The Origins of Early Modern Experimental Philosophy
Intellectual History Review 22 (4):499-518 (2012)
Abstract
This paper argues that early modern experimental philosophy emerged as the dominant member of a pair of methods in natural philosophy, the speculative versus the experimental, and that this pairing derives from an overarching distinction between speculative and operative philosophy that can be ultimately traced back to Aristotle. The paper examines the traditional classification of natural philosophy as a speculative discipline from the Stagirite to the seventeenth century; medieval and early modern attempts to articulate a scientia experimentalis; and the tensions in the classification of natural magic and mechanics that led to the introduction of an operative part of natural philosophy in the writings of Francis Bacon and John Johnston. The paper concludes with a summary of the salient discontinuities between the experimental/speculative distinction of the mid-seventeenth century and its predecessors and a statement of the developments that led to the ascendance of experimental philosophy from the 1660s.Author Profiles
DOI
10.1080/17496977.2012.725552
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Citations of this work
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Experimental pedagogy and the eclipse of Robert Boyle in England.Peter R. Anstey - 2015 - Intellectual History Review 25 (1):115-131.
David Hume y la distinción entre filosofía especulativa y experimental.Sofía Beatriz Calvente - 2018 - Dianoia 63 (81):109-131.
Jane Addams as experimental philosopher.Joshua August Skorburg - 2018 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (5):918-938.
References found in this work
Francis Bacon and the Classification of Natural History.Peter Anstey - 2012 - Early Science and Medicine 17 (1):11-31.
The Textbook Tradition in Natural Philosophy 1600–1650.Patricia Reif - 1969 - Journal of the History of Ideas 30 (1):17.