Background
Claude Guillermet de Bérigard was born in 1578, at Moulins, Allier, France.
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Claude Guillermet de Bérigard
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Bérigard studied both medicine and philosophy at Aix-en-Provence and lived quietly in Avignon, Lyons, and Paris. He could, therefore, have witnessed the condemnation by the parliament and the Sorbonne of Villon and de Claves for their support of atomism in 1624.
Career
In 1625, Bérigard was summoned to Tuscan court to serve as a secretary to the Grand Duchess Christina.
The following year, at the urging of Christina`s confessor, Bérigard was appointed an extraordinary professor of natural philosophy at the University of Pisa.
Seven years later, he took over the chair previously held by Scipione Chiaramonti to become an ordinary professor of natural philosophy, a post he held until 1638. After that Bérigard taught philosophy at the University of Padua until 1663.
In 1632 Bérigard published the Dubitationes, concerning Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (condemned in 1633). Galileo himself is quoted as saying to Elie Diodati (July 25, 1634) that it was more out of obligation than conviction. Bérigard, who must have known Galileo personally, always praised him, but remained firmly convinced of the earth’s immobility.
Bérigard later published a four-volume course on natural philosophy which he titled Circulus Pisanus. The 1643 first edition Circulus was printed in four separate volumes, each dedicated to a different patron. Together these four initial volumes treated the Physics, De generatione, and De anima. Two additional volumes, dedicated to Aristotle’s De caelo and In libros meteorologicos, were published in 1647. A second, expanded and modified version of the work was printed in Padua in 1661.
The Circulus Pisanus is based on the "disputationes circulares" held at the University of Pisa, which played such an important role in his teaching there. The work is cast in the form of a dialogue between Charilaus, a follower of Aristotelian philosophy, and Aristaeus, who upholds pre-Socratic philosophy, especially the atomism of such Ionian philosophers as Anaximander, Empedocles and Anaxagoras. Because atomism, like the new astronomical discoveries, had been condemned, Bérigard was very cautious about how he recovered ancient doctrines and dealt with the new philosophy. Even though he officially remained safely within the limits of traditional thought, he was also clearly familiar with the particulate (probably Cartesian) and experimental (Galileian) forms of the new philosophy. He describes many experiments in his book, including those pertaining to vacuums and the fall of bodies.
Many scientists of the time are mentioned with admiration in the work: Galileo, Torricelli, Viviani, Cabeus, Bourdin, Boulliau, Mersenne, Descartes, Digby, Kircher, Thomas Bartholin, Borelli, Copernicus, Harvey, and Hobbes. Gassendi is also quoted; although the relationship between the latter and Bérigard is not very clear, it is certain that the second edition of the Circulus shows the influence of Gassendi's Syntagma philosophicum (1658). It should be also noted that as early as 1633 Mersenne and Peiresc called Gassendi's attention to the Dubitationes. However, Bérigard explicitly points out the difference between his atomism and that of Gassendi.
Though Bérigard seems reluctant to fully cross the borders of the old philosophy, the Circulus Pisanus is undeniably a tribute to the new experimental sciences: besides the aforementioned encomium on Galileo, the Copernican hypothesis is mentioned and somewhat 'accepted'; the experiments of Torricelli are used to deny the vacuum only on the basis that God is everywhere and therefore the void cannot exist; and the praise of the telescope or the comment on De Luna become an exposition of Copernicus' and Galileo's doctrines.
Claude Guillermet de Bérigard died in 1663, in Padua, Italy.
Achievements
Views
Claude Guillermet de Bérigard propagated qualitative atomism that linked ancient atomism with the Aristotelian and Paracelsian philosophy of elements or ultimate principles. This chemical philosopher proposed that natural mixts consisted of indivisible atoms, and that there existed different qualitative kinds of elemental atoms.
Career
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1625 - 1626
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1626 - 1633
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1633 - 1638
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1639 - 1662