The European tradition makes a sharp distinction between animism and science. On the basis of this distinction, either animism is reproved for failing to reach the heights of science, or science is reproved for failing to reach the heights of animism. In this essay, I draw on work in the history and philosophy and science, combined with a method from the sociology of scientific knowledge, to question the sharpness of this distinction. Along the way, I also take guidance from the (...) research of North American Indigenous scholars. As it turns out, there is a rich, if largely overlooked, tradition of Aristotelian animism running through the history of modern European science, and this tradition sometimes resonates with Indigenous perspectives. By challenging the entrenched distinction between animism and science, I aim to help reconcile ongoing tensions between Indigenous and European scientific groups, and so strengthen prospects for their mutually beneficial cooperation. (shrink)

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)

First Published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A short-lived but important movement in seventeenth-century English natural philosophy—which scholars call “magnetical philosophy” or “magnetical cosmology”—sought to understand gravity (both terrestrial and celestial) by analogy with magnetism. The movement was clearly inspired by William Gilbert’s De magnete (1600) and culminated with Robert Hooke’s prefiguring of the universal principle of gravitation, which he personally communicated to Isaac Newton in 1679. But the magnetical cosmology, as professed by those in the movement, differed from Gilbert’s philosophy in highly significant ways. Proponents never (...) accepted Gilbert’s animistic account of magnets and seem tacitly to have accepted a belief in action at a distance that Gilbert himself rejected. This essay argues that Francis Bacon (1561–1626) had already provided just the adaptations to Gilbert’s philosophy that the later thinkers adopted, including an important endorsement of action at a distance, and that he should be recognized as playing an important role in the movement. (shrink)

One of the most important components of early modern science was the experiment. Advocates of the “new sciences” used experiments as indisputable evidence in controversies with their opponents and as powerful arguments against authoritative texts. Among the first early modern scientific works to systematically and successfully use experiments as parts of the central argumentation is William Gilbert’s treatise De magnete (1600), in which the author sought to present a completely new theory of magnetism as an explanation of phenomena on earth (...) as well as of the movements of heavenly bodies. Gilbert goes to great lengths to persuade his readers of the innovation of his nova et inaudita physiologia. For this, however, it did not suffice to present a startling number of experiments and advocate empirical investigation. This contribution will shed light on the surprising literary and rhetorical tools employed in the De magnete in questions of authority, which aided Gilbert in presenting his powerful and highly successful “New Physiology.”. (shrink)

Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy contains a whole series of interconnected concepts related to extension, such as “borders,” “leaps” and “orbs of virtue”. These Baconian concepts are still not fully understood and are in need of a detailed analysis. They do not derive from a general conception of physical or mathematical space, and are not explainable in terms of parts of matter and aggregates. Instead, they are somewhat mysteriously defined in terms of limits and boundaries of action. This article offers a (...) contextual investigation of Bacon’s extension relating concepts. I show that in adopting a particular strategy of deriving spatial properties and extension related concepts from a theory of action and force, Bacon follows in the footsteps of Gilbert’s magnetic philosophy. However, in contrast to the more traditional approaches of William Gilbert, Giovan Battista della Porta and Johannes Kepler, Bacon strips his extension-related concepts from most natural philosophical content and argues for a methodologically driven approach, leading to operational definitions. (shrink)