Winged Men and the Cast of Dice: Anti–Finalism and Radical Materialism in Guillaume Lamy

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe controversy over teleology raged in the early modern period with particular intensity. In this paper, I will show that Guillaume Lamy represents a “radical” current of antifinalism, devoid of weakness, and far from compromise with his adversaries. This antifinalism makes of Lamy not so much a sincere supporter of the unknowability of God’s ends, as scholars have maintained — in other words, a proto–fideist — but rather a radical Lucretian materialist, whose aim is to openly distance himself equally from the partial Cartesian rejection of final causes and from the sugar–coated Epicureanism of the Gassendists.