From natural history to early modern science: the case of Bacon's “histories” (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Philosophy of Francis Bacon's Natural History: A Research Program
2010
My paper proposes a new contextual interpretation of Francis Bacon's New Atlantis as an exemplar of natural history. The context in question is provided by Bacon's late writings: his Latin natural histories published under the title Historia naturalis et experimentalis or left in manuscript, together with other fragmentary re-writings of earlier works. I will claim that in the last five years of his life Francis Bacon was actively engaged into a process of rewriting and reorganizing his earlier ideas regarding natural history, natural philosophy and the relation between the two. I attempt to show that in this process, Bacon elaborated a research program for doing natural history and that most of his posthumous works, New Atlantis included, have a place in this research program. My reading provides, I propose, an interesting and fruitful interpretative framework not only for New Atlantis but for a handful of very diverse seventeenth-century writings belonging to authors who claimed to be Baconians and to provide 'continuations' and 'interpretations' of New Atlantis.
My paper proposes a new contextual interpretation of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis as an exemplar of natural history. The context in question is provided by Bacon’s late writings: his Latin natural histories published under the title Historia naturalis et experimentalis or left in manuscript, together with other fragmentary re-writings of earlier works. I will claim that in the last five years of his life Francis Bacon was actively engaged into a process of re-writing and re-organizing his earlier ideas regarding natural history, natural philosophy and the relation between the two. I attempt to show that in this process, Bacon elaborated a research program for doing natural history and that most of his posthumous works, New Atlantis included, have a place in this research program. My reading provides, I propose, an interesting and fruitful interpretative framework not only for New Atlantis but for a handful of very diverse seventeenth–century writings belonging to authors who claimed to be Baconians and to provide ‘continuations’ and ‘interpretations’ of New Atlantis.
Merchants of Light and Mystery Men: Bacon's Last Projects in Natural History
Journal of Early Modern Studies, 2014
Th is essay explores the natural history project that Bacon undertakes in the last part of his life. After setting aside the Novum organum and the attempt to set out a method of interpreting nature in detail, Bacon turned to the project of outlining what a natural history should look like. Part of this project involved the composition of some natural histories to serve as models of what a natural history should look like. He published two of six exemplary histories he planned, the Historia vitae et mortis and the Historia ventorum. Both of these are very carefully organized works in learned Latin. However, shortly after his death, William Rawley, his literary executor, published Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum, presented as "a natural history in ten centuries." Th e style of this work is altogether diff erent from the Latin natural histories: it is in English, not Latin, and, as Rawley put it in his letter to the reader, "it may seeme an Indigested Heap of Particulars." In this essay, I discuss the relations between the formal Latin natural histories and the Sylva. Appealing to the structure of Salomon's House in the New Atlantis, published in the same volume as the Sylva, I argue that the Sylva Sylvarum represents the very fi rst stages of constructing a natural history, while the Latin natural histories represent later stages in the process, where the observations, experiments, and other materials collected from various sources are arrayed in a more orderly and systematic fashion.
Is Baconian Natural History Theory-Laden
Journal of Early Modern Studies
Th e recent surge of interest in Bacon's own attempts at natural history has revealed a complex interplay with his speculative ideas in natural philosophy. Th is research has given rise to the concern that his natural histories are theory-laden in a way that Bacon ought to fi nd unacceptable, given his prescription in the Parasceve for a reliable body of factual instances that can be used as a storehouse for induction. Th is paper aims to resolve this tension by elaborating a moderate foundationalist account of Bacon's method and by appealing to a distinction he makes, in a letter to Father Fulgentio, between pure and impure natural histories. I argue that the discussions of causes and axioms in the published histories render them impure, since that material properly belongs to Part Four of the Instauratio, but that this interplay with Part Four is necessary for the sake of the continued refi nement of Part Th ree (the natural historical part). Bacon ultimately aims for a storehouse of instances, to be attained at the culmination of this process of refi nement, and at that point the history should be published in its pure form.
Francis Bacon's natural history and civil history: a comparative survey
Early science and medicine, 2012
The aim of this paper is to offer a comparative survey of Bacon's theory and practice of natural history and of civil history, particularly centered on their relationship to natural philosophy and human philosophy. I will try to show that the obvious differences concerning their subject matter encompass a number of less obvious methodological and philosophical assumptions which reveal a significant practical and conceptual convergence of the two fields. Causes or axioms are prescribed as the theoretical end-products of natural history, whereas precepts are envisaged as the speculative outcomes derived from perfect civil history. In spite of this difference, causes and precepts are thought to enable effective action in order to change the state of nature and of man, respectively. For that reason a number of common patterns are to be found in Bacon's theory and practice of natural and civil history.
Francis Bacon and the “Interpretation of Nature” in the Late Renaissance
Isis, 2014
The "interpretation of nature" (interpretatio naturae) is the leading idea in Francis Bacon's natural philosophy. But by contrast with his ideas about method, induction, or experiment, the significance of the "interpretation of nature" has received very little scholarly attention. This essay tests the originality of Bacon's idea by means of a focused survey of existing forms of Renaissance natural knowledge-Aristotelian and anti-Aristotelian natural philosophy, Galenic and Paracelsian medicine, natural magic, physiognomy, natural history-before turning to consider the much more prominent place of "interpretation" in the fields of Renaissance logic, revealed and natural theology, and law. It finds that Bacon's application of the idea of "interpretation" to nature was highly original, but also that certain important aspects of his conception have analogies in Renaissance civil law. The essay concludes by exploring the implications of these findings for a recent body of scholarship in the history of the sciences that invokes the notion of the "interpretation of nature" to characterize pre-Baconian natural philosophy more generally.
This paper establishes the 'emblematic' use of natural history as a propaedeutic to self-betterment in the Renaissance; in particular, in the natural histories of Gessner and Topsell, but also in the works of Erasmus and Rabelais. Subsequently, it investigates how Francis Bacon's conception of natural history is envisaged in relation to them. The paper contends that, where humanist natural historians understood the use of natural knowledge as a preliminary to individual improvement, Bacon conceived self-betterment foremost as a means to Christian charity, or social-betterment. It thus examines the transformation of the moralizing aspect of Renaissance natural history in Bacon's conception of his Great Instauration.
Natural history and the medicine of the mind: the roots of Francis Bacon`s Great Instauration
Annals of the University of Bucharest - Philosophy Series, 2012
Francis Bacon founded his grand-scale project of a Great Instauration on what he has claimed to be a new and reformed natural history. This claim has been often taken for granted by Baconian scholars. This paper investigates some possible roots of Baconian natural history and discusses a number of features common to Bacon’s conception of natural history and to other natural historical writings belonging to the same cultural context: the Neo-Stoic and Protestant revival of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century England. My investigation focuses on one of the characteristic features Baconian natural history shares with other natural historical writings belonging to this cultural milieu, namely the claim that an empirical study of nature has moral and therapeutic benefits for the human mind.