2016 - Franco Angeli
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Fact, fiction and error in Bacon and the Royal Society
563-578 p.
- This essay discusses the problem of error as raised by the Baconian project for natural history. I begin with an account of Bacon's treatment of the problem, discussing both his celebrated account of the Idols of the mind, and a number of other problems that come up in the construction of natural histories, including the problem of the reliability of the senses, as well as the problem of the reliability of the sources from which the constituents of a natural history are derived. I then consider the version of the Baconian program that is proposed in Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667). Bacon, of course, had proposed a collective form of scientific investigation in his New Atlantis (1626), as a way of carrying out a program too vast for a single investigator. But when it is actually realized in the foundation of the Royal Society, as described in Sprat, I argue that the collective organization proposed also addresses some of the key problems relating to error raised in Bacon's original program,.
- a feature that goes beyond Bacon's own original proposal. [Publisher's Text].
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Information
ISSN: 1972-5558
KEYWORDS
- Error, Bacon, Sprat, Royal Society, Baconian Idols, natural history, experiment
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In this issue
- I volti dell'errore nel pensiero moderno : da Bacone a Leibniz : introduzione
- Fact, fiction and error in Bacon and the Royal Society
- Significato, falsità ed errore in Thomas Hobbes
- Descartes on error and madness
- Croisement, permutation : sur un schéma récurrent d'explication de l'erreur dans les philosophies de l'âge classique
- Pascal et l'erreur
- L'analyse morale de l'erreur chez Pierre Nicole
- Sommes-nous tous des lycanthropes? : imagination, folie et vision en dieu dans De la recherche de la vérité de Malebranche
- Spinoza e la necessità dell'errare
- Leibniz on error : between Descartes and Spinoza : will, judgement and the concept of reality
- Before judging : Leibniz on the ultimate origin of error
- The consequences of error : Leibniz and toleration
- Indice dei nomi
- Indice dell'annata 2016