The writing of a book on Gassendi is necessarily a synthetic task. Gassendi not only expounded many subjects, but he did so in a manner which can only be fully understood by recognizing his own synthetic aims as a scholar. The variety of contemporary academic fields which must be brought together to explain his work includes the history of science, the history of philosophy, the history of historiography, classical scholarship, and French history. Moreover, this task is made even more daunting by the challenge of deciphering Gassendi's formidable texts, composed in a difficult late-Renaissance Latin style interlaced with Greek, and by the challenge of stating their significance for the modern reader. Anyone who follows Gassendi down the labyrinthine trails of his work would be unable to progress very far without the signposts and advice offered by fellow scholars from diverse academic fields concerning the intellectual geography of his writings. I have thus incurred many debts in the preparation of this study.

Several sections of the present book were begun as chapters of my Ph.D. dissertation in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. At Harvard I had the immense good fortune of reading Gassendi for the first time while I was a member of John Murdoch's seminar on ancient Greek and medieval atomism. Professor Murdoch's handling of these abstruse topics convinced me that perhaps even Gassendi's apparently unintelligible passages might be rendered intelligible through patient application. I am also grateful to my other teacher, I. Bernard Cohen.