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1 results

  • 12 - Experimental Natural History

  • from Part II - Disciplinary Activities
  • Edited by David Marshall Miller, Iowa State University, Dana Jalobeanu
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution
    Published online:
    14 January 2022
    Print publication:
    06 January 2022, pp 222-237

  • Summary

    The last two decades have seen remarkable developments in our understanding of early modern natural history. Historians have closely scrutinized its research methods, experimental practices, and methodological and epistemological commitments. Building on this recent scholarship, this chapter focuses on a particularly important type of natural history deriving from Francis Bacon, namely, experimental natural history. We show that this new form of natural history provided many branches of natural philosophy with a method for organizing the study of nature—of determining their desiderata, applying experiment, and structuring and exploiting their evidential and observational bases. The most important contributions of experimental natural history to the Scientific Revolution were the elaboration of a new philosophy of experimentation and the introduction of new, practice-based systems of classification.