La démarche de la Sylva Sylvarum semble s’écarter de la voie inductive proposée par le Novum Organum. Pourtant, l’exemple de la fabrication de l’or indique que les deux textes n’offrent pas forcément des perspectives si différentes. Cette œuvre est davantage détaillée dans la Sylva, avec un accent pratique plus prononcé. Mais, comme dans le Novum Organum, la dimension opérationnelle y est articulée à la recherche des causes générales du processus et, si la « forme » n’est pas présente comme terme, (...) l’idée apparaît bien en arrière-fond. Cet article propose ainsi, sur la base de cet exemple, de nuancer la divergence entre l’ experientia literata des histoires naturelles et l’induction vraie du Novum Organum. (shrink)

Francis Bacon’s elusive notion of experience can be better understood when we relate it to his views on matter, motion, appetite and intellect, and bring to the fore its broader philosophical implications. Bacon’s theory of knowledge is embedded in a programme of disciplinary redefinition, outlined in the Advancement of Learning and De augmentis scientiarum. Among all disciplines, prima philosophia plays a key foundational role, based on the idea of both a physical parallelism between the human intellect and nature and a (...) theological parallelism between nature and God. Failure to assess Bacon’s distinctive position concerning the way in which the mind mirrors both the natural and the divine world, that is to say, the meaning of “reality,” has resulted in notoriously jejune discussions on Baconian empiricism, monotonously driven by epistemological concerns. As a result, the standard view on Bacon’s empiricism is as epistemologically comforting as it is imaginary, an “idol” in a genuinely Baconian sense. In this article, Bacon’s notion of experience will be discussed by examining those steps that he considered to be the crucial initial stages in the formation of human experience, stages described as a process of experiential literacy or, in emblematic terms, as a hunting expedition led by the mythological figure of Pan. I argue that a well-rounded analysis of Bacon’s experientia literata needs to take into account the complementary notion of the “spelling-book of nature”, that is, the original code of the primordial motions of matter. By getting acquainted with the first rudiments of experience through its spelling-book, one learns to read the book of nature and, most of all, to write new pages in it. (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous examinons pourquoi Bacon ne justifie pas réellement les modes de l’ experientia literata, sinon en donnant des exemples. Le problème est qu’il semble livrer le début de l’invention au hasard. Nous y voyons en réalité le signe du pragmatisme de Bacon. Dans l’ experientia literata, la raison est par principe écartée, puisqu’on s’avance en terrain inconnu. Cependant, Bacon considère que les procédures en sont efficaces, parce qu’elles sont déjà admises : elles ont (...) déjà fait leurs preuves, de sorte que l’on sait déjà qu’il s’agit de pratiques fructueuses. C’est que cette experientia literata témoigne d’une forme de savoir sédimenté, une « expérience » commune dont chacun peut se servir. Si elle est efficace, c’est qu’en réalité, on ne part jamais de rien dans la recherche. (shrink)

Feyerabend's “Classical Empiricism” draws on a 17th century Jesuit argument against Protestant fundamentalism. The argument is very general, and applies to any simple foundationalist epistemology. Feyerabend uses it against Classical Empiricism—roughly, the view that what is to be believed is exactly what experience establishes, and no more—which he identifies as among other things Newton's “dogmatic ideology.”.

SUMMARYThis study is centred on events in 1580 surrounding a scandalous publication of Machiavelli’s The Prince by Pietro Perna in Basel. With the presentation of new documents the paper fully reconstructs the judicial case that followed its publication, raising new questions about the author of the infamous book Vindiciae contra tyrannos. However, this fascinating story will serve only as a starting point for the investigation of Machiavelli's late-sixteenth-century reception, providing insights into not only the political and religious but also the (...) scientific context of its publication. These fields, it will be argued, were thoroughly interrelated, all sharing similar epistemological premises. (shrink)

In this essay Martin Kintzinger takes as his starting point observations on the current debate regarding knowledge and asserts a lack of reflection on the status of knowledge in pre-modern societies. In Sebastian Brant’s work ‘Narrenschiff’ and other contemporary critical writings, Kintzinger finds evidence that the medieval critique of experts was not by necessity a critique of expertise per se. Rather, it often was a critique of an expertise based on purely theoretical book learning, deemed unpractical and inapplicable. Significantly, there (...) existed a counter-conception of an expert who possessed both theoretical knowledge and practical experience and who was deemed practically able to cure disease, or give valuable legal advice etc. Of course, the term experientia was first used in this context only around 1600. But Kintzinger argues that experience-based knowledge, which is associated with inductive inference and the modern natural sciences, was not a product of the early modern period. Rather, the notion of experience as a warrant of true knowledge was heavily rooted in medieval thought. This essay subsequently traces the emergence of the notion of experience to Scholasticism, to the thought of Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great and to the medieval debate on the dualism between the arts and science, and between empiricus and theoricus respectively. (shrink)

Experience played a key role in the natural science of the later Middle Ages. Both the terms “experience” and “experiment” can be found in medieval texts. However, the latter was mainly used as a synonym and there is only a slight allusion to the concept of experiments in the modern sense. In their arguments, medieval authors rather referred to day-to-day experience, to phenomena which were evident from simple observation. The medieval Latin meaning of expertus (or its close equivalent experimentator) was (...) thus closely related to the notion of everyday experience. An expert was someone who had a wide experience of natural phenomena and who always sought to extend his knowledge. During the later Middle Ages, this aspect slowly gained in importance (despite the fact that written authorities and the textbooks of natural philosophy remained dominant), thus opening up new ways of thinking, which finally led to the Scientific Revolution. (shrink)

The essay is divided into five sections: the first section gives a short overview of the history of “experience” – Greek empeiria, Latin experientia – which takes Aristotle’s theory of knowledge as its starting point. Within its theoretical framework, experience served as a crucial mediator between sensory perception and intellectual knowledge. In the philosophy of Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages the category of experience then was reduced to marginal importance under neo-Platonic and Arabic influences. At the dusk (...) of the Middle Ages, however, it was rehabilitated and turned into a rallying cry by those who attempted to overcome late medieval philosophy. The following section describes the revaluation of experience as the fountain of real knowledge under the auspices of Petrarchism, which ran contrary to the formalistic teachings of the Scholastics. The remaining sections first deal with the role of the humanist concept of experience in the field of moral philosophy (specifically regarding the teaching of history). Secondly, it shows how experience worked as an incentive for field research in natural history and medicine and how it precipitated a revival of ancient Aristotelian empiricism within natural philosophy, thereby paving the way for the modern empirical science of nature. (shrink)

RESUMO: O artigo examina a apropriação heideggeriana de Bernardo de Claraval na nota "Zu den Sermones Bernardi in Canticum canticorum ",que faz parte de outras notas e esboços de uma Vorlesung não proferida, intitulada "Os fundamentos filosóficos da mística medieval ". Ao longo de minha análise, destaco três aspectos com base na fórmula inicial: "Hoje lemos no livro da experiência" -, que é parafraseada por Heidegger da seguinte maneira: "Hoje queremos mover-nos no campo da experiência pessoal de maneira compreensiva. Retorno (...) à esfera da vivência própria e ausculta da revelação da própria consciência". Portanto, primeiramente, enfatizo a fórmula inicial como campo experiencial que o livro faz abrir: ler não é mais decifrar, mas mover-se a si mesmo, recolher, até mesmo ser afetado. Em segundo lugar, a partir da apropriação da cristologia de Bernardo de Claraval, mostro como Heidegger aponta para uma "experiência fundamental", no sentido de que, mesmo considerando que a experiência religiosa do místico cisterciense esteja centrada na figura de Cristo celebrado na liturgia monástica, a religiosidade cristã descortinada é uma vida fundamentalmente mais intensa e mais rica em vivências e em fenômenos vividos. Por fim, em terceiro lugar, destaco certa "inviolabilidade" da experiência religiosa em Bernardo de Claraval,concernente à autonomia e independência absolutas, de modo que nenhuma autoridade exterior, nem mesmo a eclesiástica, poderá determinar o sentido fundamentado em corpo doutrinal estranho às vivências mesmas. Para iluminar as notas da Vorlesung cancelada, as minhas análises recorrem às outras preleções de Heidegger ministradas na Universidade de Freiburg. ABSTRACT: This article examines Heidegger's appropriation of ideas of Bernard of Clairvaux in the note "Zu den Sermons Bernardi in Canticum Canticorum ", which is part of other notes and sketches in a never presented Vorlesung entitled "Philosophical foundations of medieval mysticism ". Throughout my analysis I highlight three points, based on the initial formula "Today we read in the book of experience". This formula is paraphrased by Heidegger as follows: "Today we want to move ourselves in the field of personal experience in a comprehensive way, return to the sphere of living itself and perceive the revelation of conscience itself." Therefore, first I emphasize the initial formula as an experiential field that the book opens: to read is no longer to decipher, but moving oneself, collecting, and even being affected. Second, based on the appropriation of the Christology of Bernard of Clairvaux, I show how Heidegger points to a "fundamental experience" in the sense that, even considering that the religious experience of the Cistercian mystic is centered on the figure of Christ celebrated in the monastic liturgy, the unveiled Christian religion is a life that is fundamentally more intense and richer in living experiences and lived phenomena. Finally, and in third place, I highlight a certain "inviolability" of religious experience in Bernard of Clairvaux in the sense of absolute autonomy and independence, so that no external authority, not even ecclesiastic authority, can determine meaning based on a body of doctrine foreign to lived experience. To illuminate the notes on the cancelled Vorlesung, my analysis turns to other lectures Heidegger gave at the University of Freiburg. (shrink)

The Protestant Prussian humanist Daniel Hermann (1543-1601) wrote the occasional poem De vita literata sive scholastica which he performed publicly at the newly established Academy of Straßburg probably in 1567 on behalf of the Academys headmaster when he was still a student himself. In this poem he praises and characterizes the academic life as the most useful and most excellent occupation in the world. He shows that scholarship and science guide the thoughts and the feelings of the students, investigate (...) what is true and what is just, and show gods working. Besides he gives an historical outline of the academic life from the beginning of time up to his own era. He claims that scholarship and science were never more prosperous than in Christianity. He describes the difficulties of academic teaching as well as a scholars eternal fame by virtue of his writings and of his effects to the society. He stresses the importance of academic education as well as Christs help for the solution of present political and military problems. (shrink)

The chapter approaches the hermeneutic concept of experience introduced by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960) from the perspective of the conceptual history of experience in the Western philosophical tradition. Through an overview of the concept and the epistemological function of experience (empeiria, experientia, Erfahrung) in Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and Hegel, it is shown that the tradition has considered experience first and foremost in methodological terms, that is, as a pathway towards a form of scientific knowledge that is (...) itself increasingly immune to experience. Science strives “beyond” experience because of the limitations inherent in the fundamentally contingent, singular, and negative character of experience: experience comes to us through unpredictable chance encounters and in singular situations and negates, tests, or “imperils” previous knowledge, thereby transforming it. By contrast, philosophical hermeneutics rethinks experience precisely in terms of these limitations. In the hermeneutic approach articulated by Gadamer and Claude Romano, experience is an encounter with the irreducible finitude and historical situatedness of one’s understanding and conceptual framework, an encounter with an otherness that puts our preunderstanding to test and requires us to revise it. Hermeneutic experience is thus a singular event that irreparably transforms us. (shrink)

This article shows that a forgotten source of Marsilius’ scientia of law-making in the Defensor Pacis is the Lucidator, the main astrological work of Peter of Abano. A compared analysis of these two works demonstrates that the theories of experientia and scientia that Marsilius considers necessary to make laws in the first dictio of the Defensor Pacis entirely draw on Peter of Abano’s views on the epistemological status of ‘the science of the stars’. It is shown that the purpose (...) of Marsilius’ reinstatement of Peter of Abano’s theory of scientia is to build a science of law-making that does not need natural law and is based on experience and certain demonstrations. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the role of experientia in medieval law. This could take a number of forms, three of which are treated by way of example. In the first part of the essay, the author discusses how experience first came to serve as a source for the creation and legitimisation of new law since Late Antiquity. Henceforth, it became an important principle within Canon Law that served not only to create legal regulations supplementary to traditional law but (...) also to overwrite and replace it. The second part of the essay is concerned with the role of expert reports (consilia) by men learned in the ius commune which were requested to help rule cases under local law. Being dispersed in collections after their use in court, consilia made a significant impact on common and local law. In the final section the author discusses the use of expert witnesses (from areas as diverse as medicine, agriculture, the arts and crafts etc.). Expert opinions were recognised by court as high-value evidence. (shrink)

Este artigo tem como foco uma análise do texto “A mulher e a arte” (sem data), da escritora carioca Júlia Lopes de Almeida (1862-1934). Este escrito, recém-publicado na íntegra pela primeira vez, em revista acadêmica, constitui uma conferência da autora na qual ela expõe suas opiniões sobre o tema da arte de autoria feminina, tecendo uma série de críticas de cunho feminista à desigualdade entre os gêneros no espaço da criação artística. Em seu texto, a literata cita diversos nomes (...) de artistas e intelectuais mulheres, de modo a sustentar seu argumento em defesa da potência criativa feminina e assinalar a importância da transformação da cultura patriarcal. Assim, a partir do olhar historiográfico e embasados pela epistemologia feminista, buscamos ressaltar a conferência como fundamental para o estudo da escrita de autoria feminina e feminista no Brasil entre os séculos XIX e XX.Palavras-chave: Júlia Lopes de Almeida. Literatura. Feminismo. AbstractThis article focuses on an analysis of the text “The woman and the art” (undated), by the writer Júlia Lopes de Almeida (1862-1934), from Rio de Janeiro. This writing, recently published in full for the first time, constitutes a conference in which the author exposes her opinions on the theme of art of female authorship, weaving a series of feminist criticisms of the inequality between genders in the space of artistic creation. In her text, Júlia lists several names of artists and women intellectuals, in order to support her argument in defense of the feminine creative power and point out the importance of the transformation of patriarchal culture. Thus, from the historiographic perspective and based on feminist epistemology, we seek to emphasize the conference as fundamental for the study of female and feminist writing feminists in Brazil between the 19th and 20th centuries.Keywords: Júlia Lopes de Almeida. Literature. Feminism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that Machiavelli's method, his inductive and comparative use of history and experience for political analysis, and his fashioning of historical-political analysis as ‘science’, played an important and still unrecognised role in his reception in the sixteenth century. It makes the case that Machiavelli's inductive reasoning and stress on historia and experientia offered a model for scientific method that open-minded sixteenth-century scholars, eager to understand, organise and augment human knowledge, could fit to their own epistemology. By focusing (...) on the question of method—a crucial issue for sixteenth-century contemporaries—the paper offers more than a key to the understanding of Machiavelli's positive reception. It also helps in apprehending the crucial importance of Lucretius to Machiavelli's scholarship; the role of the late Renaissance fascination with historia in his reception; and the breadth of appropriation of his method exactly in the decades when anti-Machiavellianism became official politics all over Europe. These claims are sustained through the cases of Machiavelli's early translators and promulgators; the French legal humanists and historiographers; the Swiss, Italian and French scholars engaging with medicine, Paracelsism and astronomy; the authors of political maxims from all over Europe; and finally Francis Bacon. (shrink)

Praca stanowi przyczynek do badań nad życiem i twórczością Ignacego Dąbrowskiego – pisarza przełomu wieków XIX i XX. Jego rękopisy, zachowane przeważnie w znakomitym stanie, zgromadziła Aniela Skórska, siostrzenica literata. Dziś przechowywane są one w zbiorach Biblioteki Narodowej. Cyzelowane i wielokrotnie poprawiane utwory stanowią świadectwo złożonego procesu twórczego, jaki towarzyszył prozaikowi w pracy nad kolejnymi dziełami. Analiza zachowanych brulionów i manuskryptów pozwala na głębsze poznanie literackiej osobowości Dąbrowskiego – postaci skrytej i introwertycznej, a uporządkowanie materiałów rękopiśmiennych pomocne będzie w (...) odtworzeniu oraz weryfikacji faktów z jego życia. (shrink)

Um Wolffs Rationalismus adäquat behandeln zu können, genügt es nicht, wie es üblicherweise geschieht, seine Auffassungen über die Beziehungen zwischen der Vernunft und der Erfahrung zu untersuchen, sondern man muß auch das in Betracht ziehen, was er über die Beziehungen zwischen der Vernunft und dem Glauben sagt. Dann wird nämlich sichtbar, daß das „connubium rationis et experientiae“, in welchem die Erfahrung als Hilfsmittel der Vernunft dient, im „connubium rationis et fidei“, in welchem die Vernunft diese Rolle in bezug auf den (...) Glauben spielt, seine Ergänzung findet. Daraus geht hervor, daß er ebenso wenig den Glauben auf die Vernunft reduziert, wie er eine von der Erfahrung abgeschnittene Vernunft zuläßt, obgleich er der Vernunft die Aufgabe zuerkennt, die sich aus dem Glauben ergebenden Wahrheiten zu beweisen. (shrink)

Comment Bacon, à travers le détournement de thématiques caractéristiques de l’humanisme renaissant, construit-il une philosophie qui place en son centre non plus l’homme, mais l’outil, dont la promotion s’accompagne d’un effacement des termes qu’il commande et unit – la nature et l’esprit? Le transfert le plus significatif de l’homme à l’outil est celui du langage de la négativité, langage qui culmine dans la définition de la forma – objet dernier atteint par la méthode inductive –,comme natura naturans, fons emanationis, actus (...) purus, etc. L’épistémologie baconienne ne nous met-elle pas dès lors en face d’une sorte de nihilisme de l’activité pure réifiée en un dispositif? Les textes sur l’experientia litterata tentent de résoudre cette aporie, marquant non un retour au « réel », mais plutôt une tentative de conciliation entre, d’une part, la rationalité mise en place par l’organum, et, d’autre part, l’homme et son ingenium.How did Bacon, through the leading astray of themes of Renaissance humanism, build a philosophy placing in its center no longer man but the « tool » whose promotion goes along with a wiping out of terms both ordering and uniting nature and the mind. The most significant transference of man towards the tool is that of the language of negativity, a language culminating in the definition of the forma, i.e. the object reached when all is said through the inductive method, as a natura naturans, fons emanationis, actus purus, etc. Hence doesn’t Baconian epistemology confronts us to some kind of a nihilism of plain activity reified into some device? The texts dealing with the experientia litterata try to solve such an aporia, indicating not so much as a return to the real as rather an attempt at reconciling between rationality as erected by the organum on the one hand and man in his ingenium, on the other. (shrink)

L’expérience est la plupart du temps entendue selon la vulgate philosophique et épistémologique comme une expérimentation technoscientifique. Mais cette acception oublie un sens plus originaire de l’experientia. Ce sens est le temps. Or si l’on regarde ce que signifie l’expérience « temporale », c’est-à-dire extatique, on s’aperçoit qu’elle est une mise à l’épreuve, un éprouver hors de soi, c’est-à-dire l’expérience affectuelle d’un irreprésentable. C’est de cela dont témoignent les artistes, et spécialement les écrivains Clarice Lispector avec le « é (...) da coisa » et Samuel Beckett avec l’« Innommable ». Ces mots, à l’épreuve de l’échec, témoignent de ce qui, dans la vie comme existence, est plus que la vie, ouvrant aux autres mondes et aux nouveaux possibles. (shrink)

Not only did Paracelsus (1493-1541) censure the logic of the Aristotelians, but also their "Godless" approach to questioning nature. He declared that Aristotle was “a heathen whose work had rightly been condemned repeatedly in church councils." In this essay I elucidate some of the more salient features of Paracelsus’s "epistemology," and draw parallels between his notion of experientia (Erfahrung) and that of Hans-Georg Gadamer. I also discuss Paracelsus’s educational metaphor, his creation myth, and the mysterious doctrine of signatures en (...) route to uncovering his peculiar understanding of the relationship between theory, practice, and experience. (shrink)

In the mid XIXth century, an illustrated intellectual minority questioned the colonial mentality of the system of Spanish domination revealing in its writings an attempt at construction of the sign of woman based on liberal, progressive and post independence ideologies. Within this minority we find the Colombian writer Soledad Acosta de Samper, whose concern for the social condition of women is revealed in her work in the image of an educated woman. Using the text La mujer en la sociedad moderna (...) [Woman in Modern Society] and the novel Una holandesa en América [A Dutch Woman in America], this article analyzes two aspects of the image of women in Acosta: that of woman as a moralizer and that of religiosity. The analysis of these two themes shows Acosta’s use of the normative discourses of the period in her project of giving woman a more important social role and they become strategies to tone down the potential for transgression of the new situation for women that she desires. (shrink)

Certainty : a contemporary question -- Beginnings: questions and debates in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries -- Abba Father: the certainty of salvation -- The spiritual man judges all things: the certainty of exegetical authority -- Are you alone wise?: the Catholic response -- Experientia: the great age of the Spirit -- Unmasking the angel of light: the discernment of the spirits -- Men should be what they seem: appearances and reality.

In 1635 a Latin translation was published of Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems , which had occasioned his condemnation by the Inquisition in 1633. The Latin translation bore the title Systema Cosmicum. It had been organized by Elia Diodati , a Protestant of Italian origin born in Geneva and living in Paris, where he was a Parliament lawyer. Diodati, a confidante of Galileo, had gone into action after receiving a letter that may be regarded as Galileo's intellectual (...) testament, written the same day his legal testament was registered and he decided to journey from Florence to Rome to stand trial. Galileo's letter stated that “from reliable sources I hear the Jesuit Fathers have managed to convince some very important persons that my book is execrable and more harmful to the Holy Church than the writings of Luther and Calvin.”The translator was Mathias Bernegger , the Austrian‐born Protestant rector of the University of Strasbourg, who taught history and political science but had a background in mathematics. The publisher was the influential Dutch firm of the Elseviers, based in Leiden but with branches in several cities. The place of publication was Strasbourg, which at that time was a free city within the Holy Roman Empire. The book had two appendixes: a five‐page selection from Kepler's introduction to his Astronomia Nova , arguing that Scripture carries no weight in natural philosophy; and a Latin translation of Paolo Foscarini's 1615 booklet that had been condemned and banned by the Decree of the Index of 5 March 1616 for arguing that the earth's motion is compatible with Scripture. The book's frontispiece reproduced the one from the original edition—that of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Copernicus engaged in conversation—but with the figure of Copernicus looking much younger than the original. And the title page carried two epigraphs: a Greek quotation from the Platonist philosopher Alcinous meaning “One must be mentally free if one wants to become a philosopher” and a Latin quotation from Seneca meaning “It is especially among philosophers that one must have equal liberty.”A year later , there appeared also in Strasbourg with the Elseviers and edited by Bernegger the first publication ever of Galileo's “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” which he had written in 1615. It had both the Italian text and a Latin translation by Diodati and bore the revealing title Nov‐antiqua Sanctissimorum Patrum et Probatorum Theologorum Doctrina de Sacrae Scripturae Testimoniis, in Conclusionibuis mere Naturalibus, Quae Sensata Experientia et Necessariis Demonstrationibus Evinci Possunt. It had a preface in which Diodati praised Galileo's astronomical accomplishments, blamed his trial on jealous rivals, and justified the depth and purity of his piety and religiousness. Diodati used the pseudonym Robertus Robertinus, which corresponded to the name of a Prussian poet named Robert Roberthin .These are some of the factual details in Nonnoi's book. Other chapters deal, in a similar vein, with the ambiguities of Galileo's atomism; with icons, models, and symbols in Galileo's Copernican propaganda; and with the image of Galileo in the astronomical writings of John Wilkins .Such details are fascinating and important for understanding Galileo's work and its aftermath, and so Nonnoi's book is useful for contributing such necessary spadework—in particular, the bibliographical documentation is especially valuable and the analysis of the pictures found in the works discussed shows considerable originality. Regrettably, Nonnoi does not integrate such details into an overarching thesis that might elaborate their significance; thus, the work of assimilating them remains to be done. (shrink)