Il finalismo nel Syntagma philosophicum di Pierre Gassendi

According to a widespread historiographical opinion, Gassendi’s physics is devoid of any form of finalism: Gassendi’s protests against Descartes’s elimination of final causes served only to preserve the possibility of the teleological argument to demonstrate the existence of God ; similarly, the entire Christian revision of Epicurus’s philosophy was dictated by the need to flaunt a superficial orthodoxy, behind which a purely mechanistic physics would be concealed. This article provides textual information that runs counter to this interpretation. Not only does Gassendi consider nature as a mechanism designed by God with ends in mind, but he believes that these ends are inscribed within creatures themselves, that they know them (each in its own way) and act towards them. Finalism is constitutive of Gassendi’s view of nature. He maintains that physics aims to discover not only the efficient causes but also the final causes hidden in everyp aspect of nature. Final causes, in turn, serve to guide scientific inquiry, allowing us to distinguish between alternative hypotheses.