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Baconian Natural and Experimental History

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Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences

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Overview

Francis Bacon’s natural and experimental history was his main legacy to the seventeenth century. It was especially popular in England, but also had its adepts on the continent. Natural and experimental history was a preliminary, open-ended, experimental investigation of nature, with classificatory and heuristic purposes (Anstey and Jalobeanu forthcoming; Jalobeanu 2010, 2015). Many of its practitioners considered it a foundation for a new natural philosophy, a natural philosophy with properly constructed (and severely tested) axioms. Natural and experimental histories could be topically organized (as in Bacon’s Natural History of Winds (Historia Ventorum), or Robert Boyle’s History of Cold), or “scattered,” i.e., made of seemingly random strings of experiments, emulating Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, or a Natural History in Ten Centuries, the posthumous volume published in 1626 or 1627 which became extremely popular in the second part of the seventeenth century. After the...

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICUB-Humanities and Department of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Dana Jalobeanu

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  1. Dana Jalobeanu
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Correspondence to Dana Jalobeanu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Dana Jalobeanu

  2. Dept. of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University Dept. Philosophy & Moral Sci, Ghent, Oost-Vlaanderen, Belgium

    Charles T. Wolfe

Section Editor information

  1. Sociology, Philosophy & Anthropology, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Kirsten Walsh

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Jalobeanu, D. (2021). Baconian Natural and Experimental History. In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_49-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_49-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-20791-9

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