Experiment, Speculation and Religion in Early Modern Philosophy

Alberto Vanzo, Peter R. Anstey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429663628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Experimental philosophy was an exciting and extraordinarily successful development in the study of nature in the seventeenth century. Yet experimental philosophy was not without its critics and was far from the only natural philosophical method on the scene. In particular, experimental philosophy was contrasted with and set against speculative philosophy and, in some quarters, was accused of tending to irreligion. This volume brings together ten scholars of early modern philosophy, history and science in order to shed new light on the complex relations between experiment, speculation and religion in early modern Europe.

The first six chapters of the book focus on the respective roles of experimental and speculative philosophy in individual seventeenth-century philosophers. They include Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Isaac Newton. The next two chapters deal with the relation between experimental philosophy and religion with a special focus on hypotheses and natural religion. The penultimate chapter takes a broader European perspective and examines the paucity of concerns with religion among Italian natural philosophers of the period. Finally, the concluding chapter draws all these individuals and themes together to provide a critical appraisal of recent scholarship on experimental philosophy.

This book is the first collection of essays on the subject of early modern experimental philosophy. It will appeal to scholars and students of early modern philosophy, science and religion.

1 Francis Bacon on Sophists, Poets and Other Forms of Self-Deceit (Or, What Can the Experimental Philosopher Learn from a Theoretically Informed History of Philosophy?)^*

Dana Jalobeanu

1 Introduction

Francis Bacon exposed and defended his project of a natural and experimental history in a series of strikingly polemical writings. The declared target of his polemic is philosophy: not Aristotelian philosophy, not the received ways of philosophical practice, but the very activity of ‘philosophising’ as conceived by all his predecessors, ancients and moderns alike. At least this is what the reader can find in the prefatory material to the Historia naturalis et experimentalis (OFB 12, published 1622). Here, Bacon portrays philosophy as swaying dangerously between poetic invention and superstitious beliefs; between producing ‘fabulous worlds’ in the ‘cells’ of one’s own phantasy; and ‘conjuring’ ‘apish worlds’ (simiolas & fabulas mundorum) through which man attempts to emulate God’s creation.¹ The fault seems to lie in the very habit of philosophising, which is equated in this text with the production of either ‘vaine speculations’ or dangerous, idolatrous superstitions.² Hence, Bacon’s recommendation is to ‘cast aside thoughts of philosophy … until a tried and tested natural history has been collected and constructed’ (OFB 12: 6/7, emphasis added).

This polemical outlook is striking and paradoxical because, of course, Bacon’s natural and experimental history is not constructed by setting aside ‘all philosophy’ in order to begin anew a factual inquiry into nature.³ In theory as well as in practice, Bacon’s natural history begins with books; often with the books of the very authors verbally abused in his successive refutations of philosophies. For example, when providing directions on how to assemble a natural history of the heavens, Bacon indicates that

the best history of the Heavenly Bodies would be that which could be extracted and elicited from Ptolemy, Copernicus and the more learned writers on astronomy, if you completely stripped the art from the experiment and also added the observations of more recent authorities.

(Descriptio globi intellectualis, OFB 6: 110/111)⁴

More generally, in his Preparatives towards a Natural History Bacon clearly specifies that a ‘review’ of ‘received opinions, with all their varieties and sects’ (OFB 11: 470/471) may help the natural historical inquiry; while in the Advancement of Learning he recommends the collection of philosophical doctrines into a ‘Kalender of Sects of Philosophie’ (OFB 4: 92). The Advancement of Learning and De augmentis scientiarum emphasise the benefit of several collections of ‘doubts’, errors and questions, assembled mainly from works of philosophy, and organised in ways similar to the Aristotelian Problemata.⁵ All these collections of errors, doubts, questions and doctrines show that there is ample room in Bacon’s project for a history of philosophy of a certain kind; a theoretically informed history of philosophy placed in the service of the investigation of nature.

Thus, the extreme polemical outlook of Bacon’s natural and experimental history cannot simply be, as has been suggested, a rejection of the ‘old regime of knowledge’ (Zagorin 1998, 29).⁶ Bacon’s reform is not directed towards discarding received philosophical systems in order to make a fresh start à la manière de Descartes. Nor are his criticisms used to vindicate one tradition against the others or to invent a respectable genealogy for a new doctrine. Something more interesting and more profound is going on in Bacon’s polemical and idiosyncratic use of the history of philosophy, as I try to show in this chapter. Bacon uses in sophisticated ways traditional anti-sectarian language, critical arguments and sometimes even straightforward verbal abuse in order to depict, to distinguish and to give names to the many ways in which human minds can err (and have erred in the past). He combines historical and historiographic research to erect complex and dynamic typologies of errors. Furthermore, and even more interestingly, Bacon reflects upon such types of errors, showing how one can use them to steer one’s course through the ‘waves of experience’. In this way, Bacon’s peculiar history of philosophy and his natural and experimental philosophy are closely intertwined in ways which have never been fully investigated.

Although Bacon’s history of philosophy has attracted a considerable degree of attention in past decades,⁷ to date the scholarly criticism has focused on its rhetorical, pedagogic and therapeutic aspects.⁸ Here, I propose a different perspective. I look at the methodological and epistemological import of Bacon’s criticisms of the received philosophical knowledge. I show that Bacon’s views of past philosophical doctrines provided him the empirical material for diagnosing and classifying relevant errors and diseases of the mind. One can thus see his theory of idols as developing from successive attempts to use a polemical and theoretically informed history of philosophy in order to steer the course of natural historical (and experimental) research. But I also show that historical and historiographic reflection helped Bacon to come up with a better, more accurate methodology of experimental research while avoiding some of the pitfalls of naïve empiricism.

2 Sects, Fictions and Fables: Bacon’s Polemical History of Philosophy as a Map of Errors

From very early on, Bacon associated a ‘refutation of philosophies’ (redargutio philosophiarum) with his general plan for the reformation of knowledge.⁹ The magnitude, purpose and functions of this ‘refutation’ vary widely from one text to the other. In his more ambitious moments, such as in the prefatory material of the Instauratio magna (OFB 11, published 1620), Bacon claims that a refutation of the received doctrines is an essential preliminary for the doctrine of purging the intellect (doctrina de expurgatione intellectus).¹⁰ But this part of Bacon’s general plan was never brought to completion; and in less ambitious moments, as for example in the De augmentis scientiarum (SEH 4, published 1623), Bacon expressed doubts that the various parts of this doctrine of purging the intellect can ever be ‘reduced to an art’ and recommended, instead, a ‘thoughtful prudence’ in the investigation of the idols of the mind and the general errors of demonstration.¹¹ Where does this leave the refutation of the received doctrines?

A group of writings from the first decade of the seventeenth century is particularly rich in historical and philosophical details and can thus be used to respond to this question. The texts are Temporis partus masculus (c. 1603), Cogitata et visa (c. 1607) and Redargutio philosophiarum (c. 1608). Each of these early texts reads as a history of philosophy of a certain kind.

Temporis partus masculus is organised as a collection of ‘indictments’: philosophers are ‘called by name’ to the bar to respond to the accusation that, with their ‘fables’ and ‘fictions’, they have ‘debauched our minds’ (SEH 3: 529).¹² The colourful and abusive language is reminiscent of Cornelius Agrippa’s De vanitate.¹³ Like Agrippa, Bacon works with a very inclusive definition of learning, encompassing all arts and sciences; and thus his criticisms extend from ‘vain dialecticians’ and ‘poetical’ philosophers to deluded alchemists, boastful mechanics, web-spinning rationalists and deceitful magicians.¹⁴ Also, like Agrippa, Bacon claims that natural philosophers are ‘more fabulous than the poets’ (SEH 3: 529)¹⁵ and that natural philosophy is a source of ‘dreams’ and ‘monstrous tales’.¹⁶ Rhetorical similarities between Bacon and Agrippa extend to the creation of inventive, colourful labels: for Bacon, Aristotle is ‘that worst of sophists’ (Farrington 1964, 63),¹⁷ Plato a swollen poet and ‘deluded theologian’ (ibid., 64),¹⁸ Paracelsus a producer of ‘drunken oracles’ (ibid., 65); and Hippocrates that ‘puffer of ancient wisdom’ (ibid., 67).¹⁹

Meanwhile, in contrast to Agrippa, Bacon’s explicit purpose in this text is not to discredit learning but to correct its errors and to learn from this process. As indicated in a well-known passage of another text from the same period, Commentarius solutus, ‘discoursing scornfully of the philosophy of the grecians’ (SEH 11: 64) was meant to constitute a specific device in this scenario of teaching and learning. In the Tempus partus masculus, Bacon claims that bashing the ancients is merely a ‘veil of abuse’ under which reader has to discover for herself

the skill with which I have packed every word with meaning and the accuracy with which I have launched my shafts straight into their hidden sores. Those whom I incriminate share a common guilt and might well have been confounded in a common accusation; but I have been at pains to frame an indictment appropriate to each individual and particularising his chief offence.

(Farrington 1964, 70)

Thus, the ‘indictments’ are part of a pedagogical setup; they exemplify and discuss, under the guise of the ‘refutation of philosophies’, specific errors and diseases of learning. Individual examples are said to ‘stand for’ the ‘tallest growth’ of a whole category of error (ibid.). For example, Aristotle’s errors are said to exemplify the typical errors of the whole ‘sect’ of the sophists, a category comprising ancient and modern philosophers who tend to enslave the human intellect with words. By contrast, Plato, this ‘swelling poet’, stands for errors originating in the belief that truth ‘is a native inhabitant of the human mind’. Embracing ‘Plato’s error’ is the origin of the worst form of idolatry; because he

taught us to turn our mind’s eye inward and grovel before our own blind and confused idols under the name of contemplative philosophy.

(ibid., 64)

One can see in this typology of philosophical errors a prefiguration of Bacon’s later discussion of the idols. In Temporis partus masculus, erroneous doctrines and deluded sects are seen as both resulting from idols and productive of new idols.²⁰ Take, for example, the doctrines of the empirical philosophers.²¹ Unlike those espoused by Plato and Aristotle, the doctrines of the empirics are quite particular, and yet they too are accused of leading the mind astray towards either despair or laziness. The doctrines of the empirics, according to Bacon, discourage, in fact, the investigation of nature. Thus, for example, by claiming that the heat of the Sun is fundamentally different from the heat of fire, Galen, ‘some Arabians’ and some of the modern physicians²² have asserted a dogma not only false, but leading to ‘artificial despair’ (Farrington 1964, 65).²³ This claim, an instantiation of the ontological separation between the heavens and the sublunary world, leads the intellect to believe that there is nothing one can learn about the heat of the Sun from experiments, and thus puts an end to empirical investigations. In a text from the same period, Bacon colourfully characterises this particular doctrine as ‘hamstringing the sinews of experience’ (Cogitata et visa, SEH 3: 592).²⁴ This error is classified later, in the Novum organum, as an example of a category of dogmas ‘not merely desperate but actually dedicated to despair’ (Novum organum I, 75, OFB 11: 120/121).

If in the Temporis partus masculus such examples of erroneous doctrines are investigated in a somewhat random-looking order, in Cogitata et visa and Redargutio philosophiarum Bacon attempts to build classifications. He states that ‘the hosts of errors’ are ‘so many and so great that it is impossible to engage them singly’ (Farrington 1964, 103).²⁵ One needs a typology, a division of doctrines one can recognise, discu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Table and Figure
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Francis Bacon on Sophists, Poets and Other Forms of Self-Deceit (Or, What Can the Experimental Philosopher Learn from a Theoretically Informed History of Philosophy?)
• 2 Robert Boyle and the Intelligibility of the Corpuscular Philosophy
• 3 Cavendish and Boyle on Colour and Experimental Philosophy
• 4 Appeals to Experience in Hobbes’ Science of Politics
• 5 Locke and the Experimental Philosophy of the Human Mind
• 6 Newton’s Scaffolding: The Instrumental Roles of His Optical Hypotheses
• 7 What (Else) Was Behind the Newtonian Rejection of ‘Hypotheses’?
• 8 From Experimental Natural Philosophy to Natural Religion: Action and Contemplation in the Early Royal Society
• 9 Experimental Philosophy and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Italy
• 10 Early Modern Experimental Philosophy: A Non-Anglocentric Overview
• List of Contributors
• Index