How Bacon Became Baconian
Francis Bacon’s metaphysics of material desires represents a major contribution to early-modern natural philosophy and theories of matter. By material desires, Bacon meant a limited set of primordial appetites deemed to govern all natural phenomena. He wa
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How Bacon Became Baconian Guido Giglioni
Francis Bacon’s metaphysics of material desires represents a major contribution to early-modern natural philosophy and theories of matter. By material desires, Bacon meant a limited set of primordial appetites deemed to govern all natural phenomena. He was convinced that through experimental trials natural philosophers could identify such basic appetites, classify them by means of increasingly comprehensive interpretative frameworks (inductions) and control them through direct manipulations (superinductions). Because of its focus on appetites—appetites within matter, but also appetites in men—Bacon’s program of inventio, inductio, and superinductio of material desires can be described as an original model of natural-political inquiry.1 An accurate assessment of the nature of mechanical operations in Bacon’s natural philosophy needs to focus on the interplay of these three levels of inquiry. By putting appetites at the center of his philosophical reflection, Bacon advanced a strikingly original solution to the question of the relationship between knowledge and action in nature, a solution that is markedly different from the one chosen by the major figures of seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy. By and large, mechanical philosophers of various creeds questioned any blunt assertion of ontological realism when explaining the nature of life and preferred to confine their investigations to a study of the external appearances of matter (what we might call a Kantian “as-if” solution) in addressing the question of how to account for intelligence in nature (or at least the recurrence of teleological patterns of action that seem to indicate the presence of some form of knowledge embedded in nature). For them, finalism in nature could no longer be explained through the unintentional teleology of I would like to thank Sophie Roux, Daniel Garber, Michael Hunter, and one anonymous reviewer for their suggestions and comments. 1 On Bacon’s metaphysics of material desires, see Giglioni, Francesco Bacone, 59–95; “Mastering the Appetites of Matter: Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum.” G. Giglioni (*) Warburg Institute, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]
D. Garber and S. Roux (eds.), The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 300, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4345-8_2, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013
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Aristotelian kind. They interpreted design in nature either as the result of projections imposed onto nature by our mind or as the manifestation of an objective order originally established by God but not dependent on the very essence of nature. It was an argument that Ralph Cudworth described as a dilemma dividing “atomic atheists” from “bigotical religionists.”2 Bacon opted for brutal realism: nature was a battlefield of ruthless and opposing appetites. The order of the cosmos did not result from intentional planning, but rather it remained a provisional settlement, highly unstable and flexibl
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