Jalobeanu Dana
Department of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Bucharest, Romania.
Early Sci Med. 2012;17(1-2):197-229. doi: 10.1163/157338212x631846.
At various stages in his career, Francis Bacon claimed to have reformed and changed traditional natural history in such a way that his new "natural and experimental history" was unlike any of its ancient or humanist predecessors. Surprisingly, such claims have gone largely unquestioned in Baconian scholarship. Contextual readings of Bacon's natural history have compared it, so far, only with Plinian or humanist natural history. This paper investigates a different form of natural history, very popular among Bacon's contemporaries, but yet unexplored by contemporary students of Bacon's works. I have provisionally called this form of natural history'Senecan' natural history, partly because it took shape in the Neo-Stoic revival of the sixteenth-century, partly because it originates in a particular cosmographical reading of Seneca's Naturales quaestiones. I discuss in this paper two examples of Senecan natural history: the encyclopedic and cosmographical projects of Pierre de la Primaudaye (1546-1619) and Samuel Purchas (1577-1626). I highlight a number of similarities between these two projects and Francis Bacon's natural history, and argue that Senecan natural history forms an important aspect in the historical and philosophical background that needs to be taken into consideration if we want to understand the extent to which Bacon's project to reform natural history can be said to be new.
在其职业生涯的不同阶段，弗朗西斯·培根声称他已对传统自然史进行了改革和变革，使得他全新的“自然与实验史”与其古代或人文主义前辈们的任何作品都截然不同。令人惊讶的是，在培根研究领域，此类说法在很大程度上未受到质疑。迄今为止，对培根自然史的语境解读仅将其与普林尼式或人文主义自然史进行了比较。本文考察了一种不同形式的自然史，它在培根同时代人当中极为流行，但当代研究培根作品的学者尚未对其进行探究。我暂且将这种自然史形式称为“塞内加式”自然史，部分原因在于它形成于16世纪新斯多葛主义的复兴时期，部分原因在于它源自对塞内加《自然问题》的一种特定宇宙志解读。在本文中，我讨论了“塞内加式”自然史的两个例子：皮埃尔·德·拉·普里莫代（1546 - 1619）和塞缪尔·珀查斯（1577 - 1626）的百科全书式和宇宙志项目。我强调了这两个项目与弗朗西斯·培根自然史之间的诸多相似之处，并认为如果我们想要理解培根改革自然史的项目在何种程度上可被称为新的，那么“塞内加式”自然史构成了历史和哲学背景中一个需要考虑的重要方面。
