Photos. "This is a masterly book which brings together the two major Bacons--the politician and the philosopher. . .

This article examines the seventeenth-century debate between the Dutch philosopher Benedict de Spinoza and the British scientist Robert Boyle, with a view to explicating what the twentieth-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze considers to be the difference between science and philosophy. The two main themes that are usually drawn from the correspondence of Boyle and Spinoza, and used to polarize the exchange, are the different views on scientific methodology and on the nature of matter that are attributed to each correspondent. Commentators (...) have tended to focus on one or the other of these themes in order to champion either Boyle or Spinoza in their assessment of the exchange. This paper draws upon the resources made available by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their major work What is Philosophy?, in order to offer a more balanced account of the exchange, which in its turn contributes to our understanding of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the difference between science and philosophy. (shrink)

This work provides an original account of Francis Bacon's conception of natural inquiry. P'erez-Ramos sets Bacon in an epistemological tradition that postulates an intimate relation between objects of cognition and objects of construction, and regards the human knower as, fundamentally, a maker. By exploring the background to this tradition, and contrasting the responses of major philosophers of the 17th century with Bacon's own, the book charts Bacon's contribution to the modern philosophy of science.

Robert Boyle thought that his scientific achievements in pneumatics and chemistry depended on, and thus provided support for, his mechanical philosophy. In a recent article in this journal, Alan Chalmers has challenged this view. This paper consists of a reply to Chalmers on two fronts. First it tries to specify precisely what ‘the mechanical philosophy’ meant for Boyle. Then it goes on to defend, against Chalmers, the view that Boyle's science does support his natural philosophy.Keywords: Robert Boyle; Mechanical philosophy; Reductionism.

This paper draws attention to the crucial importance of a new kind of precisely defined law of nature in the Scientific Revolution. All explanations in the mechanical philosophy depend upon the interactions of moving material particles; the laws of nature stipulate precisely how these interact; therefore, such explanations rely on the laws of nature. While this is obvious, the radically innovatory nature of these laws is not fully acknowledged in the historical literature. Indeed, a number of scholars have tried to (...) locate the origins of such laws in the medieval period. In the first part of this paper these claims are critically examined, and found at best to reveal important aspects of the background to the later idea, which could be drawn upon for legitimating purposes by the mechanical philosophers. The second part of the paper argues that the modern concept of laws of nature originates in René Descartes's work. It is shown that Descartes took his concept of laws of nature from the mathematical tradition, but recognized that he could not export it to the domain of physico-mathematics, to play a causal role, unless he could show that these laws were underwritten by God. It is argued that this is why, at an early stage of his philosophical development, Descartes had to turn to metaphysics. (shrink)

Pérez-Ramos' study of Baconian science in the New Organon departs sharply from recent interpretation. The single thesis that pervades this book is that the "over-arching ideal guiding Bacon's science" is "maker's knowledge." For Bacon "to know, in brief, means to make". This assertion is itself not made by Bacon, nor does it follow from his statement that "human knowledge and human power meet in one," for power has other forms than making alone. A philosopher who publishes his praise of Machiavelli's (...) realism, and who extends the range of application of his scientia to political knowledge does not restrict the scope of power to "making." Within limits that effectively make Bacon a "philosopher of technology" in a later sense, Pérez-Ramos has given us an original and valuable inquiry. He seeks to give full weight to the Baconian aim to "stake all on the victory of art over nature." This intention has the promise of bringing into a unity the end and the means of Baconian philosophy, the mastery of nature goal and the scientia which is its instrument, a unity not hitherto achieved by Baconian interpreters. (shrink)

For more than a century after its appearance on the modern philosophical scene, Spinoza’s philosophy was considered surprising and even scandalous for its assertion of the oneness or singularity of substance. From Bayle’s early Dictionary article to Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, the core of Spinoza’s philosophy was said to be its unprecedented gesture of making God the sole res that could be thought through the concept of substance. Substance, according to definition 3 of part I of the (...) Ethics, is “that which is in itself and is conceived through itself.” The enormous emphasis placed on this move by the interpretative tradition almost into the twentieth century managed, however, to obscure every other dimension of Spinoza’s thought, so that Spinoza’s thought was simply a metaphysics of the oneness of substance. It is this coupling of Spinozism and the metaphysics of substance that I want to undo. In line with a series of interpretative developments in France over the last thirty years, I want to dispel this identification by employing a paradoxical formulation. Far from being a metaphysics of substance, I contend that Spinoza’s philosophy is instead an ontology of relation. By emphasizing his negation of the substantiality of what he calls res singulares, we can locate Spinoza’s originality less in having posited the existence of a single substance—Letter 50 in fact suggests that substance can only “improperly” be called “single” or “one”—than in having laid out the foundation for this ontology of relation. (shrink)

Bibliografia (p.[xvii]-xlvi) - Scritti autobiografici.- Dagli scritti filosofici anteriori alla "Scienza nuova."- Principj di scienza nuova.- Dagli scritti minori: filosofici e critici.- Dagli scritti minori: storici, biografici ed epigrafici.

This pioneering work in the history of science, which originated in a series of three Gauss Seminars given at Princeton University in 1984, demonstrated how the roots of the scientific revolution lay in medieval scholasticism.

In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then.

This paper argues that, contrary to the claims of Alan Chalmers, Boyle understood his experimental work to be intimately related to his mechanical philosophy. Its central claim is that the mechanical philosophy has a heuristic structure that motivates and gives direction to Boyle's experimental programme. Boyle was able to delimit the scope of possible explanations of any phenomenon by positing both that all qualities are ultimately reducible to a select group of mechanical qualities and that all explanations of natural phenomena (...) are to be in terms of the operations of machines and are to appeal only to qualities that are already familiar. This is illustrated by his investigations into the Torricellian experiment. Boyle's explanation of the elevation of the mercurial cylinder by appeal to the spring of the air was an intermediate mechanical explanation. Boyle was convinced that the spring of the air was ultimately reducible to the mechanical qualities. This in turn had implications for his research into the cause of respiration. In a move that was both parsimonious and consistent with the broad requirements of the mechanical philosophy, Boyle was able to solve the problem of the cause of the inflow of air into the lungs by appeal to his research in pneumatics. This application of a mechanical explanation in pneumatics to physiology is just what one would expect if the mechanical philosophy was as universal as Boyle claimed it to be. Therefore, far from Boyle's experiments having a life of their own, they were clearly directed by and understood in terms of the mechanical philosophy.Keywords: Air-pump; Boyle; Chalmers; Experiment; Explanation; Mechanism. (shrink)

We can distinguish ‘mechanical’ in the strict sense of the mechanical philosophers from ‘mechanical’ in the common sense. My claim is that Boyle's experimental science owed nothing to, and offered no support for, the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense. The attempts by my critics to undermine my case involve their interpreting ‘mechanical’ in something like the common sense. I certainly accept that Boyle's experimental science was productively informed by mechanical analogies, where ‘mechanical’ is interpreted in a common sense. But (...) this leaves my original claim untouched and, in the main, unchallenged.Keywords: Boyle; Mechanism; Mechanical philosophy; Corpuscular philosophy; Reductionism. (shrink)

Le système spinoziste comprend une infinité d'expressions de la Nature et offre aux modes finis que nous sommes la possibilité d'appréhender la puissance d'agir sous un angle physique, mental, ou encore psychophysique, selon qu'elle est ...

Collapsing buildings, unexpected meetings in the marketplace, monstrous births, encounters with pirates at sea - these and other unforeseen 'accidents' at the turn of the seventeenth century in England acquired unprecedented significance in the early modern philosophical and cultural imagination. Drawing on intellectual history, cultural criticism, and rhetorical theory, this book chronicles the narrative transformation of 'accident' from a philosophical dead end to an astonishing occasion for revelation and wonder in early modern religious life, dramatic practice, and experimental philosophy. Alongside (...) texts by such canonical figures as Shakespeare and Bacon, this study draws on several lesser known authors of sensational news accounts about accidents that occurred around the turn of the seventeenth century. The result is a cultural anatomy of accidents as philosophical problem, theatrical conceit, and spiritual landmark. (shrink)