Francis Bacon's youth was spent in preparations for a life of royal service. Sir Nicholas carefully guided his formal education toward this end, and Francis seems always to have believed that to serve as a councillor was his vocation. While a young man, Francis was confronted with several differing conceptions of just what the role and the purpose of a statesman should be, yet by the late 1580s he had made his own decision about the responsibilities of a good statesman. His youthful experiences and the nature of his employments after 1586 made Bacon utterly convinced that the nature and problems of knowledge and learning were properly the concern of the statesman he wished to become.

Francis Bacon's formal education began under the watchful eye of his parents but we know almost no details of the schooling he received in his father's house.

If historians are to understand what it was that Bacon thought he was doing in writing about natural philosophy, we must accept that he always regarded himself as a statesman and a personal councillor to kings, rather than as a private person. By examining his upbringing and his legal career as an elite Crown servant, we have been able to see that his reform of natural philosophy, no less than his proposed reform of law, was always governed by his political perspective and his loyal ambition to create bureaucratic machinery with which his master could better govern and expand his kingdom. Bacon was convinced that the enhancement of the powers of the Crown was a great and necessary good and, as his loathing for men like Edward Coke illustrates, he viewed any attempts to detract from these powers as seditious. Similarly, in Scriptural matters, men should accept the leadership of official experts, namely, the ecclesiastical hierarchy; those who assumed a right to pronounce independently about religious truths were ‘sectaries’. So, too, in natural philosophy: men should accept the leadership of official experts and a centralised organisation. Those who assumed otherwise were ‘willful’ and ‘voluntaries’. No wonder that his physician, William Harvey, a celebrated voluntary (as it were), could say that Bacon wrote philosophy ‘like a Lord Chancellor’.

The administration of the world

Bacon's perspective was always that of a statesman; he believed problems of knowledge were properly part of a statesman's concerns; and he believed a reformed natural philosophy would be a splendid support for the imperial state he desired to see established. Such a natural philosophy would (he said) bring forth knowledge of ‘the causes and secret motions of things’, and produce inventions and useful knowledge for the state and the people. Nevertheless, Bacon argued repeatedly that inventions and the advantages they would bring to the commonweal were never to be mistaken for ‘the true ends of knowledge’.

The Stoics were firmly convinced that philosophy possesses an organic unity, comparable to the coherence of a living being. They acknowledged that various disciplines may be distinguished within philosophy. Zeno of Citium, founder of the Stoic school, mentions three parts of philosophy – logic, physics, and ethics – all of which belong to the organic whole. Logic is not an autonomous discipline, independent of physics and ethics, for it constantly refers to these other branches. Dealing with human thinking, logic is mainly concerned with protecting the mind from error. This goal, however, could not be achieved without some ethical conditions. Only a wise man is free from error and falsity: His thinking is not jeopardized by irrational impulses, for he has suppressed and extirpated all irrational movements and inclinations. Thus he is guarded against emotional influences which might prevent him from attaining the truth. The activity of the mind, therefore, is clearly related to moral behavior: A man who is dominated by irrational inclinations must inevitably go astray in the search for truth. Conversely, ethics is closely related to logic. Moral behavior is essentially a life in conformity with reason, Logos. It is the proper function of logic to disclose the true nature of reason and its activity. Logic tries to clarify fundamental notions such as knowledge, perception and understanding, judging and arguing, truth and error. Clarification of the notion of reason is important for understanding moral behavior.

Finally, physics is related to both logic and ethics. For Zeno, the three parts of philosophy may be distinguished but they cannot be separated, since they constantly refer to each other. Each part loses its meaning if separated from the others.

The background to seventeenth-century philosophy may be conveniently summarized under two headings. One is the recrudescence of skepticism, resulting from a variety of factors, among them the recovery of classical texts, the Reformation, the rise of national states, and the voyages of discovery. My second heading is another such factor in the rise of skepticism, the emergence of the New Science. The mechanico-mathematical account of the world that was developed in the seventeenth century not only undid the reigning Aristotelian physics but also systematically called into question its whole worldview and thus contributed to the crise pyrrhonienne of the period. Yet the New Science, by its very name, was prima facie incompatible with skepticism, and it is to this opposition that the fundamental philosophical problems of the period relate.

The best-known program developed to deal with the opposition was of course Descartes's. He famously argued that skepticism, consistently applied, refutes itself, and further, that we are thereby led to none other than the New Scientific view of the world. The method of doubt leads us to a metaphysically vindicated clear and distinct idea of extension, the principal attribute of bodies, on which all their other attributes depend. Now, the Cartesian “new way of ideas,” as it was later called, was an exceedingly complex issue, and protracted debate on the issue produced several versions of it among Arnauld, Malebranche, Regis, and others. What they all had in common, however, was the conception of an idea as containing the intelligible or universal element of the material particulars it represented.

One of the more striking differences between medieval and early modern philosophy is the status accorded the study of the theory of valid arguments. The study of this theory dominated the first two years of a medieval arts curriculum, and its influence permeated university life in the Middle Ages. There is nothing shocking about a medieval theologian who is discussing predestination or the creation of the world in time stopping his argument to spend a folio or two outlining some part of a logical system which he intends to use in resolving the question. It is partly this inter-penetration of logic and substantive philosophical discussion which makes much medieval philosophy seem so familiar to someone brought up in the twentieth-century Anglo-American tradition.

Within early modern philosophy the attitude is very different, an attitude exemplified by Descartes's discussion of the role of deduction in his Regulae:

Nobody who has read Karl Alfred Blüher's admirable history of Seneca's reception in Spain can be in any doubt that the reign of Juan II of Castile (1406–1454) marks a distinctive epoch in that history. It was then that the misleading but endlessly seductive topos of Seneca as Spaniard first began to be widely current, largely as a result of a series of vernacular translations. A couple of relatively late items – a partial revision of a thirteenth-century De ira and a wholly new version of the Apocolocyntosis, both associated with Nuño de Guzmán – were relatively restricted in their immediate influence. These apart, we are concerned with four main instances. There were two translations of Seneca's Tragedies, the earlier and less complete of which was apparently produced under the patronage of the marquis of Santillana. There were, again, two versions of the Letters to Lucilius; here, too, there are links with one of the minority of lay patrons in mid-fifteenth-century Castile, Fernán Pérez de Guzman. In both these cases, translations into other Romance vernaculars appear to have been the immediate source for the Castilian renderings; the textual histories, complex for both Tragedies and Letters, have been studied in articles by myself and Mario Eusebi respectively. The other two major examples of Senecan translation in our period were executed directly out of Latin, and their patron was King Juan II himself. In the early 1430s Alonso de Cartagena translated a series of extracts and treatises, some authentic and some not.

In recent years, historians of early modern thought have raised questions concerning the relation of the philosophy of John Locke to the seventeenth-century Epicurean revival instituted by Pierre Gassendi. While many have seen a strong element of Cartesianism in Locke's thought, some of these historians have argued that the main thrust of his philosophy should be understood in the context of this seventeenth-century Epicureanism. One of the most central, and at the same time puzzling concepts in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding is the concept of soul. While Locke never gave a definitive account of the soul, he did present two hypotheses relating to the “essence” of the soul which were important in contemporary disputes and later philosophical developments. In this chapter I shall suggest that these hypotheses represent Locke's own modifications of a seventeenth-century Epicurean account of the soul. Moreover, I shall argue that two major themes concerning the soul in the Essay have roots in this philosophy.

The best-known of Locke's hypotheses was put forward in Book 4 of the Essay. Throughout much of the Essay Locke wrote about the soul from a Cartesian perspective – apparently the perspective of much of his audience. For example, in the chapter of the Essay in which he discussed personal identity, Locke wrote that he was “taking, as we ordinarily now do, … the Soul of a Man, for an immaterial Substance, independent from Matter.” As such it is conceivable that it can be united to different bodies at different times.

Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) is most frequently remembered for introducing the philosophy of the ancient atomist Epicurus into the mainstream of European thought. Gassendi's version of Epicurean atomism and his adaptation of Epicurean hedonism exerted major influences on seventeenth-century developments in science and political philosophy. Before European intellectuals could embrace the philosophy of Epicurus, however, his views had to be purged of the accusations of atheism and materialism that had followed them since antiquity. Gassendi, a Catholic priest, assumed the task of baptizing Epicurus by identifying the theologically objectionable elements in his philosophy and modifying them accordingly. For example, he denied the Epicurean doctrines of the eternity of the world, the infinitude of atoms, the mortality of the human soul, and the existence of the clinamen, or swerve, which Epicurus had introduced in order to account for the impact of atoms in an infinite universe and for the freedom of the human will.

Gassendi's Syntagma philosophicum assumes the form of a traditional “complete” philosophy in three parts, respectively entitled “Logic,” “Physics,” and “Ethics.” It contains a thorough exposition of philosophy and the history of philosophy. Gassendi's virulent anti-Aristotelianism, evident in his first published work, the Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (1624), makes it clear that one of his aims in the Syntagma philosophicum was to produce a complete alternative to Aristotelianism in order to provide foundations for the new science. He did so by endorsing a Christianized version of Epicureanism, in which he intended to discuss all of the traditional issues in philosophy – logical, natural, and moral.

INTRODUCTION

Although there are clear indications of Stoic influence in a variety of scientific contexts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Stoic contribution to early modern science has been almost completely ignored. The silence of modern historians of science is a striking contrast to writers in other fields – for example, politics and literature – where Stoic influences are widely acknowledged and accorded considerable importance. I will attempt here to do two things. First, I will make a case for Stoic influence in early modern science; and second, I will discuss how this influence occurred. My conclusion will be that investigating the transmission of Stoic ideas obliges us to examine the wider cultural context of science. This is not an argument for externalism as a substitute for internal history of science; I take the position that Stoic influence can only be understood by combining both perspectives.

The recognition of Stoic influence has been hampered by the lack of a detailed historical argument for the transmission of specifically Stoic scientific ideas. I will therefore examine the transmission and later use of the Stoic ideas found in Cicero's book On the Nature of the Gods and the subsequent employment of these ideas in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century discussions of the substance of the heavens by Jean Pena, Robert Bellarmine, Tycho Brahe, and Johann Kepler. Last, I will briefly describe the use made of these ideas by Sebastian Basso, to underline the eclectic way in which Stoic natural philosophy was combined with other positions – for example, atomism – during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

A PREMISE

Words (nomina) – some key words in the articulation of Lorenzo Valla's thesis – have a very special meaning in the dialogue On Pleasure. The argument seems to develop on the basis of certain words used with a very particular meaning – words like honestas, honestum, utilitas, utile, fruitio – and to receive impetus from certain verbs, often used in the first person singular: aio atque affirmo, sic statuo, or volo. These words are very difficult to translate. That is why, in trying to present my interpretation of Valla's Epicureanism, I often feel forced to use the Latin terms, together with their English translations. It is as if Valla had invented them.

The key word in the whole argument is voluptas. I define elsewhere (A Defense of Life, Chap. 2) Valla's process as “discovering a new meaning and function in an old word.” In the present essay I try to shed further light on this new meaning by focusing on the character of the Epicurean as the main character of a drama which opposes voluptas to honestas.

SETTING THE PROBLEM: WHAT IS VALLA'S VOLUPTAS?

Lorenzo Valla disseminated his dialogue On Pleasure in its first version, entitled De voluptate, from Piacenza in 1431. He must have conceived it, and probably wrote it down (at least in part) while in his hometown of Rome, where he lived close to the environment of the Curia. In 1430 he moved to Piacenza, called there by his friend Panormita, whom he introduced as the “Epicurean” in his dialogue. Valla was in his middle twenties.

In Scottish thought in the eighteenth century we find something of a reenactment of the ancient debates between Stoics and Skeptics. The Stoic tradition is strongest among the teachers and preachers who find their way into the universities from about 1720 and who close ranks against the skeptical influence of David Hume from the 1740s onwards. Neither tradition survives in a pure classical form, and it would be misleading to suggest that these labels capture all that was at issue; but the adoption of classical models was not inadvertent, and both sides make use, where it suits them, of the language and sources of antiquity. When James Balfour of Pilrig in 1753 sided with the prevailing moralism against Hume's philosophy, Hume offered unsuccessfully to recreate the conditions of social intercourse “when Atticus and Cassius the Epicureans, Cicero the Academic, and Brutus the Stoic, could, all of them, live in unreserved friendship together, and were insensible to all those distinctions, except so far as they furnished agreeable matter to discourse and conversation.” But he was not always so conciliatory. In the first part of this essay I discuss Hume's explicit and generally hostile references to Stoic thought and practice. In the second part I describe the more sympathetic reception accorded to Stoic ideas by some of his Scots contemporaries, who represent a Christian Stoicism which has lost much of its Roman rigor. Hume's own picture of Stoicism is neither Christian nor Roman, but this may be in part a deliberate literary tactic to present a less than flattering portrait of a tradition which, from experience, he did not consider wholly benign.

The course of Stoicism in Italy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from about 1350 to 1550, has not by any means been fully charted. It is generally agreed that a renewal of Latin Stoicism there gathered momentum with the humanist Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) and was bound up with his desire to write philosophy in an elegant Latin that educated laymen, as well as professional scholars, could understand. The kind of letters Petrarch wrote, in fact, are close in spirit to the urbane letters of moral and spiritual guidance written by the Roman Stoic Seneca to his younger friend and disciple Lucilius – intimate and moving, yet instructive. Petrarch's renewal of Stoicism moved along two main paths. The first was his presentation, in De vita solitaria and De otio religioso, of a Stoic / Christian way of life in which cultivation of the scholarly life and ethical perfection are one. Petrarch's model looks remarkably like Seneca's sapiens – that self-sufficient sage, as rare to find as the phoenix, delineated in the Dialogues. The second was Petrarch's elaboration of Stoic psychotherapy in his huge compendium, De remediis utriusque fortunae, based on a mutilated work of similar name attributed to Seneca. The principles of psychotherapy that Petrarch advocates, he tells us explicitly in De remediis and in his more intimate Secretum, are derived mainly from Cicero's Tusculans, the richest Latin source on the subject, and also from Seneca's De tranquillitate animi and the Letters to Lucilius.

This volume is the product of a conference on “Epicureanism and Stoicism,” sponsored by the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, held 24–27 March 1988. Bringing together scholars from several countries and a variety of disciplines, the conference addressed the question of the influence that Epicureanism and Stoicism – two philosophies of nature and human nature articulated during classical antiquity – exerted on the development of Western European thought from ancient times to the Enlightenment. Although the influence of these philosophies has often been noted in certain areas – for example, the influence of Stoicism on Christian thought, and the influence of Epicureanism on modern materialism – the essays in this volume make us newly aware of the degree to which these philosophies and their continued interaction informed European intellectual life, well into early modern times. Even then, many thinkers continued to perceive these two ancient schools as significant alternatives for understanding the human and the natural worlds.

Stoicism and Epicureanism arose more or less contemporaneously in Athens in the late fourth century b.c. Both Epicurus (341–271 b.c.) and Zeno of Citium (334–262 b.c.) developed their philosophies in reaction to the prevailing schools of Plato and Aristotle which dominated Greek thought at that time. The Epicureans and the Stoics alike had Roman expositors whose writings facilitated the transmission of their thought into the medieval period and beyond. Cicero (106–43 b.c.) discussed Epicureanism and Stoicism in several influential works, such as the Tusculans, De finibus, De natura deorum, De divinatione, and De fato.