomism” was introduced for the first time in the 1660s and subsequently depicted at a part of what was hailed as the new “mechanical philosophy.”