The Philosopher and the Craftsman: Francis Bacon’s Notion of Experiment and Its Debt to Early Stuart Inventors (2017)
Pastorino, Cesare (Author)
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 108
Issue: 4
Pages: 749-768
The key role that Francis Bacon played in the reevaluation of mechanical arts is a well-established tenet of the scholarship on the Scientific Revolution. However, scholars tend to assume that Bacon’s knowledge of technologies and their methods came from learned texts and that he lacked familiarity with the crafts of his time. By contrast, this essay shows that Bacon’s philosophical discussion of experimentation owes a large debt to his concrete knowledge of early Stuart craftsmen applying for royal privileges and patents for new technical inventions. Bacon personally supervised the drafting of many of these privileges. In his philosophical work, he adapted legal requirements—devised to identify inventions unambiguously—to describe and analyze experimental practices. This evidence directly affects the long-standing debate on the role of crafts in the rise and development of early modern science. In the case of Francis Bacon, it is possible to find a concrete and precise connection between crafts methodologies and the philosophical description of experimentation.
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