Doina-Cristina Rusu

We generally assume that the encounter with the Americas contributed to the downfall of trust in the ancient authorities. Not only did the ancients have no specific knowledge of the existence of the so-called “New World,” but the knowledge they did possess proved, in some cases, to be contradictory to the new discoveries. One of the main fields in which experience of the New World was used to criticise ancient knowledge was meteorology, and in particular the fact that the torrid zone was not extremely hot and dry as the ancients had claimed, but of a pleasant climate with abundant vegetation. This paper investigates how Juan de Cárdenas (1563–1609) made use of his experience in the New World to support the truth of Aristotle's theories in the field of meteorology. More precisely, Cárdenas employed the hypothesis of subterranean caves to account for the humidity and pleasant climate of the West Indies in the tropics. In this way, he claimed that this new land was exceptional, while he sought to preserve Aristotle's theory that the torrid zone, in normal conditions, is indeed dry and hot. Cárdenas aimed to prove that the peculiarities of the New World can only be explained by his hypothesis, and he used a comparison between Spanish and American vegetation to show why the former is the result of a perfect nature, while the latter is inferior due to its location on top of these caves, which do not allow nature to follow its own course, which in this case would be complete dryness and lack of vegetation.

The natural histories contained in Francis Bacon's Historia naturalis et experimentalis seem to differ from the model presented in De augmentis scientiarum and the Descriptio globi intellectualis in that they are focused on the defining properties of matter, its primary schematisms and the spirits. In this respect, they are highly speculative. In this paper I aim to describe the Historia naturalis et experimentalis as a text about matter theory, the histories of which are ascending from what is most evident to the senses to what is least accessible to them. Moreover, the Latin natural histories are parts of a methodological procedure in which the provisional rules and axioms obtained in one history can be used as theoretical assumptions for another history, thereby permitting one to delve ever more profoundly into the structure of nature.

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.

The study of vegetables represents one of the main topics in Bacon’s Sylva sylvarum. Not only in quantitative terms, because plants occupy about a third of the entire book, but the centuries on plants are among the most structured, and this reveals Bacon’s particular interest for the topic. The key to understanding Bacon’s interest can be found in both his Sylva sylvarum and the Historia vitae et mortis, where Bacon explains how the results of studying certain processes in plants can be later transferred and applied to animals and humans. In the context of his discussion of nourishing foods and drinks, Bacon addresses the question of how nourishment gets assimilated in the body. One of the ways in which the...

This special issue brings to the attention of the scholarly community some of the common features and some of the subtle, but important, differences between Francis Bacon's and Giovan Battista Della Porta's ways of dealing with the reading, selecting, enacting, and recording of recipes. Focusing on questions of genre, intellectual and material context, strategies of research, and strategies of performing recipes, the four papers of this special issue address two major issues. First, they shed new light on the relationship between Della Porta's Magia naturalis and Francis Bacon's Sylva sylvarum. Second, they show that in the recording of their experimental practices, Bacon and Della Porta depart from the traditional “recipe format” and discover new avenues of experimental research.

This paper argues that the methodology Francis Bacon used in his natural histories abides by the theoretical commitments presented in his methodological writings. On the one hand, Bacon advocated a middle way between idle speculation and mere gathering of facts. On the other hand, he took a strong stance against the theorisation based on very few facts. Using two of his sources whom Bacon takes to be the reflection of these two extremes—Giambattista della Porta as an instance of idle speculations, and Hugh Platt as an instance of gathering facts without extracting knowledge—I show how Bacon chose the middle way, which consists of gathering facts and gradually extracting theory out of them. In addition, it will become clear how Bacon used the expertise of contemporary practitioners to criticise fantastical theories and purge natural history of misconceived notions and false speculations.

This paper shows how Bacon is, on the one hand, still anchored to the idea of contingency as an intrinsic and ontological trait of natural phenomena, though he provides a significatively different explanation than the one of Scholastic-Aristotelianism; and on the other, how his focus on the notion of “pretergeneration”, functional to his philosophical agenda, aimed at mastering nature through art, represents a strong detachment from the Aristotelian idea that science only concerns phenomena happening necessarily for the most part. Pretergeneration, this paper shows, is understood by Bacon as a result of the Fall. For Bacon, matter, as well as humans, started to behave in such a way as to follow not only the general good, but also individual the one. It is this particular feature that renders possible the deviations from the usual course of nature. Interestingly, Bacon does not see a direct contradiction between the idea of the existence of eternal laws of nature, imposed by God at the moment of the creation, and the fact that matter, either through pretergeneration or manipulation, can eventually deviate from such laws. Indeed, Bacon identifies the Fall as the moment when the possibility for “alternative things,” that is, contingent deviations from the laws of nature, can take place. As a result, matter can be “seduced” – that is, driven away by the course it would otherwise follow through human manipulation – in order to create new objects. At the same time, external conditions can determine spontaneous deviations from the natural course. Contingency, in this view, is therefore seen as both the result of human manipulation as well as an intrinsic character of nature.

Anne Conway’s philosophy has been categorized as “vitalism,” “vital monism,” “spiritualism,” “monistic spiritualism,” “immaterial vitalism,” and “antimaterialism.” While there is no doubt that she is a monist and a vitalist, problems arise with the categories of “spiritualism,” “immaterial vitalism,” and “antimaterialism.” Conway conceives of created substances as gross and fixed spirit, or rarefied and volatile matter. While interpreters agree that Conway’s “spirit” shares characteristics traditionally attributed to matter (e.g., extension, divisibility, impenetrability), and that she is critical of Henry More’s immaterial spirit, Conway’s spirit is still conceived as an immaterial soul-like or mind-like entity. I argue that Conway’s vitalism is material, and is best understood in the tradition of Renaissance vital naturalism. First, Conway does not criticize materialism per se, only mechanical materialism, which characterizes matter as lifeless. Her vitalism has to be materialistic in some sense, since only God is an immaterial substance. Second, Conway’s conceptions of matter and spirit, the language she uses, and the fact that she attributes thinking to extended, divisible, and impenetrable substances all place her within the tradition of Renaissance vital naturalism, wherein Bernardino Telesio, Tommaso Campanella, and Francis Bacon used “spirit” to account for all natural processes.