Mathematical subtleties and scientific knowledge: Francis Bacon and mathematics, at the crossing of two traditions

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
GIULIANO MORI
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Inductive Method ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
The Many ◽  
Royal Society Of London

AbstractThis article engages the much-debated role of mathematics in Bacon's philosophy and inductive method at large. The many references to mathematics in Bacon's works are considered in the context of the humanist reform of the curriculum studiorum and, in particular, through a comparison with the kinds of natural and intellectual subtlety as they are defined by many sixteenth-century authors, including Cardano, Scaliger and Montaigne. Additionally, this article gives a nuanced background to the ‘subtlety’ commonly thought to have been eschewed by Bacon and by Bacon's self-proclaimed followers in the Royal Society of London. The aim of this article is ultimately to demonstrate that Bacon did not reject the use of mathematics in natural philosophy altogether. Instead, he hoped that following the Great Instauration a kind of non-abstract mathematics could be founded: a kind of mathematics which was to serve natural philosophy by enabling men to grasp the intrinsic subtlety of nature. Rather than mathematizing nature, it was mathematics that needed to be ‘naturalized’.

Francis Bacon and the Origins of Christian Virtuosity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Nuovo
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
The Mind

Although the vocation of Christian virtuoso was invented and named by Robert Boyle, Francis Bacon provided the archtype. A Christian virtuoso is an experimental natural philosopher who professes Christianity, who endeavors to unite empiricism and supernatural belief in an intellectual life. In his program for the renewal of the learning Bacon prescribed that the empirical study of nature be the basis of all the sciences, including not only the study of physical things, but of human society, and literature. He insisted that natural causes only be used to explain natural events and proposed not to mix theology with natural philosophy. This became a rule of the Royal Society of London, of which Boyle was a principal founder. Bacon’s rule also had a theological use, to preserve the purity and the divine authority of revelation. In the mind of the Christian virtuoso, nature and divine revelation were separate but complementary sources of truth.

Hobbes'forgotten Natural Histories

2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Bunce
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Historical Information ◽  
Natural Histories

AbstractThomas Hobbes' natural philosophy is often characterised as rationalistic in opposition to the emerging inductivist method employed by Francis Bacon and fellows of the Gresham College - later the Royal Society. Where as the inductivists researched and published a multitude of natural histories, Hobbes' mature publications contain little natural historical information. Nonetheless, Hobbes read numerous natural histories and incorporated them into his works and often used details from these histories to support important theoretical moves. He also wrote a number of natural histories, some of which remain either unpublished or untranslated. Hobbes' own mature statements about his early interest in natural histories are also misleading. This article attempts to review Hobbes' early writings on natural histories and argues that his works of the 1630s and 1640s owe a significant debt to the natural histories of Francis Bacon, Hobbes' one-time patron.

scholarly journals ANTONIO DE ULLOA, DISCOVERER OF PLATINUM

1998 ◽  
Vol 6 (7) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Lavinel G. Ionescu
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Scientific Societies ◽  
Spanish Family ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Royal Society Of London

Don Antonio de Ulloa, a member of a distinguished Spanish family, was born in 1716 and died in 1795. He studied physics and mathematics and was a member of many scientific societies, including the Academy of Sciences of Paris and the Royal Society of London. He traveled widely in Europe and the Americas and occupied many important positions, including those of Frigate Captain, Commander of the Royal Squadron of the Spanish Armada, Goverment of Huancavelica -Peru, Louisiana, and Florida. In l735, while a member of a scientific expedition sent by the Spanish and French governments to South America to measure a degree of meridian in Quito, close to the equator, he discovered platinum in the mines of Lavadero or wash gold in the district of Choco.

Martin Folkes

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Roos
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
New Science ◽  
Definition Of

In 1750, Martin Folkes became the only individual who was President of both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London, and he contributed to efforts to unite both organizations. Although he failed, illness forcing him to resign both offices, this chapter outlines the book’s analysis of the ensuing disciplinary boundaries between the two organizations in the early Georgian era in the context of Folkes’s life and letters. While it is normally assumed that natural philosophy and antiquarianism are disciplines that were fast becoming disconnected in this period, this work will reconsider these assumptions. The Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries were nearly reunited for good reason. Both societies incorporated techniques and affinities from antiquarianism—natural history and landscape—and the ‘new science’—engineering principles, measurement, and empiricism. Using Folkes’s life and letters, this biography will examine the disciplinary boundaries between the humanities and sciences in early Georgian Britain and reassess the extent to which the separation of these ‘two cultures’ developed in this era. It will also consider to what extent Folkes continued the Newtonian programme in mathematics, optics, and astronomy on the Continent. In this manner, the work will refine its definition of Newtonianism and its scope in the early eighteenth century, elucidating and reclaiming the vibrant research programme that Folkes promoted in the period of English science least well understood between the age of Francis Bacon and the present.

Anniversary Dinner 1974: Speech by Sir Thomas Brimelow at the Anniversary Dinner, The Dorchester, 30 November 1974

1975 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
Science In Society ◽  
English I

An invitation from the President of the Royal Society to speak at one of these Dinners gives pleasure and confers honour; but it also disconcerts, for the Society, by its motto of Nullius in verba , gives notice that the President and the Fellows and the Foreign Members, some of whom are present tonight, do not intend to take on trust anything that the speaker may say: which, if it were so, would be a pity, because I shall have occasion to express the gratitude and appreciation of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for what the Society does in the field of its foreign relations and I should wish my words to be believed. Digressing for a moment, I am going to take advantage of this phrase Nullius in verba because a former President of the Royal Society, who was also a very distinguished classical scholar, once said that all bureaucrats of all countries should be required to speak in Esperanto; but this evening I propose to speak English. I am told by a former Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society that this motto means nothing more than ‘check the evidence’. It must be admitted that by checking the evidence and by testing the validity of propositions in the field of natural philosophy in the 314 years which have elapsed since the Society was founded, science has come a long way; to the benefit, on balance, of the greater part of mankind. Yet, at the beginning of this century, I think the Royal Society was over-optimistic about the role of science in society.

scholarly journals The role of the consultant psychiatrist in the clinical team

1989 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 347-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Health Services ◽  
Patient Care ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Clinical Team ◽  
Consultant Psychiatrist ◽  
The Many ◽  
Medical Audience

Many psychiatrists are deeply disturbed by the changing and challenging circumstances in which they are responsible for patient care. This became evident at a conference on the role of the consultant in the clinical team, held by the Health Services Manpower Review at the Royal Society of Medicine on 14 July 1988 and attended by an entirely medical audience. The need for the consultant to act as leader of the clinical team was emphasised without identifying the nature and extent of this task, resulting in the failure to develop any strategy to tackle the many problems identified.

Problems with Rhubarb: Accommodating Experience in Aristotelian Theories of Science

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Heßbrüggen-Walter
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Medical Plants ◽  
Theories Of Science

The paper examines controversies over the role of experience in the constitution of scientific knowledge in early modern Aristotelianism. While for Jacopo Zabarella, experience helps to confirm the results of demonstrative science, the Bologna Dominican Chrysostomo Javelli assumes that it also contributes to the discovery of new truths in what he calls ‘beginning science’. Both thinkers use medical plants as a philosophical example. Javelli analyses the proposition ‘rhubarb purges bile’ as the conclusion of a yet unknown scientific proof. Zabarella uses instead hellebore, a plant that is found all over Europe, and defends the view that propositions about purgative powers of plants are based on their ‘identity of substance’, an identity that had become questionable with regard to rhubarb due to new empirical findings in the sixteenth century.


scholarly journals Anniversaries of other academies and societies

1948 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-143
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Physical Science ◽  
Chemical Society ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Royal Society Of London

The President, Officers, Council and Fellows of the Royal Society of London offer their most cordial congratulations to the Chemical Society on this memorable occasion marking the passage of the first hundred years since its birth on the twenty-third of February 1841. Your first President was Thomas Graham, a distinguished Fellow of the Royal Society and our friendly association so auspiciously initiated has been cemented by a common interest in the advance of scientific knowledge and by intimate collaboration from the Foundation to the present day. In 1912 we were gratified to receive a Celebration Address from the Chemical Society in which felicitations were offered as from a daughter to her parent. We were indeed glad to accept the honour so gracefully bestowed and realize that it was a merited tribute to the memory of pioneers in the organization of the community of investigators in the domain of physical science.

Mining Tacitus: secrets of empire, nature and art in the reason of state

2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
VERA KELLER
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Reason Of State ◽  
Wide Scale

AbstractA new political practice, the ‘reason of state’, informed the ends and practices of natural study in the late sixteenth century. Informed by the study of the Roman historian Tacitus, political writers gathered ‘secrets of empire’ from both history and travel. Following the economic reorientation of ‘reason of state’ by Giovanni Botero (1544–1617), such secrets came to include bodies of useful particulars concerning nature and art collected by an expanding personnel of intelligencers. A comparison between various writers describing wide-scale collections, such as Botero, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Jakob Bornitz (1560–1625) and Matthias Bernegger (1582–1640), reveals that seventeenth-century natural intelligencers across Europe not only were analogous to political intelligencers, but also were sometimes one and the same. Those seeking political prudence cast themselves as miners, prying precious particulars from the recesses of history, experience and disparate disciplines, including mathematics, alchemy and natural philosophy. The seventeenth-century practice of combining searches for secrets of empire, nature and art contests a frequent historiographical divide between empirical science and Tacitism or reason of state. It also points to the ways political cunning shaped the management of information for both politics and the study of nature and art.

scholarly journals Anniversary Dinner 1955

1956 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Know How ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Royal Society Of London

The Anniversary Dinner for 1955 was held at the Dorchester Hotel on St Andrew’s Day, 30 November 1955. The Toast of ‘The Royal Society of London’ was proposed by His Excellency the American Ambassador to the Court of St James, the Honourable Winthrop W. Aldrich, who said: ‘It is indeed an honour and a privilege to be chosen to propose the toast of the Royal Society, a society which for three centuries has exerted a vast and beneficent influence in the life not only of Britain but of the world. ‘In America, even as a child at school, I became familiar with many of the great names which are inscribed on the rolls of this Society, and I was taught to venerate their achievements. We Americans know how indebted we are in our own progress in science and technology to the inductive principle which was expounded by Francis Bacon and which has since, in every generation, been so brilliantly applied by the great experimentalists of this nation. ‘Restless curiosity about the secrets of the universe, and the irresistible instinct to ferret them out, are just as lusty in Britain today as they were at the birth of this Society three hundred years ago. I am told that when Sir Edmund Hillary was asked why he climbed Mt Everest, he replied “Because it was there”. For this body of scientists, Sir Edmund undoubtedly said all that needs to be said. I venture to prophesy that so long as any Everest, in the laboratory, in nature, or in the conceptual realm, remains unconquered, the Fellows of this Society, the blood brothers of Hillary, will be found assaulting its most forbidding slopes.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document