Francis Bacon, feminist historiography, and the dominion of nature

Journal of the History of Ideas

Volumn 69, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 117-141

  Vickers, Brian ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 39749147044     PISSN: 00225037     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jhi.2008.0007     Document Type: Review

References (62)

1. See Paolo Rossi, "Ants, spiders, epistemologists," in Francis Bacon. Terminologia e fortuna net XVII secolo, ed. Marta Fattori (Rome, 1984), 245-60, at 245.
2. Knights, "Bacon and the Seventeenth-Century Dissociation of Sensibility," in Explorations (London, 1946), 92-111.
3. See Sandra Harding, "The Norms of Social Inquiry and Masculine Experience," PSA 1980: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 2 (1980): 305-24;
4. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986);
5. and Harding, Whose science? Whose knowledge? (Ithaca, NY, 1991);
6. Evelyn Fox Keller, "Baconian Science: A Hermaphroditic Birth," Philosophical Forum 11 (1980): 299-308;
7. Keller, "Feminism and Science," Signs 7 (1982): 589-602;
8. and Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985),
9. which includes the essay "Baconian Science: The Arts of Mastery and Obedience"; Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980).
10. See Noretta Kroetge, "Methodology, Ideology, and Feminist Critiques of Science," PSA 1980, 2: 346-59, at 351-56;
11. Alan Soble, "In Defense of Bacon," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 25 (1995): 192-215;
12. quoted from revised version, "In Defense of Bacon," in A house built on sand: exposing postmodern myths about science, ed, Noretta Kroetge (New York, 1998), 195-215;
13. Peter Pesic, "Wrestling with Proteus: Francis Bacon and the 'Torture' of Nature," Isis 90 (1999): 81-94;
14. Perez Zagorin, Francis Bacon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 121-23.
15. Isis 97 (2006): 483-533.
16. Katharine Park, "Women, Gender, and Utopia. The Death of Nature
17. and the Historiography of Early Modern Science," ibid.: 487-504; hereafter referred to as "Park."
18. Carolyn Merchant, "The Scientific Revolution and The Death of Nature," ibid.: 513-33; hereafter referred to as "Merchant 2006."
19. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I.10, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 472-36;
20. Max Scheler, Ressentiment [1915], tr. W.W. Woldheim, ed. and intro. Lewis A. Coser (New York: Free Press, 1961).
21. Some feminists are aware of this problem, e.g., Marion Tapper, "Ressentiment and Power. Some Reflections on Feminist Practices," Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory, ed. Paul Patton (London: Routledge, 1993), 130-43;
22. Vikki Bell, Feminist Imagination (London: Sage, 1999), 40-61.
23. See The First Prayer-Book of King Edward VI, 1549 (London, n.d.), 233.
24. See, e.g., Marriage and Society. Studies in the Social History of Marriage, ed. R. B. Outhwaite (London: St. Martin's Press, 1981);
25. Keith Wrightson, English Society 15801680 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982);
26. Ralph Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450-1700 (Harlow: Longman, 1984);
27. Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
28. English Family Life, 1576-1716. An Anthology from Diaries, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988);
29. David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death. Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
30. Merchant refers to the "English edition of The Advancement of Learning" (2006, 519, 529n.), when it is an original work written in English; she describes the Advancement, which runs to 230 pages in Spedding's edition, as an "essay" (ibid.); she compares the changes Bacon made for the Latin expansion (1623) on the basis of its English translation by Spedding and others (p. 526); and in order to justify her denial of Peter Pesic's demonstration that Bacon carefully used the much milder term "vexatio," not tortura, she quotes "a recent French translation of the Novum Organum that renders the English phrase 'the vexations of art' in French as 'la torture des arts [mécaniques]'" (pp. 529). But the French translator (hopefully) worked from the original Latin text.
31. Quotations are from The Works of Francis Bacon, 14 vols., ed. James Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath (London, Longman and Green, 1857-84), with volume and page number; here, 4: 47 (for the Latin text see 1: 157).
32. In "Feminist Criticism of Metaphors in Bacon's Philosophy of Science," Philosophy 73 (1998): 47-61, Iddo Landau developed this argument, that even if Bacon's metaphors had expressed misogynistic attitudes to nature, this would not invalidate his program for renewing natural philosophy.
33. Quotations are from The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
34. John Hoskyns, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1935), 8.
35. I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936; 1965).
36. Of The Advancement and Proficience of Learning or the Partitions of Sciences, IX Bookes (Oxford, 1640), 81.
37. Katharine Park, "Bacon's 'Enchanted Glass,'" Isis 75 (1984): 290-302, at 297. This essay formed part of a useful symposium, "Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes on Imagination and Analogy."
38. The Latin text reads: "Atque de Literata Experientia haec dicta sunt, quae (ut jamante diximus) sagacitas potius est et odoratio quaedam venatice, quam Scientia" (I, 633).
39. For Bacon's use of hunting metaphors for the pursuit of knowledge see, e.g., De Sapientia Veterum, Fable 6: "Pan, or Nature," 6: 707-14 (6: 635-41), reworked in De Augmentis Scientiarum, Book 2, ch. 13, "Of the Universe, according to the Fable of Pan," 4: 318-27 (1: 521-30).
40. v.
41. See, e.g., Stuart Clark, "King James's Daemonologie: Witchcraft and Kingship," in The Damned Art. Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sydney Anglo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 156-81.
42. "The discoveries which have hitherto been made in the sciences are such as lie close to vulgar notions, scarcely beneath the surface. In order to penetrate into the inner and further recesses of nature, it is necessary that both notions and axioms be derived from things by a more sure and guarded way; and that a method of intellectual operation be introduced altogether better and more certain"; Spedding 4: 49-50 (1:159); cit. Kroetge, "Methodology, Ideology, and Feminist Critiques of Science," 353.
43. Op. cit. in note 4, 88-90.
44. See http://leme.library.utoronto.ca
45. Quotations are from The Odyssey of Homer, trans. and intro. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
46. See the excellent annotated edition by Richard Thomas, Virgil: Georgias, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), i.31-4, ii.201-2, 216-25. Quotations are from the Loeb translation by H. R. Fairclough,
47. rev. G. P. Goold, Virgil, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), ii.247.
48. My translation of "produnt," which Spedding reanders as "betray." Lewis and Short translate the verb prodo as "To give, put or bring forth," also "to publish, make known, report, record," Spedding seems to have chosen the subsidiary sense, "to betray perfidiously," which hardly seems appropriate.
49. See, e.g., Graham Rees, "Matter Theory: A Unifying Factor in Bacon's Natural Philosophy," Ambix 24 (1977): 110-25.
50. For the Latin text see Spedding, 6: 651-52; for an English version, 6: 725-26.
51. See, e.g., Silvia Alejandra Manzo, "Holy writ, mythology, and the foundations of Francis Bacon"s principle of the constancy of matter," Early Science and Medicine 4 (1999): 114-26.
52. Cf. Death of Nature, 171.
53. Merchant 2006, 529, citing Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 35.
54. See, e.g., Amos L. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986),
55. and Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
56. See the valuable study by Jeremy Cohen, "Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It": The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).
57. Cohen, ibid., p. 2,
58. citing White's essay in Science 155 (1977): 1203-7.
59. See Spedding, 7:215-26.
60. See Spedding, 7: 521-39. The translation quoted is by Benjamin Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon. An Essay on its Development from 1603 to 1609 with New Translations of Fundamental Texts (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964), 59-72.
61. Spedding, 3: 557-85; Farrington's translation, 103-33.
62. See Walter R. Davis, "The Imagery of Bacon"s Late Work," Modern Language Quarterly 27 (1966): 162-73. It is ironic that, in describing her intellectual development, Carolyn Merchant fails to see that her position, even with its avoidance of the concepts of "marriage" or "wife," is actually very close to Bacon's: "This led me to articulate an ethic of partnership with nature in which nature was no longer symbolized as mother, virgin, or witch but instead as an active partner with humanity" (2006, 515).