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.

An apprenticeship in scientific communication: the early correspondence of Henry Oldenburg (1656-63)

1999 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. Avramov
Keyword(s):  
Communication Skills ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Scientific Communication ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Prolonged Stay ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Scientific Academies

This paper examines how Henry Oldenburg became a man of scientific communication during the years 1656-1663. His interest in the new natural philosophy started in the mid-1650s when, while visiting England, he became acquainted with men like Robert Boyle and Samuel Hartlib. Embarking on a trip over Europe as tutor to Richard Jones, Boyle's nephew, he also began to practice merchandising in knowledge. His communication skills quickly developed, for he learned a great deal from his personal contacts with men of science and from his correspondence with Hartlib, Boyle, and others. His prolonged stay in Paris in the late 1650s was very important for there he acquired an experience of the intellectual life of the private scientific academies, and gained for himself a host of new correspondents. The paper concludes by looking at Oldenburg in his role as mediator in the Spinoza-Boyle debate of 1663. By that time, at the beginning of his career as Secretary of the Royal Society, he was already a well-rounded ‘philosophicall merchant’.

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.

Robert Boyle, Christian Virtuoso

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Nuovo
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Experimental Methods ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Experimental Practice ◽  
Robert Boyle

Boyle gave the vocation of a Christian virtuoso its name and exemplified its character in his life. Following Bacon, he affirmed the priority of natural philosophy, and, like Bacon, he prescribed that it be practiced through experimental methods and that it found its explanations either directly upon perceived causes or upon causal hypotheses inferred from experimental practice or trials of nature, chief among them the mechanical or ‘atomicall’ philosophy. In his book The Christian Virtuoso, he prescribed that the study of nature was complemented and completed by the study of Holy Scripture, and he imagined a form of intellectual life in which the scope of natural reason was enlarged by revelation, which in turn was confirmed through trials or experiments of faith.

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.

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.

Literary Knowledge

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-43
Author(s):  
Tita Chico
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Fundamental Component ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Tool

Natural philosophy in the long eighteenth century connoted a sense of modernity and enlightenment, attributes that bound science to meanings in excess of its practice and consumption. The pliancy of science as a trope finds support in reflections on language as a scientific tool by Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and other natural philosophers. The two dominant technologies of the experimental imagination are the observed particular and the modest witness. Observed particulars of empirical study are those nuggets of data that disclose themselves and, in their revelation, produce knowledge. The modest witness is the individual who is objective by virtue of erasing himself through his privilege. Tropes are literary tools that not only enable practitioners to describe scientific findings, but also enable an even more fundamental component of experimentalism: literariness makes possible the conceptualization of scientific findings and the individual who produces them.

What did Charles II call the Fellows of the Royal Society?

1977 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-16 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Accademia Del Cimento

I have shown elsewhere that in 1660 and 1661 both Robert Southwell (1635-1702, later Sir Robert and P.R.S.), and Sir John Finch (1626-1682) tried to establish a correspondence between the virtuosi in England and in Florence, more especially between Prince Leopold de’ Medici and Robert Boyle, by far the most widely known English man of science at that time. For some mysterious reason the desired correspondence did not take place; Boyle did not write, but did send through Oldenburg two copies of the Latin edition of his New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall , one for the Prince and one for Vincenzo Viviani. This was in October 1661. Indeed, the only knowledge that the Royal Society obtained about the Florentine Accademia del Cimento came through Oldenburg’s French correspondents. They learned nothing substantial except that the experiments made by the Accademia were to be published all together in a book. Finally, in 1667, they were; but for several years the appearance of this work had been expected and in fact eagerly awaited throughout the learned world. As far as the experiments are concerned it could have been published as early as 1662, and the long delay can largely, though not entirely, be blamed on the Secretary who wrote it, Count Lorenzo Magalotti (1637-1712), who was a perfectionist, and a fussy one, not about natural philosophy, but about language.

Self-Scrutiny and the Study of Nature: Robert Hooke's Diary as Natural History

1996 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lotte Mulligan
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
After Hours ◽  
College Now ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

Robert Hooke's intellectual life was steadfastly dedicated to the pursuit of natural philosophy and the formulation of an appropriate method for studying nature, His daily life, however, was seemingly fragmented—an energetic rush in and around the city of London, with him acting now as curator (and later secretary) of the Royal Society, now as Cutlerian Lecturer in the History of Nature and Art, now as Geometry Professor at Gresham College, now as architect and surveyor of postfire London, and forever as a member of a number of intersecting social, intellectual, and professional circles that made up London's coffeehouse culture. Such a range of activities was perhaps wider than that of many of his contemporaries, though other diarists, most notably Samuel Pepys, recorded similarly crammed lives. Yet despite the apparently unsystematic nature of his daily round he was, also like Pepys, a methodical man who hated to waste time, and for long periods he kept a diary that helped him account for how he spent it.I argue here that his diary keeping was an integral part of his scientific vision reflecting the epistemological and methodological practices that guided him as a student of nature. The diary should be read, I propose, not as an “after-hours” incidental activity removed from his professional and intellectual life; both its form and its content suggest that he chose to record a self that was as subject to scientific scrutiny as the rest of nature and that he thought that such a record could be applied to producing, in the end, a fully objective “history” with himself as the datum.

Locke, Bacon and Natural History

2002 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter R. Anstey
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Medical Philosophy ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Essay Concerning Human Understanding ◽  
Natural Histories ◽  
New Evidence

AbstractThis paper argues that the construction of natural histories, as advocated by Francis Bacon, played a central role in John Locke's conception of method in natural philosophy. It presents new evidence in support of John Yolton's claim that "the emphasis upon compiling natural histories of bodies ... was the chief aspect of the Royal Society's programme that attracted Locke, and from which we need to understand his science of nature". Locke's exposure to the natural philosophy of Robert Boyle, the medical philosophy of Thomas Sydenham, his interest in travel literature and his conception of the division of the sciences are examined. From this survey, a cumulative case is presented which establishes, independently of an in-depth exegesis of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the central role for Locke of the construction of natural histories in natural philosophy.

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’.

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