This seminar is co-organised with the research project NOTCOM (mfo.web.ox.ac.uk/erc-project-notcom-common-notion-science-and-consensus-seventeenth-century), at the Maison Française d’Oxford

Book II of the Novum organum begins as follows: “The work and aim of human power is to generate and superinduce a new nature or new natures on a given body.” (NO II.1) The transformation of bodies is thus central for Baconian science, as it is for the alchemist. In the Novum organum, Bacon suggests that there are two strategies for the transformation of bodies. The one regards bodies as collections of simple natures, and goes by discovering the form of each of the simple natures and imposing it on a body. The other goes by observing how bodies are transformed in nature (the latent process) and imitating it in the laboratory. (NO II.5) The much-discussed illustration of the method in the Novum organum is exclusively of the first kind. (NO II.10-21). This is what most commentators mean when they talk about Baconian method. But in the Sylva Sylvarum, Bacon illustrates the second strategy. Using the example of transforming a body into gold, I will discuss Bacon’s second method, and contrast it with the first. I will suggest that its employment in the Sylva may represent a change in his views on what the method of inquiry should be.

Daniel Garber is the A Watson Armour III University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Garber’s principal interests are the relations between philosophy, science, religion and society in the period of the Scientific Revolution. Garber is the author of Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (1992), Descartes Embodied (2001), and Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad (2009) and is co-editor with Michael Ayers of the Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (1998), the editor of a number of collections, and author of numerous articles.