Sébastien Basson

Sébastien Basson, Latinized as Sebastianus Basso, was a French physician and natural philosopher of the beginning of the seventeenth century. He was an early theorist of a matter theory based on both atoms and compounds. His natural philosophy draws on several currents of thought, including Italian Renaissance naturalism, alchemy and Calvinist theology. Ivor Leclerc considers this work the fullest expression of the “new conception of nature” that had arisen in Europe by the 1620s, at the hands of Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, David van Goorle, and Daniel Sennert.

For Basson, atoms may combine as mixta, but they are not in a void, but rather in an ether. They are moved by it; in this suggestion Basson contradicts the teleology of the Jesuit view of causation. The theory of his time on the classical elements tended towards a version with five principles, but Basson rejected earth and water in his book, leaving his elemental theory as three Paracelsian principles. He opposed, though, the theory of "compounds", as admitted by Sennert, in the sense of mixtures having properties that were not properties of their atomistic constituents.

Some contemporaries—both adversaries

Ariew, Roger. Descartes, Basson et la scolastique renaissante. In Descartes et la Renaissance, edited by E. Faye (Geneva: Slatkine, 1999), pp. 295–309. Ariew, Roger. "Basso, Sebastian". In Roger Ariew, Dennis Des Chene, Douglas M. Jesseph, Tad M. Schmaltz, Theo Verbeek, The A to Z of Descartes and Cartesian philosophy. Scarecrow Press, 2010, Leclerc, Ivor. The necessity today of the philosophy of nature Lüthy, Christoph. "Thoughts and circumstances of Sébastien Basson. Analysis, micro-history, question". In Early Science and Medicine, 2 (1997), ; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Atomism from the 17th to the 20th Century