  Gassendi reveals atomist sympathies in his earliest works and correspondence, where he rejects much of the style and some of the substance of philosophy in the late Aristotelian tradition. Indeed, some commentators see Gassendi as a thinker in the Renaissance mold who simply lands on atomism as a central component of a broader Epicurean alternative system to the robust range of received Aristotelian views.  However, though he shares most of Epicurus's claims about atoms (and many Epicurean arguments for those claims), Gassendi disagrees on key points. This suggests it is the merits of the view itself, that it is the most likely physical hypothesis about the underlying structure of matter, and not simply a general restoration of Epicureanism, that leads him to atomism.