Natural Knowledge as a Propaedeutic to Self-Betterment Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Natural History

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 181-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A.T. Lancaster
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Social Betterment ◽  
Natural Histories

AbstractThis paper establishes the 'emblematic' use of natural history as a propaedeutic to self-betterment in the Renaissance; in particular, in the natural histories of Gessner and Topsell, but also in the works of Erasmus and Rabelais. Subsequently, it investigates how Francis Bacon's conception of natural history is envisaged in relation to them. The paper contends that, where humanist natural historians understood the use of natural knowledge as a preliminary to individual improvement, Bacon conceived self-betterment foremost as a means to Christian charity, or social-betterment. It thus examines the transformation of the moralizing aspect of Renaissance natural history in Bacon's conception of his Great Instauration.

Spiders, Ants, and Bees

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-51
Author(s):  
Doina-Cristina Rusu ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Middle Way ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Histories

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.

Francis Bacon's Natural History and the Senecan Natural Histories of Early Modern Europe

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 197-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Jalobeanu
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Traditional Natural ◽  
Natural Histories ◽  
Experimental History

AbstractAt various stages in his career, Francis Bacon claimed to have reformed and changed traditional natural history in such a way that his new “natural and experimental history” was unlike any of its ancient or humanist predecessors. Surprisingly, such claims have gone largely unquestioned in Baconian scholarship. Contextual readings of Bacon's natural history have compared it, so far, only with Plinian or humanist natural history. This paper investigates a different form of natural history, very popular among Bacon's contemporaries, but yet unexplored by contemporary students of Bacon's works. I have provisionally called this form of natural history 'Senecan' natural history, partly because it took shape in the Neo-Stoic revival of the sixteenth-century, partly because it originates in a particular cosmographical reading of Seneca's Naturales quaestiones. I discuss in this paper two examples of Senecan natural history: the encyclopedic and cosmographical projects of Pierre de la Primaudaye (1546–1619) and Samuel Purchas (1577–1626). I highlight a number of similarities between these two projects and Francis Bacon's natural history, and argue that Senecan natural history forms an important aspect in the historical and philosophical background that needs to be taken into consideration if we want to understand the extent to which Bacon's project to reform natural history can be said to be new.

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.

From Eden to savagery and civilization: British colonialism and humanity in the development of natural history, ca. 1600–1840

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 63-79
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
British Colonization ◽  
Natural Histories ◽  
The Relationship

This article is concerned with the relationship between British colonization and the intellectual underpinnings of natural history writing between the 17th and the early 19th centuries. During this period, I argue, a significant discursive shift reframed both natural history and the concept of humanity. In the early modern period, compiling natural histories was often conceived as an endeavour to understand God’s creation. Many of the natural historians involved in the early Royal Society of London were driven by a theological conviction that the New World contained the natural knowledge once possessed by Adam, but lost in the Fall from Eden. By the early 19th century, however, this theological framework for natural history had been superseded by an avowedly progressive vision of the relationship between humanity and nature. No longer ontologically distinct from the rest of creation, the human became a subject of natural history writing in a new way. Encounters between colonizers and colonized thus became a touchstone for tensions between divine and natural historical knowledge. The resolution of these tensions lay in the emergence of a concept of savagery that imbibed both a rational account of historical progress towards civilization and a religious conviction that savage humanity needed rescue from its animal nature.

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 “None of Them Could Say They Ever Had Seen Them, but Only Had It from Others”: Encounters with Animals in Eighteenth-Century Natural Histories of Greenland

Animals ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 2024
Author(s):  
Helen Parish
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Natural Histories

The pages of early modern natural histories expose the plasticity of the natural world, and the variegated nature of the encounter between human and animal in this period. Descriptions of the flora and fauna reflect this kind of negotiated encounter between the world that is seen, that which is heard about, and that which is constructed from the language of the sacred text of scripture. The natural histories of Greenland that form the basis of this analysis exemplify the complexity of human–animal encounters in this period, and the intersections that existed between natural and unnatural, written authority and personal testimony, and culture, belief, and ethnography in natural histories. They invite a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which animals and people interact in the making of culture, and demonstrate the contribution made by such texts to the study of animal encounters, cultures, and concepts. This article explores the intersection between natural history and the work of Christian mission in the eighteenth century, and the connections between personal encounter, ethnography, history, and oral and written tradition. The analysis demonstrates that European natural histories continued to be anthropocentric in content and tone, the product of what was believed, as much as what was seen.

Redefining the Role of Experiment in Bacon's Natural History: How Baconian was Descartes before Emerging from His Cocoon?

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 158-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mădălina Giurgea ◽  
Laura Georgescu
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Rene Descartes ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

AbstractIn this article we argue that the views that Francis Bacon and René Descartes held about the role of experiments in the process of discovery are closer than previously accepted. Looking at the way experiments and the heuristics of experimentation are embedded in Bacon's posthumous History of Dense and Rare and Descartes' Discourses 8, 9, 10 of the Meteorology, we will show that experiments help the investigator both in solving specific problems that could not have otherwise been foreseen and in generating relevant information that advances the scope of the investigation.

The Communication of Hit Quality Using Natural History Visualizations (NHVs)

2021 ◽  
pp. 247255522110175
Author(s):  
Kathryn M. Nelson ◽  
Michael A. Walters
Keyword(s):  
Case Report ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Physicochemical Properties ◽  
Retrospective Analysis ◽  
High Throughput ◽  
High Throughput Screening ◽  
Active Compounds ◽  
Historical Literature ◽  
Integral Component ◽  
Natural Histories

High-throughput screening (HTS) often yields a list of compounds that requires prioritization before further work is performed. Prioritization criteria typically include activity, selectivity, physicochemical properties, and other absolute or calculated measurements of compound “value.” One critical method of compound prioritization is often not discussed in published accounts of HTS. We have referred to this oft-overlooked metric as “compound natural history.” These natural histories are observational evaluations of how a compound has been reported in the historical literature or compound databases. The purpose of this work was to develop a useful natural history visualization (NHV) that could form a standard, important part of hit reporting and evaluation. In this case report, we propose an efficient and effective NHV that will assist in the prioritization of active compounds and demonstrate its utility using a retrospective analysis of reported hits. We propose that this method of compound natural history evaluation be adopted in HTS triage and become an integral component of published reports of HTS outcomes.

scholarly journals Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Color Sensibility: Natural History, Language and the Lay Color Practices of Renaissance Virtuosi

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4-6) ◽  
pp. 358-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Pugliano
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Correct Identification ◽  
Unpublished Manuscript ◽  
Standard Nomenclature ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Artistic Patronage ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship

Famed for his collection of drawings of naturalia and his thoughts on the relationship between painting and natural knowledge, it now appears that the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) also pondered specifically color and pigments, compiling not only lists and diagrams of color terms but also a full-length unpublished manuscript entitled De coloribus or Trattato dei colori. Introducing these writings for the first time, this article portrays a scholar not so much interested in the materiality of pigment production, as in the cultural history of hues. It argues that these writings constituted an effort to build a language of color, in the sense both of a standard nomenclature of hues and of a lexicon, a dictionary of their denotations and connotations as documented in the literature of ancients and moderns. This language would serve the naturalist in his artistic patronage and his natural historical studies, where color was considered one of the most reliable signs for the correct identification of specimens, and a guarantee of accuracy in their illustration. Far from being an exception, Aldrovandi’s ‘color sensibility’ spoke of that of his university-educated nature-loving peers.


scholarly journals Experiments made in order to ascertain the nature of some mineral substances; and, in particular, to see how far the acids of sea-salt and of vitriol contribute to mineralize metallic and other substances

1776 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 605-623
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Sea Salt ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Mineral Substances ◽  
Other Substances ◽  
Made In

The late Henry Baker, Esq. a worthy member of this honourable Society, full of laudable zeal for the advancement of natural knowledge, has most generously bequeathed the sum of one hundred pounds, for the use of this respectable body; the interest of which he intended should be annually applied for the benefit of such member who the Council of this Society thought proper to nominate, for the task of making discoveries in natural history. These gentlemen have this year done me that honour, which I most gratefully acknowledge; and in consequence of this appointment, I have made experiments on a variety of mineral substances.

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