Article ID: CBB001202409

John Locke’s “New Method of Making Common-Place-Books”: Tradition, Innovation and Epistemic Effects (2014)

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In 1676, the English physician and philosopher John Locke published a new method of commonplacing. He had developed this method and, in particular, a new approach to organizing and indexing the entries, in the course of 25 years of personal note-taking and it proved quite influential. This paper presents the three major approaches to commonplacing as practiced by physicians and other scholars before Locke – the systematic or textbook approach, the alphabetical approach and the sequential or index-based approach – and it analyzes the ways in which Locke himself applied them in his own commonplace books. In comparison with established approaches, his new method offered a maximum degree of flexibility while facilitating the later retrieval of notes and minimising waste of space and paper. Thanks to these features, it was particularly well suited for physicians and natural philosophers who were interested in the infinite variety of natural particulars rather than in elegant quotes on a very limited set of classical topics. In conclusion, the potential epistemic impact of commonplacing on early modern medicine and natural philosophy is discussed, in particular its importance for contemporary debates about species and disease entities and for the emergence of the notion of “facts.”

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Article Charmantier, Isabelle; Müller-Wille, Staffan (2014) Worlds of Paper: An Introduction. Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period (pp. 379-397). unapi

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Authors & Contributors
Walmsley, Jonathan
Gaukroger, Stephen W.
Anstey, Peter R.
Kraemer, Fabian
Zaterka, Luciana
Walmsley, J. C.
Concepts
Natural philosophy
Philosophy
Empiricism
Mechanism; mechanical philosophy
Medicine and science, relationships
Books
Time Periods
17th century
18th century
16th century
Early modern
Renaissance
20th century, early
Places
England
Portugal
Japan
Germany
Great Britain
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