Tommaso Cornelio et l’histoire du matérialisme

Gassendi began to be known in Neaples after 1650, when Tommaso Cornelio – the founder, with Lionardo di Capua, of the scientific Academy of the Investigators – introduced his works in South Italy. Cornelio feels a great admiration for Descartes’ Principles, but he doesn’t agree with Descartes’s metaphysical views and physical rejection of the « vacuum »; so, in his Progymnasmata physica, a series of scientifïcal essays focusing its main interests on human physiology, he proposes a modem version of Atomism, where the notion of « œther » is the terminus medium between Cartesian plenism and Democritean vacuum.