William Gilbert’s 1600 book, De magnete, greatly influenced early modern natural philosophy. The book describes an impressive array of physical experiments, but it also advances a metaphysical view at odds with the soon to emerge mechanical philosophy. That view was animism. I distinguish two kinds of animism – Aristotelian and Platonic – and argue that Gilbert was an Aristotelian animist. Taking Robert Boyle as an example, I then show that early modern arguments against animism were often effective only against Platonic (...) animism. In fact, unacknowledged traces of Aristotelian animism can be found in Boyle’s mechanical account of nature. This was Gilbert’s legacy. (shrink)

Historians have claimed that the two closely related concepts of animism and natural teleology were both decisively rejected in the Scientific Revolution. They tout Robert Boyle as an early modern warden against pre-modern animism. Discussing Avicenna, Aquinas, and Buridan, as well as Renaissance psychology, I instead suggest that teleology went through a slow and uneven process of rationalization. As Neoplatonic theology gained influence over Aristotelian natural philosophy, the meaning of animism likewise grew obscure. Boyle, as some historians have shown, exemplifies (...) this uneven process. There is an unresolved tension between his religious convictions and the implicit animism of his empirical practice. (shrink)

This paper investigates the emergence, in the second part of the 17th century, of a new body of experimental knowledge dealing with the chemical transformations of water taking place in plants. We call this body of experimental knowledge a “chemical history of vegetation.” We show that this chemical natural history originated, in terms of recipes and methods of investigation, in the works of Francis Bacon and that it was constructed in accordance with Bacon's precepts for putting together natural and experimental (...) histories. Our paper covers a wide array of experimental investigations, carried out by people with different backgrounds, theoretical assumptions, and metaphysical allegiances (Thomas Browne, Robert Sharrock, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, John Beale, and John Evelyn). We claim that, despite their differences, these naturalists had a lot in common. First, they treated plants as laboratories of chemical investigation. Second, they used the experiments with plants to develop tools, hypotheses, and operational concepts, which travelled from one naturalist to the other, even when their respective explanatory vocabularies were widely different. Third, we show that some of them also manifested an interest in defining and clarifying the limits and structure of this new body of experimental knowledge, displaying, thus, a certain disciplinary unity. (shrink)

RESUMO O objetivo deste trabalho é indicar como a exploração estilística de Margaret Cavendish responde às particularidades do conceito de natureza dela, por exemplo, a tese de que a natureza é uma matéria viva, infinita, mutável e heterogênea. Primeiramente, mostrarei o modo pelo qual a autora está presente em seus escritos, como ela escreve de uma perspectiva de primeira pessoa sobre sua própria experiência e de quem ela é. Resumirei brevemente sua biografia e o contexto no qual ela praticou filosofia. (...) Dado que suas escolhas de estilo são bastante numerosas, apresentarei somente algumas poucas, entre as peculiaridades estilísticas dela. Em segundo lugar, desenvolverei uma visão geral do seu conceito de natureza, ao contrário do proposto pelas teorias mecanicistas de seu tempo. Esclarecerei que tal conceito é expresso adequadamente pela diversidade estilística à qual Cavendish se volta em suas investigações. ABSTRACT This paper aims at indicating how Margaret Cavendish's stylistic exploration answer to the particularities of her concept of nature, i.e. the thesis that nature is live, infinite, changing and heterogeneous matter. I will first show the way in which the author is present in her writings, as she writes from a first person perspective about her own experience and from who she is. I will briefly summarise her biography and the context in which she practiced philosophy. Given that her stylistic choices are quite numerous, I will only present a few of her stylistic particularities. Secondly, I will develop the general outline of her concept of nature, as opposed to the one proposed by the mechanistic theories of her time. I will make it clear that said concept is adequately expressed in the stylistic diversity to which Cavendish turns in her investigations. (shrink)