Silvia Manzo

La idea de que la tarea de la ciencia consiste en dar cuenta de las leyes de la naturaleza comenzó a establecerse durante el siglo XVII mientras se estaba delineando la nueva imagen de la ciencia y de la naturaleza. Si bien distintos estudios historiográficos coinciden en situar el origen del concepto moderno de ley de la naturaleza en este siglo, sus interpretaciones son divergentes en varios sentidos. En este trabajo, me dedicaré en primer lugar a repasar brevemente y analizar en forma crítica los resultados de estos estudios historiográficos, agrupándolos en cuatro grandes líneas de lectura. En segundo lugar y a modo de conclusión a partir de lo arrojado por esos estudios, enumeraré los factores fundamentales que considero ineludibles para realizar un abordaje historiográfico satisfactorio y completo de este problema.

Os escritos de Francis Bacon dedicados à filosofia abundam em imagens, metáforas, comparações e alegorias destinadas a ilustrar e apresentar com eloquência suas ideias. Solidamente formado na cultura humanista de seu tempo, Bacon adotou com destreza os recursos da retórica e nutriu-se de um amplo espectro da literatura clássica greco-latina, assim como também dos escritos bíblicos. Em especial, a mitologia clássica (a que dedicou seu De sapientia veterum (1609) - Da sabedoria dos antigos) foi um de seus recursos predilteos na hora de valer-se de alegorias para tornar acessível a um público amplo e não especializado os conteúdos mais inovadores, profundos e abstrusos de sua filosofia.1 Tudo isso converte algumas de suas obras em excelentes peças da literatura filosófica, nas quais Bacon põe em prática sua grande plasticidade como escritor, que, delicadamente e sem tropeços, transporta seus leitores da beleza da poesia e fantasia para os conceitos mais abstratos, sempre em busca de representar suas ideias filosóficas e de transformar a realidade por meio delas. Neste texto, apresentarei brevemente algumas das imagens pelas quais ele quis retratar aspectos fundamentais do seu projeto de restauração do saber.

Es muy habitual que se presenten los grandes lineamientos de la filosofía moderna en el marco del paradigma epistemológico y apelando a la distinción de dos corrientes filosóficas fundamentales, el empirismo y el racionalismo. Se trata de categorías analíticas construidas para interpretar y caracterizar retrospectivamente a ciertos filósofos de la modernidad. Pero no fueron términos ni conceptos utilizados por los actores mismos6. John Locke, George Berkeley y David Hume no se llamaban a sí mismos empiristas, ni René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza y Gottfried W. Leibniz se autodenominaban racionalistas. En este capítulo, profundizaremos algunos puntos esbozados en el capítulo anterior. En primer lugar, expondremos las definiciones que han recibido el empirismo y el racionalismo dentro del paradigma epistemológico, que si bien ha sido criticado y redefinido en las últimas décadas, sigue siendo sostenido en la actualidad. En esa misma sección, analizaremos en qué medida las figuras del canon moderno establecido por el paradigma sostienen o no las tesis racionalistas y empiristas que les atribuyen esas definiciones tradicionales. Finalmente, resumiremos algunas críticas que ha recibido la narrativa tradicional y presentaremos una propuesta de resignificación de ambas categorías que nos parece más atinada.

This paper will address the nineteenth-century reception of Bacon as an exponent of materialism in Joseph de Maistre and Karl Marx. I will argue that Bacon’s philosophy is “quasi-materialist.” The materialist components of his philosophy were noticed by de Maistre and Marx, who, in addition, pointed out a Baconian materialist heritage. Their construction of Bacon’s figure as the leader of a materialist lineage ascribed to his philosophy a revolutionary import that was contrary to Bacon’s actual leanings. This contrast shows how different the contexts were within which materialism was conceived and valued across the centuries, and how far philosophical and scientific discourses may be transformed by their receptions, to the point that in many cases they could hardly be embraced by the authors of these discourses.

Broadly speaking, “empiricism” is a label that usually denotes an epistemological view that emphasizes the role that experience plays in forming concepts and acquiring and justifying knowledge. In contemporary philosophy, there are some authors who call themselves as empiricists, although there are differences in the way they define what experience consists in, how it is related to theory, and the role experience plays in discovering and justifying knowledge, etc. (e.g., Ayer 1936; Van Fraassen 2002). In contrast, in the early modern period, empiricism was not a label that philosophers traditionally characterized until nowadays as empiricists (most famously, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume) used to describe their doctrines. Indeed, as attributed to early modern philosophical authors, empiricism is not an actor’s category, but an analytic historiographical category retrospectively applied to them and confronted to rationalism, whose main representatives were considered to be Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and G.W. Leibniz. Such a narrative began to be established by the late nineteenthcentury and described early modern empiricism as an epistemological stance maintaining (1) that the origin of all mental contents lies in experience (a genetic statement), and (2) that knowledge can only be justified a posteriori (an epistemic statement). This entails that empiricists deny the existence of innate mental contents and the possibility of a purely a priori knowledge. In the history of early modern science such a dichotomy has been usually rendered in terms of the opposition between continental rationalist Cartesian science vs British empiricist Newtonian science. In the last four decades, many aspects of this traditional narrative have been criticized, and the meaning of early modern empiricism is subject of renewed studies.

In the period of emergence of early modern science, ‘monsters’ or individuals with physical congenital anomalies were considered as rare events which required special explanations entailing assumptions about the laws of nature. This concern with monsters was shared by representatives of the new science and Late Scholastic authors of university textbooks. This paper will reconstruct the main theses of the treatment of monsters in Late Scholastic textbooks, by focusing on the question as to how their accounts conceived nature’s regularity and teleology. It shows that they developed a naturalistic teratology in which, in contrast to the naturalistic explanations usually offered by the new science, finality was at central stage. This general point does not impede our noticing that some authors were closer to the views emerging in the Scientific Revolution insofar as they conceived nature as relatively autonomous from God and gave a relevant place to efficient secondary causation. In this connection, this paper suggests that the concept of the laws of nature developed by the new science –as exception-less regularities—transferred to nature’s regularity the ‘strong’ character that Late Scholasticism attributed to finality and that the decline of the Late Scholastic view of finality played as an important concomitant factor permitting the transformation of the concept of laws of nature.

Monsters as a category seem omnipresent in early modern natural philosophy, in what one might call a “long” early modern period stretching from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century, when the science of teratology emerges. We no longer use this term to refer to developmental anomalies (whether a two-headed calf, an individual suffering from microcephaly or Proteus syndrome) or to “freak occurrences” like Mary Toft’s supposedly giving birth to a litter of rabbits, in Surrey in the early eighteenth-century (Todd 1995). But the term itself has a rich semantic history, coming from the Latin verb monstrare (itself deriving from monere, to remind, warn, advise), “to show,” from which we also get words like “monitor,” “admonish,” “monument” and “premonition”; hence there are proverbs like, in French, le monstre est ce qui montre, difficult to render in English: “the monsters is that which shows.” Scholars have discussed how this “monstrative” dimension of the monster is in fact twofold: on the one hand, and most awkwardly, the monster is an individual who is “pointed at,” who is shown; on the other hand, the monster is a sign, a portent, an omen, and in that sense “shows us” something (on the complex semantic history of the term across Indo-European languages see Ochsner 2005). The latter dimension persists in naturalized form in the early modern period when authors like Bacon, Fontenelle or William Hunter insist that monsters (or anomalies) can show us something of the workings of Nature.

Lo personal es político. Revisito la potente frase de Carol Hanish (1970) que sigue resonando en las luchas y discursos feministas desde que se hiciera pública a comienzos de 1970. Me permito reversionarla, con gran libertad, para marcar el pulso de este texto y contar, a partir de mi relación con la filosofía, cómo lo personal pasó a ser político en el interés por conocer las filósofas modernas e interpelar y rearmar el canon filosófico. Con ello, los y las invito a reflexionar sobre la perspectiva de género en la historiografía filosófica, las formas de construcción del canon y sus repercusiones en la enseñanza de la filosofía.

In the last few decades, the historiographical categories rationalism and empiricism have been criticized for their limitations to explain the complex positions and the links held by the philosophers tradiotnally attached to them. This narrative was firstly conceived by Kantian German historians and began to become standard at the turn of the twentieh century. Nonetheless, nineteenth-century French historiography developed other narratives by which early modern philosophers were classified according to alternative criteria. In the first edition of Histoire comparée des systémes de philosophie (1804), Joseph-Marie Degérando distinguishes three first-order early modern schools founded by Bacon, Descartes and Leibniz, respectively. Degérando introduces the empiricism and rationalism distinction as one among others, and not as the fundamental one. In addition, he separates empiricism from experimental philosophy. The last one, along with speculative philosophy, is said to conciliate senses and reason. As a result, this account offers philosophical groupings different from those constructed by the standard narrative. Furthermore, it draws on labels and classification criteria which were part of the early modern philosophical discourse.

The first part of this paper will provide a reconstruction of Francis Bacon’s interpretation of Academic scepticism, Pyrrhonism, and Dogmatism, and its sources throughout his large corpus. It shall also analyze Bacon’s approach against the background of his intellectual milieu, looking particularly at Renaissance readings of scepticism as developed by Guillaume Salluste du Bartas, Pierre de la Primaudaye, Fulke Greville, and John Davies. It shall show that although Bacon made more references to Academic than to Pyrrhonian Scepticism, like most of his contemporaries, he often misrepresented and mixed the doctrinal components of both currents. The second part of the paper shall offer a complete chronological survey of Bacon’s assessment of scepticism throughout his writings. Following the lead of previous studies by other scholars, I shall support the view that, while he approved of the state of doubt and the suspension of judgment as a provisional necessary stage in the pursuit of knowledge, he rejected the notion of acatalepsia. To this received reading, I shall add the suggestion that Bacon’s criticism of acatalepsia ultimately depends on his view of the historical conditions that surround human nature. I deal with this last point in the third part of the paper, where I shall argue that Bacon’s evaluation of scepticism relied on his adoption of a Protestant and Augustinian view of human nature that informed his overall interpretation of the history of humanity and nature, including the sceptical schools.

The lasting effects of the debate over canon-formation during the 1980s affected the whole field of Humanities, which became increasingly engaged in interrogating the origin and function of the Western canon. In philosophy, a great deal of criticism was, as a result, directed at the traditional narrative of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophies—a critique informed by postcolonialism as well as feminist historiography. D. F. Norton, L. Loeb and many others1 attempted to demonstrate the weaknesses of the tripartite division between rationalism, empiricism and critical philosophy.2 As time went on, symptoms of dissatisfaction with what has...

Francis Bacon’s theory of matter is a controversial topic among historians. I agree with the viewpoint, which suggests that although Bacon changed his views on atomism repeatedly, he never rejected it completely (Partington, Urbach, Gemelli). I will substantiate this interpretation by paying more attention to the usually neglected allegorical works and by investigating why Bacon changed his mind on atomism in his Novum organum. I shall reconstruct Bacon’s various opinions in chronological order to establish his final evaluation of atomism and his reasons for it. Given that Bacon never embraced a matter theory identical with Greek atomism, I shall here define atomism in the broadest sense, as a corpuscular matter theory that posits final and indivisible particles. Following this semantic delimitation, two successive Baconian opinions will be distinguished: the first took the atom to constitute an ontological and causative-operational principle; the second deprived the atom of this causative-operational ability, but did not touch its ontological priority. At the same time, I will investigate the question concerning the coexistence of atomism and pneumatism in Bacon’s theory, a point that has been discussed in the influential interpretations by Kargon and Rees. I shall argue that Bacon did not regard these two doctrines as incompatible.

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.

This paper examines the views of Joseph-Márie Degérando and Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann about empiricism, and the scope and limits of experience as well as its relation to reason and its role in the attainment of true knowledge. While Degérando adopted the “philosophy of experience” and Tennemann advocated Kant’s critical philosophy, both authors blamed each other for the same mistake: if Degérando considered that, despite all appearances to the contrary, critical philosophy fell into empiricism, Tennemann judged that the philosophy of experience was nothing but pure and simple empiricism. Degérando’s and Tennemann’s discrepancies involved not only a discussion of “nomenclatures” and of the role and limits of experience in knowing, but also an epistemological and ideological commitment to the pacification of the intellectual field in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In this line, Degérando’s alignment with the philosophy of experience attempted to distance himself from the politically dangerous sensualism attributed to the idéologie. But, unlike his countryman Charles Villers, he did not want to replace the sensualism by critical philosophy. His opposition to philosophical novelty (which he associated with political revolution) led him to praise only the “eclectic” spirit of Kant’s philosophy.

La concepción cusana de la possibilitas / materia (posibilidad / materia) está directamente ligada con la doctrina de los modos de ser (modi essendi) sobre los que el Cusano se explaya, con diversos grados de profundidad, en varias de sus obras, entre las que se cuenta De docta ignorantia (1440), De conjecturis (1440), De Mente (1450), De venatione sapientiae (1462) y De ludo globi (1463). A lo largo de esas obras Nicolás de Cusa aborda dos aspectos centrales de la posibilidad / materia, estrechamente relacionados entre sí: el aspecto ontológico y el aspecto gnoseológico. En la primera sección de este artículo expondremos la caracterización ontológica de la posibilidad / materia en el marco de los distintos modos de ser. En la segunda sección nos dedicaremos a desarrollar las perspectivas de Cusa acerca del conocimiento del modo de ser de la posibilidad o materia .

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.

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

Francis Bacon's position on the existence of void and its nature has been mostly studied with regard to his views on the atom. This approach is undoubtedly right, but it disregards further topics related to Bacon's account of void, namely the world system and the transmutation of bodies. Consequently, a more comprehensive study of Bacon's view on vacuum seems desirable where all the contexts are taken into account. To address this desideratum, the present paper examines Bacon's different views on vacuum drawing attention to the various contexts of the discussion. It also gives an evaluation of the arguments put forward in support of his positions. The first section presents a reconstruction of Bacon's consecutive positions and the reasons for his changes of mind. The second section lists the experimental facts traditionally cited in debates about vacuum and Bacon's interpretation of these. The final section evaluates the role that these experimental facts played in Bacon's arguments. As a result, it is shown that Bacon fits entirely into the general pattern of the early seventeenth century. Empirical arguments by themselves had little value for solving the question of the void; it was also necessary to have a formerly established theory.

La concepción según la cual la naturaleza es un todo ordenado donde prevalece la regularidad en las propiedades y procesos que caracterizan a las distintas especies recorre el pensamiento occidental desde la filosofía antigua griega hasta nuestros días. Diferentes teorías científicas sobre innumerables aspectos y objetos de la naturaleza elaboradas a lo largo de los siglos, e incluso teorías contrapuestas entre sí, asumieron el orden y la regularidad del mundo como un supuesto innombrado, como un a priori histórico sobre el cual se sustentaron. Existen varias vías posibles de examinar históricamente la construcción y la evolución de una concepción tan vasta y duradera. La que aquí propongo consiste en estudiar la concepción del orden a partir de analizar la excepción y la anomalía que lo alteran o subvierten. En este caso me dedicaré a estudiar las perspectivas aristotélicas, tardo-escolásticas y baconianas sobre los monstruos, también conocidos como “fenómenos preternaturales”.

The historiographical narrative describing early modern European philosophy as the confrontation between rationalism and empiricism and its overcoming through the Kantian synthesis had a huge spread in Argentina. This article investigates the genesis of this traditional account in the universities of Córdoba, Buenos Aires and La Plata between 1780 and 1920. It offers an introduction concerning the formation of this narrative in Europe and a survey of the teaching of early modern philosophy in Argentina during that period. It concludes that, although some of its components are found during the nineteenth century, it was only in the second decade of the twentieth century that the traditional narrative was formulated in its entirety, in parallel with the introduction of Kantianism in Argentine. However, the construction of this narrative is not merely explained by this fact but also by the weight that the history of philosophy gained in the syllabus as part of the demands involved in the shaping of the academic philosophical field. Finally, this paper suggests ways to reconfigure and renew the canon.

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 con ceptual 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.

In presenting self-preservation as the most general law of nature, set at the summit of the structure of the natural world, Francis Bacon characterized the universal appe- tite for self-preservation as an innate instinct which, in the case of living beings, is primarily associated with the emotion of fear. Bacon’s philosophy offers several tech- niques of self-care to manage the fear of accidents of fortune from which the existence and well-being of the self is under constant threat. This article reconstructs Bacon’s treatment of divinatory arts and their contributions to self-care. We will explore how he adopts traditional divinatory arts and reforms them: oneirocritics, physiognomy, and astrology. We will contend that Bacon’s approach to divinatory arts as techniques for self-care and the management of fortune shows some salient points shared with his natural philosophy: in both cases, the approach is hermeneutical, with the goal of exerting human power. With regard both to nature and to fortune, however, our power to modify the state of things extends only so far. The range of decisions we can make is not unlimited but encompasses only what is “in our power,” that is, what depends on us.

Las narraciones que presentan la filosofía moderna como un periodo particular de la historia de la filosofía, al igual que las narraciones sobre otros periodos de la historia de la filosofía, son deudoras tanto de determinadas concepciones de la filosofía como de ciertas concepciones de su historia y de la historia. La mirada hacia el pasado filosófico se sitúa en un presente que, implícitamente o no, delimita el campo de lo que es considerado como filosofía y de lo propiamente filosófico, delimitación que implica una selección de las manifestaciones que caracterizan la filosofía, como, por ejemplo, sus autores, sus problemas, sus escenarios y sus formas discursivas. Dicho de otra manera, al narrar una historia de la filosofía se determinan de alguna manera quiénes son filósofes, qué temas son filosóficos, dónde se hace filosofía y cómo se escribe filosofía, entre otras cosas. A su vez, la narración histórica de las expresiones de ese pasado asume ciertas posiciones acerca de la historicidad de lo filosófico, de sus relaciones con los diferentes ámbitos de su emergencia, de sus métodos de investigación y de las modalidades discursivas deseables para esta narración.