Francis Bacon

A comprehensive history of how induction has been conceived, from Socrates to Karl Popper.

There is an important tension within Francis Bacon’s discussions of sense-perception. On the one hand, he sometimes seems to regard sense-percep­tion as a certain and unquestionable source of information about the world. On the other hand, he refers to errors, faults, desertions, and deceptions of the senses; indeed, he aims to offer a method which can remedy these errors. Thus, Bacon may appear conflicted about whether sense-perception provides reliable information about the world. But, I argue, this appearance of a conflict (...) is itself illusory. Bacon offers us a coherent and compelling account of sense-perception that acknowledges not only its weaknesses but also its strengths. I explain his account by exploring its roots in the atomist and natural magic traditions, drawing special attention to the similarity between Bacon’s response to skepticism and earlier atomist responses to skepticism. One of the key features of the view is the analogy between sense organs and scientific instruments, both of which infallibly register information based on causal principles. (shrink)

RESUMEN Francis Bacon y René Descartes han sido presentados tradicionalmente como pioneros de corrientes filosóficas opuestas entre sí. Sin embargo, son cada vez más los estudios que muestran importantes continuidades entre sus filosofías. Este artículo explora una de ellas: sus perspectivas sobre la medicina. El dominio sobre la naturaleza y el instinto de autoconservación son los elementos centrales del marco teórico dentro del cual se inserta su valoración de la medicina como la disciplina más destacada por sus beneficios para el (...) cuidado del ser humano. A partir de ahí son muchas sus coincidencias acerca del estatus, la práctica y la reforma de la medicina. ABSTRACT Francis Bacon and René Descartes have traditionally been presented as leaders of opposed philosophical currents. However, more and more studies show important continuities between their philosophies. This article explores one of them: their perspectives on medicine. The dominion over nature and the instinct for self-preservation are the central elements of the theoretical framework within which they inserted their assessments of medicine. Medicine is valued as the most outstanding discipline for its benefits for the care of the human being. Departing from this start-point, one finds further coincidences about the status, practice, and reform of medicine. (shrink)

This essay explores the history of the concept of _monstrum_ from Francis Bacon’s _Novum Organum_ to Athanasius Kircher’s _Mundus Subterraneaus_ (1664), as well as its relationship with the origins of science; as in the early modern age, the term _monstra_ is considered as a synonym for _mirabilia naturae_. The introductory part focuses on the difficult definition of “monster”, starting from Aristotle’s famous sentence in _De generatione animalium_: whoever does not looks like his parents, or whatever happens in a different way (...) from the “generality of cases”, is included within the category of the “monstrous”. Monster is a being, whose anomaly represents a warning; therefore, monsters may be considered as signs, susceptible of an allegorical, moral and even political interpretation. In another acceptation of the term, monsters may be considered as the privileged witnesses of the richness and fecundity of nature. In the second part, Bacon’s theory of monsters is exposed: they are classified as _instantiae deviantes_, within that interpretation of nature, through which the Lord Chancellor lays the epistemological foundations of the modern science. In the third, fourth and fifth parts, a taxonomy of monsters is given: at first, by means of the _cabinets des curiosités_, which flourished in sixteenth and seventeenth century Italy, from Naples to Rome, from Bologna to Milan, with famous collectors such as Ferrante Imperato, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Manfredo Settala, Athanasius Kircher; then, through the “books of secrets”, which are at the same time a new, successful literary genre and a way of thinking nature, an aspect of natural history. Among the “professors of secrets”, there are Giovan Battista Della Porta, Ambroise Paré, Leonardo Fioravanti, Jean Fernel, Pierre Borel, Kenelm Digby, and Athanasius Kircher, again, with some disciples of his, such as Kaspar Schott. Secrets of nature and _mirabilia naturae_ are finally compared: the classical list of _mirabilia_, from Pliny the Elder to Kircher, completes the taxonomy of monsters. The sixth and last part of this essay offers an explicative theory of monsters and prodigies: the marvels of nature are magnetic phenomena, which seem to imply a mysterious action at a distance. Such magnetic action can be accounted for on the basis of the Renaissance, Ficinian and Neoplatonic concept of spirit – conceived as the universal vehicle of occult sympathies and antipathies - and then through the seventeenth concepts of corpuscular effluvia, introduced by Pierre Gassendi in his _Physica_ (1658), and _sphaera activitatis_, produced by the effluvia which each body emits, and surrounding it. This sphere is the place when most of marvelous phenomena happen. (shrink)

Die Amerikaner, die Tocqueville während seines Aufenthaltes in den Vereinigten Staaten entdeckt, sind ein auf die Praxis und nicht auf die reine Theorie ausgerichtetes Volk. Wenn sie sich Wissen aneignen, dann nur, weil sie dieses Wissen bei der Verfolgung ihrer praktischen Zwecke nutzen können. Wissen hat demnach für sie nur dann einen Wert, wenn es auch nützlich ist.

Over the last 400 years, attitudes toward Francis Bacon's philosophy have changed considerably: the 17-century interest and the 18-century enthusiasm have been replaced by the 20-century criticism and reevaluation. However, both the praise and the rejection of the Lord Chancellor’s philosophical ideas often originate from the isolation and absolutization of particular features of his philosophy that can sometimes be in opposition to each other. These partial readings are justified by the fact that the reference to Bacon’s methodological and epistemological legacy (...) has a symbolic meaning and is part of what is called “image of science” in Y. Elkana’s terminology. The way in which references to Bacon are used at different times and in different contexts is, in fact, a functional myth or theoretical fiction in which the “historical Bacon” is fading away and what emerges is important and meaningful to those who declare themselves his followers or who lash out at him with criticism. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to offer a preliminary survey of one of the most widely discussed problems in Bacon’s studies: the problem of the interplay between the speculative and operative layers of Bacon’s works. I propose to classify the various answers in three categories. In the first category I place attempts claiming that Bacon’s inquiries display his appetitive metaphysics. In the second category are those seeing Bacon’s more “scientific” works as disclosing some of the inner metaphysical layers and (...) presuppositions. The third category see Bacon’s experimental inquiries as attempts to “fix” metaphysics, by redefining concepts of metaphysical origins. In discussing these three categories of interpretative stances I show that we can gain further insights if we take into account recent and less recent trends in philosophy of science, and especially if we think in terms of background theory and bottom-up strategies of concept formation. I offer examples of such procedures in Bacon’s natural and experimental histories and show what we can gain if we apply the same interpretative strategy of focusing on concept-formation to the reading of the Novum organum. (shrink)

This chapter brings some much-needed conceptual clarity to the debate about Locke’s scientific methodology. Instead of having to choose between the method of hypothesis and that of natural history (as most interpreters have thought), he would resist prescribing a single method for natural sciences in general. Following Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle, Locke separates medicine and natural philosophy (physics), so that they call for completely different methods. While a natural philosopher relies on “speculative” (causal-theoretical) hypotheses together with natural-history making to (...) explicate phenomena, a medical practitioner must prioritize collecting data about what remedies tend to cure what diseases over hypothesizing about the causes of the latter. (shrink)

This paper will analyze three historical cases (Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei and Margaret Cavendish) that exemplify the complexity of the interaction between science and religion in the Scientific Revolution and confirm the interpretation of J. H. Brooke, according to which, in this historical context –rather than a separation- a differentiation took hold between them. We will hold that although these authors agreed in proposing the separation of science and religion as an ideal, each in their own way made an articulation (...) between the two that in the long run prevented a complete separation. This articulation was due to both epistemic and extra-epistemic reasons and manifests a tension that was characteristic of the Scientific Revolution. (shrink)

The most important of Francis Bacon’s argument against Aristotelian syllogistic logic as a main method of investigation was his doctrine of Idols, closely connected to the contemporary Anglican theological views on imperfect human nature. In his criticism of the first notion of human mind, based on mistaken abstraction, Bacon separated “ars inveniendi”, “ars judicandi” and “ars tradendi” and argued for a new nonverbal form of communication, based on “real characters”. Bacon's conventional concept of the universal language, strongly influenced by Aristotle, (...) was not realized by the philosopher himself, but it was of great popularity in both European rationalism and British empiricism in the middle – second half of the 17th century. (shrink)

In this review I analyse new trends in Bacon-scholarship over the last decade. Bacon’s role in the history and philosophy of science has been the topic of debate since the second half of the seventeenth century. Scholars took him to be either a key figure in the emergence of experimental sciences, or the opposite of what science is supposed to be. However, most of these bold claims were based on distortions and misunderstandings of Bacon’s programme. Starting in the last couple (...) of decades of the twentieth century, several studies offered a more nuanced account of Bacon’s philosophy and tried to refute some of the ‘unsound criticisms’. Moreover, over the last decade, we can notice a tendency to focus on Bacon’s more practical works, and not only on the more theoretical ones. In the context of these practical works, I identified several new trends: the role of the natural and experimental histories in the overall project of the Great Instauration, and their relation with natural philosophy; the function of mathematics and quantification; the employment of instruments and other devices to overcome the shortcomings of both the senses and the minds; the scientific methodology with an emphasis on the relation between theory and experiments, and the use of exploratory experiments; and finally Bacon’s use of sources and his influence on later early modern authors. As opposed to the idea that Bacon was interested either in collecting random facts or in inventing experimental reports to present his speculative ideas, Bacon is lately portrayed as a careful experimenter, meticulous in writing reports, ingenious in designing instruments and new experiments, and critical towards his own conceptions. (shrink)

Reich an Krisen der technisierten Zivilisation, bleibt das 21. Jahrhundert bislang arm an Losungen. Mit Habermas geht dieses Buch davon aus, dass Ansatze zur Krisenbewaltigung in einer diskursiven Vermittlung zwischen Expertenkulturen und Alltagspraxis zu suchen sind. Plosser vertritt die These, dass ein Gelingen demokratisch handlungsleitender Kommunikation einer theoriestrukturellen Reflexion auf unseren wissenschafts- und alltagssprachlichen Metapherngebrauch bedarf. Die These wird systematisch eingelost durch die innovative Einbindung von Metaphernanalysen Blumenbergs in die Untersuchung des gesellschaftskritischen Selbstverstandigungsdiskurses von Bacon uber Herder bis hin zur (...) Frankfurter Schule. (shrink)

From his earliest publications until his last, Francis Bacon displayed an intense interest in theo- logical and religious issues, and expressed this interest in both public and private. On the other hand, he has long been recognized for his proposals for a grand reform and reconstruction of natural philosophy, in which experience, observation, experiment, and technological implementation of abstract claims all took center stage. This practical bent has often neatly been encapsu- lated in the slogan derived from Bacon himself, ‘knowledge (...) is power.’ The many and interesting connections between these two sets of interests – the theological and the natural philosophical – have not gone unnoticed by scholars; however, one central component of Bacon’s pragmatic approach to natural philosophy that was deeply influenced by his theological concerns has remained unexplored. The equation between knowledge and power, so well known, in fact developed out of Bacon’s conception of the Christian Trinity, and out of the rela- tionship between the Trinity and humanity’s pursuit of knowledge about nature. It is the task of this essay to trace the development of this connection from the beginnings of Bacon’s literary career until its end. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Epigram into Lyric: Francis Bacon Translates from the Greek Anthology GORDON BRADEN If sir francis bacon did not exactly invent modern science and technology, he did predict it, with remarkable accuracy. The unfinished project of which the writings of his later years were to be component parts is a reformation of the life of the human mind from the ground up—“a complete Instauration of the arts and sciences and (...) all the learning of mankind, raised upon proper foundations ”1—and the most (arguably the only) successful such plan ever drafted. It foresaw both the previously unimaginable worldly triumph of the human race over nature in the centuries that followed and the intellectual means by which that triumph was to be achieved. He also wrote poetry. It is no surprise that someone of his time and place and station should have done so, and its existence is not in itself remarkable. Not much of it has survived, and we have no particular reason to think there was more; and, despite the extensive scholarly and critical scrutiny that Bacon’s work has received, very little attention has been given to this part of it. Still, one poem has achieved something of an afterlife and is worth attention, especially alongside the triumphalism of Bacon’s Magna Instauratio. It concerns hopelessness. Serious attention has been given to Bacon’s remarks on literature and the imagination, including his proposal, amid all his other plans, for what he calls “literary history” (historia literarum).2 But his poems are a different matter. They can be found in the great 19th-century edition of Bacon’s collected works, tucked in between his Prayers and his Christian Paradoxes.3 Most of the poems are from a small volume of psalm translations published under his own name the year before arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 his death; these are now available in one of the published volumes of the new Oxford edition of Bacon’s works.4 There is also 12-line poem in hexameter couplets that begins sounding like a translation of Horace’s Integer vitae but goes on to be a fairly straightforward completion of its opening thesis and never gets around to sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking Lalage; a manuscript in the British Library attributes it to Bacon, though it is also printed in two of Thomas Campion’s books of airs as if it were one of his.5 My own interest is in the one remaining poem, a 32-line translation of a 10-line poem from the Greek Anthology (9.359 in the Palatine Anthology, though known in Bacon’s time from the Planudean). It first appears in print in 1626, anonymously, as “Certaine verses concerning the present estate of Man,” appended with other “characters, and many other witty conceits ” to an edition of Thomas Overbury’s poem “A Wife.”6 Three years later the classical scholar Thomas Farnaby prints it with an ascription to Bacon in a selection of poems from the Greek Anthology, along with the original text of the Greek poem, a Latin translation of it, and the editor’s facing translation of Bacon’s poem back into Greek.7 Bacon’s poem can also be found, both complete and in fragmentary form, in quite a few manuscripts, which are being collated for the first time for The Oxford Francis Bacon, though the editors have not yet decided where to put it. Isolated citations and quotations of the poem occur over the next several centuries; Francis Turner Palgrave includes it in his much-reprinted Golden Treasury, with the title “Life.”8 But there has been little discussion of the poem. It is the subject of an excellent scholarly article by Herbert Grierson, but that was over a hundred years ago.9 Paul Fussell has some sharp observations on Bacon’s use of his stanza form, but they fit onto a single page.10 Other comment is mostly incidental. I want to gather and slightly enhance what has been learned or said about the poem, and explore why it has snagged my interest. The Greek original is variously attributed; the most commonly mentioned name is Posidippus, probably the Mace50 epigram into... (shrink)

Unlike Descartes, Francis Bacon never wanted to cast aside traditional philosophy in order to mark new beginnings for the intellectual enterprise. He was as much a historian as an inquirer into nature. But he had a peculiar and idiosyncratic understanding of the scope, purpose and uses of the history of philosophy. As Jalobeanu shows in this chapter, Bacon envisaged a theoretically informed, highly engaged and polemical history of philosophy whose major purpose was to diagnose and classify errors. He never managed (...) to complete this ambitious project. However, a careful investigation of its remaining fragments can unveil both the complexity of his typologies of errors and their multiple functions in Bacon’s project of a natural and experimental history. Jalobeanu demonstrates, first, that in constructing successive typologies of errors, Bacon revisited some of the traditional anti-sectarian language and critical arguments we can find in authors such as Cornelius Agrippa and Michel de Montaigne with the purpose of creating general maps of (teaching and) learning. Strategies of signposting generic errors were then used to navigate the tortuous waters of ‘experience’, avoiding some of the most common pitfalls and blunders of naïve empiricism. Second, and more importantly, she shows how Bacon’s critical reflection upon historical (and historiographic) errors also provided tools for the construction of heuristic strategies of investigation, delimiting (and hence learning how to avoid) various forms of ‘bad science’ and biases in experimental investigation. Last but not least, Bacon’s theoretically informed history of philosophy provided empirical material for the construction of his theory of idols. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy was an exciting and extraordinarily successful development in the study of nature in the seventeenth century. Yet experimental philosophy was not without its critics and was far from the only natural philosophical method on the scene. In particular, experimental philosophy was contrasted with and set against speculative philosophy and, in some quarters, was accused of tending to irreligion. This volume brings together ten scholars of early modern philosophy, history and science in order to shed new light on the (...) complex relations between experiment, speculation and religion in early modern Europe. The first six chapters of the book focus on the respective roles of experimental and speculative philosophy in individual seventeenth-century philosophers. They include Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Isaac Newton. The next two chapters deal with the relation between experimental philosophy and religion with a special focus on hypotheses and natural religion. The penultimate chapter takes a broader European perspective and examines the paucity of concerns with religion among Italian natural philosophers of the period. Finally, the concluding chapter draws all these individuals and themes together to provide a critical appraisal of recent scholarship on experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Väitetään, että nykypäivän populismi vetoaa tosiasioiden sijasta ”kokemukseen”. Mutta mitä on kokemus? Se ei ole vain ennakkoluuloihin nojautuvaa mutua eikä myöskään pelkkää empiirisen datan rekisteröintiä mutta liittyy molempiin. Artikkelin luoma tiivis katsaus kokemuksen käsitehistorian pääpiirteisiin osoittaa, että länsimaisen filosofian perinteessä kokemus on ymmärretty ohittamattomana vaiheena tiedon hankkimisessa ja koettelemisessa. Toisaalta kokemukseen on liitetty tiettyjä tiedollisia heikkouksia – kontingenssi, tilannesidonnaisuus ja ennakoimattomuus – jotka tieteellinen metodi on eri tavoin pyrkinyt voittamaan. Artikkeli esittää, että 1900-luvun filosofinen hermeneutiikka irrottautuu tästä perinteisestä kokemuksen välineellistämisestä (...) ja alistamisesta korkeammille päämäärille ja keskittyy uudella ja hedelmällisellä tavalla juuri mainittuihin kokemuksen ”vaaroihin”. Hermeneuttisesti ymmärretty kokemus muodostuu äärellisen ihmisen ainutkertaisista kohtaamisista todellisuuden muuttuvan ja ehtymättömän mielekkyyden kanssa – omalle ymmärrykselle vieraan toiseuden ja samalla oman ymmärryksen äärellisyyden ja inhimillisen äärellisyyden kohtaamisesta. (shrink)

Although the discipline of vice epistemology is only a decade old, the broader project of studying epistemic vices and failings is much older. This paper argues that contemporary vice epistemologists ought to engage more closely with these earlier projects. After sketching some general arguments in section one, I then turn to deep epistemic vices: ones whose identity and intelligibility depends on some underlying conception of human nature or the nature of reality. The final section then offers a case study from (...) a vice epistemic tradition that emerged in early modern English natural philosophy. (shrink)

There is an aesthetic undercurrent traversing Deleuze's philosophy along confluent trajectories of Baruch Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche, which harbours untapped potentials and far-reaching consequences for contemporary discussions of art and architecture. According to this subterranean stream, aesthetic experience is generated, neither in ready-made mental faculties of a subject, nor in essential qualities of an object, but through affective interactions of a relational field. A cartographic inquiry of affective aesthetics constitutes the subject matter of this paper, beginning with a philosophical elaboration (...) that connects aesthetic theories of Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze, evolving via a comparative analysis of aesthetic processes specific to Francis Bacon's artistic assemblages and Vogelkop bowerbirds' architectural constructs, and concluding with the possibility of a non-anthropocentric aesthetics. (shrink)

The way of laws is as much a defining feature of the modern period as the way of ideas; but the way of laws is hardly without its forks. Both before and after Descartes, there are philosophers using the concept to carve out a very different position from his, one that is entirely disconnected from God or God’s will. I argue that Francis Bacon and Baruch Spinoza treat laws as dispositions that derive from a thing’s nature. This reading upends the (...) currently orthodox treatment of Spinoza’s laws as infinite modes, and calls for a re-conception of his metaphysics of causation. (shrink)

In its early modern form, philosophy gave a decisive impetus to the science and technology that have transformed the planet and brought on the so-called Anthropocene. Can philosophy now help us understand this new age and act within it? The contributors to this volume take a broad historical view as they reflect on the responsibilities and possibilities for philosophy today.

Scottish philosophy and intellectual history have become the increasingly fashionable fields of academic studies. Alexander Broadie, one of the pioneers and an accomplished scholar of the Scottish Enlightenment, returns to the basic question, namely, “what is Scottish philosophy?”, and presents a comprehensive work on the history of Scottish philosophy. Broadie successfully elucidates the nature and significance of Scottish philosophy both historically and philosophically. He argues that Scottish philosophy must be studied in its historical context, for it is not only a (...) philosophical enterprise but also a persistent tradition which has united the Scottish nation for centuries. The advancements in science, literature, politics, and culture in Scotland would be extremely unlikely, if not impossible, without such an intellectual culture established by thinkers in that tradition. This article is intended as a review of Broadie’s A History of Scottish Philosophy in the background of his shifting academic interests from philosophy to history while he holds the professorship in University of Glasgow. His commitment to Scottish philosophical culture deserves the attention of contemporary historians and philosophers, for his work opens up a space for dialogue between intellectual history and history of philosophy, an issue addressed at the end of this paper. (shrink)

In the early seventeenth century Francis Bacon called for the institution of a distinct field of theoretical and practical knowledge that would deal with the tight interrelationship between the mind and the body of man, which he dubbed “the inquirie tovching hvmane natvre entyre” (Advancement of Learning, Book II). According to Bacon, such knowledge was already in existence, but unfortunately scattered in medical and religious texts. As a remedy, he proposed an integrated and autonomous account that would constitute “one general (...) science concerning the Nature and State of Man” (De augmentis scientiarum, Book IV). Such an account would concern itself with both the nature of the bond (vinculum) between mind and body (ibid.) and with the medical-religious care of man in his entirety. My purpose here is to identify a number of late Renaissance contexts that flagged a comparable type of preoccupation with the nature and care of the ‘whole man’ from a perspective that similarly strove to combine philosophy, medicine and theology. (shrink)

Francis Bacon’s method of induction is often understood as a form of eliminative induction. The idea, on this interpretation, is to list the possible formal causes of a phenomenon and, by reference to a copious and reliable natural history, to falsify all of them but one. Whatever remains must be the formal cause. Bacon’s crucial instances are often seen as the crowning example of this method. In this article, I argue that this interpretation of crucial instances is mistaken, and it (...) has caused us to lose sight of why Bacon assigns crucial instances a special role in his quest for epistemic certainty about formal causes. If crucial instances are interpreted eliminatively, then they are subject to the two problems related to underdetermination raised by Duhem: (1) that it is impossible to be certain one has specified all of the possible alternatives and (2) that an experiment falsifies a whole theory, not just a single hypothesis in isolation. I show that Bacon anticipates and aims to dodge both of these problems by conceiving of crucial instances as working, in the ideal case, through direct affirmations that are supported by links to more foundational knowledge. (shrink)

Topic of the book is the project by Francis Bacon, a philosophical plan of the great instauration.

Literary theory and criticism over the last three decades have shown an increasing interest in studying the cognitive and critical relevance of the “essay” for modern history and culture . This paper aims to supply supporting evidence for this perspective, examining the function of essay writing for both Montaigne and Francis Bacon's conception of human thought and knowledge. In particular, I will focus on the epistemological implications of the essay and fragmentary prose, both considered forms of writing that express a (...) particular way of thinking. (shrink)

Francis Bacon’s main contribution to the emergence of experimental philosophy was a new way of thinking about the serial character of experimental practices. His natural and experimental histories document his constant attempts to order experimental inquiries. They consist of large collections of lists and series of items, most of which are called “experiments.” For Bacon, “experiment” is a generic term; it is used for tests and trials, recipes, ideas of experimental investigations, theoretical observations and methodological suggestions. Experiments never stand alone (...) in a natural history; they come in series of numbered items, sometimes grouped under “heads” and “topics of inquiry.” In the Latin natural histories.. (shrink)

This paper is divided into two parts. In this first part I propose to re-contextualize some of the design policies of today in Utopian literature by the means of a fictional dialogue, in order to witness their genesis. In a sense, my fiction can be considered as a “reverse scenario”, especially when compared to other studies on Utopia, for example the study of Victor Margolin, (The Struggle for Utopia), which deals directly with Utopian elements used in design practice today. To (...) illustrate my point I have chosen Utopia of Thomas More (1478-1535) and The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon (1561-1626). The fictional dialogue is constructed around the idea of three days of conversation between the protagonist of Utopia and the protagonist of The New Atlantis: i.e. Raphael Hythloday (a philosopher of Portuguese origin) and The Reverend Father (a scientific worker of “The House of Solomon”). For the sake of the scenario I symbolise the origins of social design policies within the arguments of Raphael, and the origins of the market policies are represented by the Reverend Father. In the second part of this paper I will try to present an idea of Utopian design, which is more in coherence with the design practice of today. To illustrate this point, I will consider the Utopian element in design not as a passage from an idealist discourse to practice, but as a crossing from one sphere or “universe of design” to another. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the appetite for self-preservation and its central role in Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy. In the first part, I introduce Bacon’s classification of universal appetites, showing the correspondences between natural and moral philosophy. I then examine the role that appetites play in his theory of motions and, additionally, the various meanings accorded to preservation in this context. I also discuss some of the sources underlying Bacon’s ideas, for his views about preservation reveal traces of Stoicism, Telesian natural (...) philosophy, the natural law tradition, as well as late-scholastic ideas. Bacon assumes the existence of two kinds of preservation: self-preservation and preservation of the whole. The appetite through which the whole preserves itself overpowers individual appetites for self-preservation. In Bacon’s theory of motions, the primacy of global preservation – that is, the preservation of the whole – is evidenced by the way matter resists being annihilated, while self-preservation at a local and particular level is revealed through other kinds of motion. Bacon’s notion of appetite reflects a specific metaphysics of matter and motion, in which the preservation of natural bodies follows teleological patterns shared by both nature and humanity: the preservation of the whole is the highest goal, both in moral and natural philosophy. In this chapter, I argue that in Bacon’s natural philosophy different kind of things, including nature and humans, are ruled by patterns that are constitutive of correlated orders, neither of which is reducible to the other: there is no priority of the natural order over the moral, or vice versa. Thus, at a more general level, both are expressions of the same type of divinely imposed, law-like behaviour. (shrink)

This article assesses the role of the laws of the French logician and educational reformer Petrus Ramus in the writings of Francis Bacon. The laws of Ramus derive from Aristotle’s grounds for necessary propositions. Necessary propositions, according to Aristotle, Ramus, and Bacon, are required for the premises of scientific syllogisms. It is argued that in Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and De augmentis scientiarum the only role for these laws is in the transmission of knowledge that has already been acquired. However, (...) in the early Valerius Terminus Bacon also considered them to be relevant to the interpretation of nature. Interestingly, this, in turn, sheds light on the two precepts for the discovery of forms in Aphorism 4 of Book Two of the Novum organum that appear to derive from Valerius Terminus. All of this bears importantly on Bacon’s views on the problem of gaining epistemic access to the inner natures or forms of things. (shrink)

Given that translation is always an imperfect process, why do people single out certain words as simply untranslatable? This article looks at one such supposedly untranslatable term, the German word Wissenschaft. Rather than take the word’s status as a given, it examines the historical processes through which Wissenschaft came to be seen as a word impossible to render into English. The article examines a mid-nineteenth century debate about Francis Bacon to show that as late as the 1860s “science” and “ (...) Wissenschaft” were still treated as comparable terms. Wissenschaft began to seem untranslatable only later in the nineteenth century, as part of a critique that set German national character in opposition to the supposedly shallow materialism of the British. After this initial divergence, scholars in the twentieth century continued to elaborate on the difference between the terms, with lasting implications for our retrospective understandings of nineteenth-century intellectual life. (shrink)

The analytical understanding cannot deal with integral wholes and therefore cannot understand the soul or God. The material body is illusory in the sense that it cannot be understood in its true identity without knowing its relationship to God. Analyzing its composition in terms of separated molecules or neurons is also illusory. To understand how to go from an untrue or partially true part to its truth in the whole a method developed by Hegel called conceptual thinking is required. Reproduction (...) is not merely concerned with individuals, it involves the genus or genus process. The universal that determines the species is not changed when particulars under the universal change, die, reproduce according to their “own kind” or species. Without connecting the individual organisms with their species we may wrongly think they can evolve into any species by chance. But this is not how individual and species are related to each other. The species determines how the individuals will appear and controls their reproduction, growth, and so on. They are not independent to become what they want by choice or by chance. Everyone calls themselves “I” so “I” is a universal, although each means only oneself. In the same way each organism is identified with its species, although we mean its own particular organism – for example, a dog and not canine in general. Thus the universal and particular cannot be separated from each other. Similarly individuals who identify only personal reason independent of universal Reason are misconceiving their true identity. At the same time universal and particular are related, they are not the same but a unity in difference. The universal by itself is as abstract as the particular by itself. At the same time their relation can only be comprehended within a higher unity, the higher Self or Supreme Individual. (shrink)