Sébastien Basson, Latinized as Sebastianus Basso, was a French physician and natural philosopher of the beginning of the seventeenth century.
[2] Basson was born in the area of Metz in Lorraine around 1573 and studied at the Jesuit academy of Pont-à-Mousson, where he took philosophy courses under Pierre Sinson.
[4] In 1620, he had to appear before the board of theologians at Geneva in order to defend his anti-Aristotelian treatise, whose printing the censors had stopped.
[1] Basson's Philosophiae naturalis adversus Aristotelem libri XII (Twelve books[5] of natural philosophy against Aristotle) of 1621, was strongly against the conception of natural philosophy as based on Aristotle; it attacked in particular the concept of continuous magnitude.
[6] Ivor Leclerc considers this work the fullest expression of the “new conception of nature” that had arisen in Europe by the 1620s, at the hands of Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, David van Goorle, and Daniel Sennert.