Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

The relationship between Francis Bacon's Sylva sylvarum and Giovan Battista Della Porta's Magia naturalis has previously been discussed in terms of sources and borrowings in the literature. More recently, it has been suggested that one can read these two works as belonging to a common genre: as collections of recipes or books of secrets. Taking this as a framework, in this paper I address another type of similarity between these two works, one that can be detected by looking at the (...) methods of reading, research, and enacting and recording recipes one can find in Bacon and Della Porta. I show that essential to the two approaches was the complex interplay of practices associated with enacting recipes, and that these influenced the ways in which Della Porta and Bacon recorded their experiments. Creative manipulation of the recipes transformed them into something new. In the case of Della Porta's second edition of the Magia naturalis, this new format is something I call “technologies,” that is, ways of recording the enacting of recipes with the intention to ensure repeatability and predictability of results. In the case of Bacon, the enactment aims at something different: to display and “bring to light” the hidden motions and processes of nature. (shrink)

This paper discusses the methodological relation between natural history and natural philosophy in the case of John Evelyn (1620–1706). I propose to examine Evelyn’s tree cultivation projects and to identify relevant aspects of his attempt to move from descriptive natural history to experimental natural history. My central argument is that Evelyn’s intention in this endeavour was to develop a series of experimental natural history projects that could provide general laws and axioms of nature as foundations for natural philosophy. I suggest (...) that, considering Bacon’s methodological recommendations regarding the relation between natural history and natural philosophy, Evelyn evolved from one “Baconian” role to another. While in the 1650s Evelyn acted as a “merchant of light,” as he devoted his interest to writing natural history projects based on collecting data and commonplacing different sources, in the 1660s he moved to an advanced role, that of a “compiler” or a “lamp,” in which he composed projects of experimental natural history. In Evelyn’s view, the latter kind of natural history would serve as a methodological step in building a natural philosophy. (shrink)

This essay traces the changing relationship between horticulture, agriculture, and philosophy across the seventeenth century, as the personae of the philosophical husbandman and the philosophical gardener intertwined and competed. At stake in the dynamics between them was the relationship between abstruse researches and practical applications in evolving experimental philosophy, as well as the aesthetic of experimental practices and rhetoric. Early seventeenth-century promoters of colonial projects, such as Virginian sericulture, situated the metropolitan pleasure garden, a place of whimsy and fantastical reasoning, (...) as a realm of trial that presumed eventual utility and application to large-scale husbandry. Such views informed relationships between fanciful trials, speculative proposals, and presumptions of future utility in the development of the persona of the philosophical gardener and attendant notions of experimental philosophy over the course of the century. (shrink)