This paper revisits Bacon's persistent 'mechanical' imagery by which he described the 'aid' through which the human mind would be rendered adequate to framing axioms about nature's processes and properties that underlie all natural phenomena. It argues that the role Bacon ascribed to his own insights into the properties and motions of matter is crucial for grasping such instrumental imagery, because his own writings—both methodological and natural historical—need to be read as themselves comprising, at least in incipient form, the very (...) instruments of which they speak. From that reflexive standpoint, this paper in particular focuses on the 'aid' to the senses that his natural histories were to have offered under the interpretative guidance offered by the Novum organum and other works. The 'hypothetical' status to which Bacon is often thought to have accorded his own natural philosophical insights does not adequately take into account the transformative power Bacon thought these insights should have through his own writings. The fact that Bacon was keenly sensitive to the psychological effects of textual authority in his intellectual milieu prompts new reflection concerning how he intended his own texts to be read, and how we should read them. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive treatment of the philosophical system of the seventeenth-century philosopher Pierre Gassendi. Gassendi's importance is widely recognized and is essential for understanding early modern philosophers and scientists such as Locke, Leibniz and Newton. Offering a systematic overview of his contributions, LoLordo situates Gassendi's views within the context of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century natural philosophy as represented by a variety of intellectual traditions, including scholastic Aristotelianism, Renaissance Neo-Platonism, and the emerging mechanical philosophy. LoLordo's work will be essential (...) reading for historians of early modern philosophy and science. (shrink)

According to the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, individual spirits--the souls of humans and non-human animals--are extended but cannot be physically divided. His contemporaries and recent commentators have charged that More has never given an explication of the grounds on which the indivisibility of spirits is based. In this article, I suggest that exploring the usage that More makes of the analogy between spirits and light could go some way towards providing such an explication. More compares the relation between spirit and (...) matter to the relation that, according to Aristotelian theories of light, holds between ?intentional species? and matter. I will argue that the purpose of his comparison is to highlight that both intentional species and spirits are existentially independent from matter. The existential independence of intentional species from matter expresses itself in the fact that light is not moved through the motion of the illuminated body. The existential independence of spirits from matter expresses itself in the fact that when a body that is coextensive with a spirit is divided, the spirit is not thereby divided but rather contracts into the remaining living organism. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive and unitary study of the philosophy of Francis Bacon, with special emphasis on the medical, ethical and political aspects of his thought. It presents an original interpretation focused on the material conditions of nature and human life. In particular, coverage in the book is organized around the unifying theme of Bacon’s notion of appetite, which is considered in its natural, ethical, medical and political meanings. The book redefines the notions of experience and experiment in Bacon’s (...) philosophy of nature, shows the important presence of Stoic themes in his work as well as provides an original discussion of the relationships between natural magic, prudence and political realism in his philosophy. Bringing together scholarly expertise from the history of philosophy, the history of science and the history of literature, this book presents readers with a rich and diverse contextualization of Bacon’s philosophy. (shrink)

This study provides an overview of the life and work of the seventeenth-century Utrecht professor of philosophy Henricus Reneri, with special focus on his close relationship with René Descartes. Reneri met Descartes during the winter of 1628/29. At that time he worked as a tutor in Amsterdam. Thirteen years earlier, he had fled the Prince-Bishopric of Liège as a Calvinist convert and had come to Leiden, where he enrolled in theology. After he broke off his studies he found work tutoring (...) children of patrician families. But Reneri had higher ambitions. He wanted to teach philosophy, which he had studied at Leuven University before his conversion. In his free time Reneri carried out experiments and constructed instruments for the investigation of nature, such as the thermometer. Discontented with traditional philosophy, he participated in the search for a method to advance science. At that stage he met Descartes. In Descartes Reneri immediately recognized a genius who would change the face of philosophy. They became best friends, and when Reneri was appointed as professor of philosophy at the Deventer Illustre Gymnasium in 1631, followed by an appointment at the Utrecht Illustrious School (which became a university in 1636) three years later, Descartes followed him to both towns. Already from the founding of the Utrecht Illustrious School in 1634, Reneri tried out Cartesian explanations in his classes. The result was a reformed Aristotelianism, which combined Aristotle’s physics with elements from that of Descartes and from other corpuscular theories into an eclectic mix of his own. Initially Reneri was reluctant to openly promote Descartes’ philosophy, but the publication of the Discours de la méthode in 1637 made him more confident. In 1638, he publicly taught the Discours and supervised the defence of fully Cartesian theses. Moreover, Reneri encouraged Descartes to write and publish. Furthermore, Reneri played an important role in the formation of Descartes’ network in the Republic and introduced his friends to Descartes’ philosophy. These findings not only fill a lacuna in the scholarship on the early Descartes, but also shed new light on the earliest philosophical instruction at Utrecht University. Reneri was an educational reformer. He taught Aristotelian physics, but in order to make philosophy useful and popular again he wanted to make observation and experiment part of natural philosophy teaching. For this purpose, he devised a programme inspired by the empirical and inductive method of Francis Bacon, in which students were to actively participate. With this plan he was ahead of his time. In addition, Reneri was working on a method of logic in the Ramist tradition aiming at the organization of knowledge. His plans, however, were hardly noticed by the Aristotelians working in academia. Accordingly, his international scholarly network mainly consisted of non-academics. Reneri’s course of life also shows the importance of networks and the possibility of social ascent in the Republic. By building up a network of influential connections, he climbed up from a poor refugee to a professor who married into the Utrecht regent patriciate. (shrink)

SummaryHistorians of science have neglected early modern natural philosophers' varied attitudes to the history of philosophy, often preferring to use loose labels such as ‘Epicureanism’ to describe the survival of ancient doctrines. This is methodologically inappropriate: reifying such philosophical movements tells us little about the complex ways in which early modern natural philosophers approached the history of their own discipline. As this article shows, a central figure of early modern natural philosophy, Robert Boyle, invested great intellectual energy into his depiction (...) of the history of philosophy. Boyle's historical worldview was mediated through an array of textual traditions: classical, patristic, humanist and contemporary. Drawing extensively on his manuscript notes, this is examined for three topics. First, from his turn to natural philosophy in the late 1640s, Boyle combined a sceptical attitude towards philosophy's potential – stemming from humanist historicisations of the ‘speculative’ heritage of Greek philosophy – with a belief in natural philosophy's efficacy as a spiritual exercise, as performed by ancient ‘priests of nature’. Second, Boyle's attitude to the history of matter theory was far more complex than any simple comparison with ‘ancient atomism’ can convey. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Boyle held Epicurus to be a speculative and reductionist philosopher, leading him to posit a different lineage for a non-reductionist corpuscularianism which depended on exploitation of non-standard historiographical traditions. Appreciating this allows us to make an intervention in the ongoing debate about the relationship between corpuscularianism, chymistry and experiment in Boyle's philosophy. Third, Boyle's historicisation of supposedly anthropomorphic philosophies in his famous Free Enquiry exploited recent theological historiography, most importantly Samuel Parker's combination of the history of idolatry with the history of Greek philosophy, which itself relied on developments in continental sacred history. It was this historicisation, rather than any philosophical realities, which led to the positing of the mechanical philosophy as more compatible than Aristotelianism with Christian doctrine. (shrink)

Berkeley's Siris may be an unduly neglected treatise. Yet it reveals and confirms its author's philosophical ambitions and achievements. The greatest of them is his theory of causality. Berkeley tries to show that agents can influence the world by using ethereal corpuscles as their instruments. These particles are both material but also in some sense immaterial or occult because they both follow and do not follow the laws of nature. Siris is a rhetorical text which uses analogy, metaphor, paradox, and (...) ambiguity to illuminate the reader. I argue that the universe in Siris is ambiguous with respect to its material and immaterial essence. The world is at the same time scientific and material and metaphysical and immaterial. Berkeley fights against scientific mechanistic materialism when he subordinates science to God's will. I try to clarify how ambiguity works for Berkeley the metaphysician in establishing the superiority of minds or agents over matter and mechamisms. (shrink)