Chapter 5 - Natural Philosophy

Summary

In “Natural Philosophy,” Mary Thomas Crane charts the early modern movement away from Aristotelian natural philosophy, rooted in a version of nature based on everyday experience, and toward a counterintuitive nature, understood only through mathematics and artificially produced experiments. Examining the works of London-based practitioners of technical and mathematical sciences such as Robert Record, John Dee, Leonard Digges, and William Bourne, as well as natural philosophy’s most strident promoter, Francis Bacon, Crane demonstrates how the new version of nature that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came at the cost of an older, more intuitive understanding. The chapter ends with an analysis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a cautionary tale about using natural science to control people and nature.