{"id":2692,"date":"2012-09-10T16:05:10","date_gmt":"2012-09-10T04:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/?p=2692"},"modified":"2012-09-10T10:04:01","modified_gmt":"2012-09-09T22:04:01","slug":"denis-diderot-the-last-true-baconian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/denis-diderot-the-last-true-baconian\/","title":{"rendered":"Denis Diderot: the last true Baconian?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Anstey writes…<\/strong><\/p>\n

There were many types of Baconianism in the eighteenth century and many philosophers and natural philosophers traced their lineage from Bacon or regarded Bacon as the progenitor of views that they espoused. And yet most of these self-proclaimed \u2018Baconians\u2019 held views that Bacon himself would hardly recognize or they adhered to what, at best, could be described as a truncated form of Baconianism. A nice example is George Adams Jr whose views on the method of reasoning in natural philosophy in his Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy<\/em> (1794) (discussed previously on this blog<\/a>) amount to little more than a summary of the first book of Bacon\u2019s Novum organum<\/em> (1620).<\/p>\n

What would it take then for someone to be a true<\/em> Baconian? Of course, the question itself is problematic because there is no principled way of determining the necessary and sufficient conditions that would settle the issue. But let us run with the question nonetheless.<\/p>\n

Given the prominence of Bacon\u2019s method of natural history in his conception of how we are to acquire knowledge of nature \u2013 that is, given the quality and quantity of writings that he devoted to natural history and the efforts he expended in assembling his own exemplar histories in the last years of his life \u2013 I suggest that to be a true Baconian one must (at least) be an advocate of the Baconian method of natural history. If this is right, then as far as I am aware, the last true Baconian was the French philosophe<\/em> Denis Diderot (1713\u20131784).<\/p>\n

\"\"

Denis Diderot (1713 - 1784)<\/p><\/div>\n

Diderot\u2019s \u2018Prospectus\u2019 for the Encyclop\u00e9die<\/em>, was first published in 1750 and then appended in a modified form to the \u2018Preliminary Discourse\u2019 of the first volume of the Encyclop\u00e9die<\/em> itself in 1751. It presents an overtly Baconian scheme of the sciences set within a tripartite faculty psychology \u00e0 la<\/em> Bacon, but more importantly, it shows a clear understanding and acceptance of the structure and content of Bacon\u2019s account of the overall project of natural history. Drawing heavily on Bacon\u2019s De augmentis scientiarum<\/em> he tells us that:<\/p>\n

The history of uniform nature<\/em> is divided, following its principal objects, into: celestial history<\/em> or history of the stars<\/em>, of their movements<\/em>, sensible appearances<\/em>, etc., without explaining their cause by systems, hypotheses<\/span>, etc. (It is a matter here only of pure phenomena.) Into meteorological history<\/em> such as winds, rains, tempests, thunder, aurora borealis, <\/em>etc. Into the history of the earth and the sea, or of mountains, rivers, streams, currents, tides, sands, soils, forests, islands, configurations of the earth, continents, etc. Into history of minerals, into history of vegetables, into history of animals. Whence results a history of the elements, of the apparent nature, sensible effects, movements, etc., of fire, air, earth, and water. (Preliminary Discourse, Chicago, 1995, 147)<\/p>\n

(Regular readers of this blog will note the decrying of systems and hypotheses as hallmarks of a commitment to the experimental philosophy.)<\/p>\n

Yet Diderot does not merely reproduce the structure and content of Bacon\u2019s method of natural history, he also appreciated the heuristic structure of these histories and the fact that they needed to be subject to what Bacon called interpretatio naturae<\/em>, the interpretation of nature. For, in 1754 Diderot published a work entitled On the Interpretation of Nature<\/em> which, as many scholars have recognized, is very Baconian in character. It is, in effect, Diderot\u2019s own version of Book Two of Bacon\u2019s Novum organum<\/em>. To be sure it lacks any extended discussion of Baconian induction and prerogative instances, but it is written in aphoristic form and contains many Baconian themes including advice on experimenting, the use of queries and conjectures and concrete natural philosophical examples. Surely on this evidence Diderot must qualify as a true Baconian. Was he the last?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Anstey writes… There were many types of Baconianism in the eighteenth century and many philosophers and natural philosophers traced their lineage from Bacon or regarded Bacon as the progenitor of views that they espoused. And yet most of these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[246,438,9576,349],"class_list":["post-2692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas","tag-bacon","tag-diderot","tag-interpratation-of-nature","tag-natural-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}