{"id":977,"date":"2011-03-21T09:00:16","date_gmt":"2011-03-20T21:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/?p=977"},"modified":"2012-09-25T02:06:06","modified_gmt":"2012-09-24T14:06:06","slug":"who-invented-the-experimental-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/who-invented-the-experimental-philosophy\/","title":{"rendered":"Who invented the Experimental Philosophy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Anstey writes…<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sometimes the question \u2018Who invented X?\u2019 has no determinate answer, in spite of claims of particular individuals. One thinks of questions like \u2018Who invented the internet?\u2019 and the various dubious claims to this honour. Christoph L\u00fcthy has argued quite convincingly that \u2018the microscope was never invented\u2019 (Early Science and Medicine<\/em>, 1, 1996, p. 2). I suggest that the same probably goes for the experimental philosophy: there is no single person or group of people who created it, rather it somehow \u2018emerged\u2019 in Europe sometime between the death of Francis Bacon in 1626 and the founding of the Royal Society in 1660. One place to look for answers is to trace the early uses of the term ‘experimental philosophy’.<\/p>\n

Here is the evidence that I am aware of for the emergence of the term ‘experimental philosophy’ in early modern England. The first English work\u00a0 to use the term \u2018experimental philosophy\u2019 according to EEBO<\/a> was Robert Boyle\u2019s Spring of the Air<\/em> in 1660. Interestingly, the term philosophia experimentalis<\/em> had already appeared in the title of Nicola Cabeo’s Latin commentary on Aristotle’s Meteorology<\/em> of 1646 and Boyle cites Cabeo’s book twice in Spring of the Air<\/em>. The first English book to use the term in its title was Abraham Cowley\u2019s A Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy<\/em> of 1661. From then on, however, books about experimental philosophy start to roll off the presses of England. Boyle\u2019s Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy<\/em> and Henry Power\u2019s Experimental Philosophy,<\/em> both published in 1663, got the ball rolling. (Incidentally, Cabeo’s book was reprinted in Rome in 1686 under the title Philosophia experimentalis<\/em>.) As for manuscript sources, the earliest use of the term \u2018experimental philosophy\u2019 that I have found is in Samuel Hartlib\u2019s Ephemerides<\/em> in 1635.<\/p>\n

Another place to look for evidence for the inventor of the experimental philosophy is in discussions of natural philosophy and of experiment. It appears that Francis Bacon never used the term ‘experimental philosophy’, but he did develop a conception of experientia literata<\/em> (learned experience), which might be thought to be a precursor of the experimental philosophy. This appears in Book 5 of his De augmentis scientiarum<\/em> of 1623, where it is distinguished from interpretatio naturae<\/em> (interpretation of nature). The experientia literata <\/em>is a method of discovery proceeding from one experiment to another, whereas interpretatio naturae<\/em> involves the transition from experiments to theory. But this doesn\u2019t resemble the distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy very closely. For example, the experimental philosophy was, on the whole, opposed<\/em> to speculation and hypotheses and there is no sense of opposition or tension in Bacon\u2019s distinction.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, a distinction between operative (or practical) and speculative philosophy was commonplace in scholastic divisions of knowledge in the late 16th<\/sup> and early 17th<\/sup> centuries, and this, no doubt provided the basic dichotomy on which the experimental\/speculative distinction was based. But the operative\/speculative distinction doesn\u2019t map very well onto the experimental\/speculative distinction, not least because by \u2018operative sciences\u2019 the scholastics meant ethics, politics and oeconomy (that is, management of society) and not observation and experiment.<\/p>\n

Who invented the experimental philosophy? I don\u2019t think that there is a determinate answer to this question, but I\u2019m happy to be corrected and am keen for suggestions as to where to look for more evidence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Anstey writes… Sometimes the question \u2018Who invented X?\u2019 has no determinate answer, in spite of claims of particular individuals. One thinks of questions like \u2018Who invented the internet?\u2019 and the various dubious claims to this honour. Christoph L\u00fcthy has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[246,368,396,397],"class_list":["post-977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas","tag-bacon","tag-boyle","tag-cabeo","tag-cowley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/977","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=977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/977\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}