Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Nuovo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Repeated Reading ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Mind

The Introduction outlines the purpose of the book, which is to show how Locke’s philosophical work is clarified and explained when it is considered as the production of a Christian virtuoso—a seventeenth-century English experimental natural philosopher, an empiricist, who also professed Christianity of a sort that was infused with moral seriousness and Platonic otherworldliness, and with the conviction that the material and temporal world is irremediably imperfect and cannot satisfy the desire of the mind to know all things and the will to achieve perfection. The method used in interpreting Locke’s thought involves careful and repeated reading of his whole works in their proper contexts. Those contexts were natural philosophical and biblical theological projects engaged in by Locke’s eminent predecessors, Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle. Bacon is credited with initiating a revival of interest in the Presocratics, especially Democritus and his system of atomism; but this was part of a larger program of the renewal of learning that was deeply influenced by Christian expectation.

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.

The Curious Eye

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Webster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Johannes Kepler ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Moment

The Curious Eye explores early modern debates over two related questions: what are the limits of human vision, and to what extent can these limits be overcome by technological enhancement? Today, in our everyday lives we rely on optical technology to provide us with information about visually remote spaces even as we question the efficacy and ethics of such pursuits. But the debates surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision have their roots in a much older literary tradition in which the ability to see beyond the limits of natural human vision is associated with philosophical and spiritual insight as well as social and political control. The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, The Curious Eye explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but rather an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.

Philosophy

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 24-68
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
David Hartley ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Contents

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.

Equivocation, Donne, and the Political Interior

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-44
Author(s):  
Todd Butler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Donne ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
The Political ◽  
Royal Power ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Political Citizenship ◽  
Deliberative Processes ◽  
The Mind

As a tactic that sought to enable individuals to answer judicial interrogatories while simultaneously disguising the full substance and meaning of their answers, the Catholic doctrine of equivocation responded to the precarious position of Catholics in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras. In providing a highly contested model for the shielding of one’s thoughts, equivocation also demonstrates the centrality of human cognition to the religious and political conflicts of the seventeenth century. Writers such as John Donne (Ignatius His Conclave) and Francis Bacon (Essays) evidence a similarly deep concern with the mind and its deliberative processes as marking boundaries for political citizenship and royal power. Viewed in these terms, mental reservation and equivocation become less a matter of theology than one of statecraft.

The Nature and Care of the Whole Man: Francis Bacon and Some Late Renaissance Contexts

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 130-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
The Body ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
General Science ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Late Renaissance ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Distinct Field

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.


Science and Apologetics in the Early Boyle Lectures

1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. Dahm
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Institutional Framework ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Do So

With the endowment of a lectureship for the defense of the Christion faith, the distinguished English natural philosopher, Robert Boyle, gave the Anglican church a unique opportunity to counter the atheistic currents of thought which were posing a challenge to the faithful in the late seventeenth century. Of the Boyle lectures preached between 1692 and 1713, the most important and popular ones incorporated the new natural philosophy of the age—including some of the recently published ideas of Newton—in an apologetic which was remarkable for its flexibility and its concern with contemporary theological issues. Within the institutional framework which Boyle's generosity had provided, certain of the Anglican clergy devoted themselves anew to the age-old exercise of utilizing the discoveries of science in the service of their faith. It was particularly appropriate that they do so since many of the challenges were based implicitly or explicitly on a materialistic and mechanistic science.

Of Sticks and Stones

On Essays ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 78-96
Author(s):  
Kathryn Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Scientific Experiment ◽  
Sticks And Stones ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Scientific Rationalism

In the seventeenth century, the words ‘essay’, ‘experience’, and ‘experiment’ could be synonymous. This chapter explores the relationship between these terms, taking Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and Robert Boyle as key examples. It argues that the essay, throughout its history, asserts the value of experience, rather than metaphysics or abstraction, as the ground of knowledge, and establishes in the seventeenth century a dynamic oscillation between bodily experience, its written transmission, and the experience of reading which is still legible in contemporary essay writing. The relationship between scientific experiment in Bacon and Boyle and the literary form of the essay also suggests that one of the major axes of opposition which defines the essay, in Theodor Adorno’s account—a resistance to scientific rationalism—emerges, paradoxically, from the early essay’s simultaneous concern with experience and experiment.

Studies in the life of Robert boyle, F. R. S. Part VII. The Grand Tour

1965 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-77 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Detailed Consideration ◽  
Future Career ◽  
Foreign Travel ◽  
The World ◽  
Earl Of Essex ◽  
At Home

The seventeenth century saw the beginning of what was to become, for those who could afford it, the popular practice of continental travel. Restricted in the main to members of the nobility or wealthy class, this Grand Tour, as it came later to be called, was regarded as an indispensable part of the education of a gentleman, and essential preparation for his future career. At that time, much was written on the educative value and benefits of foreign travel. There is the letter of 1595 written by the Earl of Essex to the Earl of Rutland (1); there are the long instructions written about 1617-1618 by Henry, Earl of Northumberland, for his son, which commence thus: ‘Yow must consider, the ends of yowr travels is not to learn apishe iestures, or fashions of attyres or varieties of costely meates, but to gayne the tonges, that hereafter at yowr leisures, yow may discours with them that are dead, if they haue left any worth behind them; talke with them that are present, if yow haue occasion; and conferre with them that are absent, if they haue bestowed vpon vs any thing fitt for the view of the world; and soe, by comparing the acts of men abroade with the deeds of them at home, yowr carriage may be made cummely, yowr minde riche, yowr iudgement wyse to chuse that is best, and to eschew that is naught.’ After detailed consideration of matters worthy o f study, the instructions close with the admonition, ‘What yow obserue of worthe, takes notes of; for when yow list to take a reweu, the leues o f yowr books are easylyer turnd ouer, then the leaues of yowr memory’ (2). Francis Bacon in his Essays wrote ‘Of Travel’. James Howell in his Instructions for Forreine Travell regarded ‘the prime use of Peregrination’ to be ‘the study of living men, and a collation of his [the traveller’s] own Optique observations and judgements with’ those of others.

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).

Nihilistic Thinking as the Self-Will of the Mind and the Projects of Its Overcoming

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (10) ◽  
pp. 74-87
Author(s):  
Irina N. Sidorenko
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
The Self ◽  
Spatial Perspective ◽  
The World ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Radical Transformation

 The author analyzes the conceptions of ontological nihilism in the works of S. Kierkegaard, F. Nietzsche, M. Heidegger, E. Jünger. On the basis of this analysis, violence is defined as a manifestation of nihilism, of the “will to nothingness” and hypertrophy of the self-will of man. The article demonstrates the importance of the problem of nihilism. The nihilistic thinking of modern man is expressed in the attitude toward a radical transformation of the world from the position of his “absolute” righteousness. The paradox of the current situation is that there is the reverse side of this transformative activity, when there is only the appearance of action and the dilution of responsibility. Confidence in the rightness of own views and beliefs increases the risk of the violent imposition of own vision of reality. Historical and philosophical reconstruction of the conceptions of nihilism allowed to reveal the following projects of its comprehension and resolution: (1) the project of “positing of values,” which consists in the transformation of the evaluation, which is understood as another perspective of positing values, leading to the affirmation of being; (2) the project of overcoming nihilism from the space of temporality, carried out through the resoluteness to accept the historicity of own existence; (3) the project of overcoming nihilism as the oblivion of being from the spatial perspective of the “line,” allowing to realize the “glimpse” of being. The author concludes that it is impossible to solve the problem of violence and its various forms of its manifestation without overcoming “ontological nihilism.” Significant role in solving the problem of ontological violence is assigned to philosophy as a critical and responsible form of thinking, which is capable to help a person to bear the burden of the world, to provide meanings and affirm being, as well as to unite people and resist the fundamentalist claims of exclusivity and rightness.

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