Aristotle and Descartes, two sources of materialist atheism in the Seventeenth Century Theophrastus redivivus and Cyrano de Bergerac

The author of Theophrastus and Cyrano de Bergerac, two seventeenth-century thinkers reputed “libertine,” may refer to Epicureanism in order to ground their atheism and natural morality, but does not use atomism but, respectively, Aristotle’s and Descartes’s physics albeit cut from their metaphysical roots, in order to ground atheist materialism. The latter thus appears not as a physical notion but as something like a metaphysical foundation of atheism.