François Bernier

François Bernier (1620 to 1688) was a French physician and traveller who is remembered in philosophy chiefly as the translator and popularizer of Pierre Gassendi. Orphaned young, he studied in Paris, became Gassendi's aide and secretary, and took a medical degree at Montpellier in 1652. After Gassendi died in 1655 he spent nearly twelve years in the East, serving as physician to Dara Shikoh and later at the court of Aurangzeb, and he wrote an account of the Mughal Empire. Back in France he abridged and translated Gassendi's philosophical writings into French as the Abregé de la Philosophie de Gassendi, rendering the ideas faithfully without editorial invention, though in 1682 he published his own doubts about some of its chapters. He also defended the ideas of Descartes and, in 1684, published an essay that divided humanity into four so-called races, a text later read as an early step toward racial classification.