Dana Jalobeanu
Dana Jalobeanu is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, member of the research centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science CELFIS (www.celfis.ro), co- founder and director of programs at the Research Center Foundations of Early Modern Thought (FEM), University of Bucharest (www.modernthought.unibuc.ro). Since 2014 she is Director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Bucharest.Research area: history and philosophy of science, early modern thoughtResearch interests: early modern philosophy and science (natural philosophy) from Bacon to Newton.Other interests: historical epistemology, history of mathematics, philosophy of physics, new modes of scientific knowledge, science policy.Co-editor of the Journal of Early Modern Studies, Executive editor of Society and Politics, co-director of the Bucharest-Princeton Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy.Selected recent publications:BooksDana Jalobeanu, The Art of Experimental Natural History. Francis Bacon in context, Zeta Books, Bucharest, 2015.Dana Jalobeanu, Peter Anstey eds. Vanishing matter and the laws of nature: Descartes and beyond, Routledge: London, 2011
Address: University of Bucharest
Department of Philosophy
Splaiul Independentei 204
Bucuresti
Address: University of Bucharest
Department of Philosophy
Splaiul Independentei 204
Bucuresti
less
InterestsView All (32)
Uploads
Call for papers by Dana Jalobeanu
Books by Dana Jalobeanu
Edited volumes by Dana Jalobeanu
Recent published papers by Dana Jalobeanu
natural and experimental histories. My aim is to show that these natural histories are mainly
composed of experimental series, ie methodologically organized recordings of experimental
inquiries. Bacon's experimental series have a double purpose: heuristic and pedagogical.
They direct and encode the “good” experimental practices, while also teaching the neophyte
how to become a Baconian experimenter.
Papers by Dana Jalobeanu
natural and experimental histories. My aim is to show that these natural histories are mainly
composed of experimental series, ie methodologically organized recordings of experimental
inquiries. Bacon's experimental series have a double purpose: heuristic and pedagogical.
They direct and encode the “good” experimental practices, while also teaching the neophyte
how to become a Baconian experimenter.
Meanwhile, as has repeatedly been shown, Francis Bacon was not ignorant when it came to the novelties and discoveries of the New Astronomy. Quite the contrary: he tried to integrate all the new astronomical discoveries into a properly constructed and properly organised natural history of the heavens. This
paper proposes a clarification of the seemingly paradoxical situation described above. In the first part of the paper I discuss the major criticisms formulated by Bacon with respect to astronomy in general and Copernican astronomy in particular. I show that they are motivated by more general concerns regarding the relation between disciplines and by a challenging and quite novel view regarding the role of mathematics in physics. In the second part of the paper
I discuss Bacon’s proposal for a new natural history of the heavens suitable to ground a ‘proper’ theory of the heavens.
natural histories published under the title Historia naturalis et experimentalis or left in manuscript, together with other fragmentary re-writings of earlier works. I will claim that in the last five years of his life Francis Bacon was actively engaged into a process of re-writing and re-organizing his earlier ideas regarding natural history, natural philosophy and the relation between the two. I attempt to show that in this process, Bacon elaborated a research program for doing natural history and that most of his posthumous works, New Atlantis included, have a place in this research program. My reading provides, I propose, an interesting and fruitful interpretative framework not only for New Atlantis but for a handful of very diverse seventeenth–century writings belonging to authors who claimed to be Baconians and to provide ‘continuations’ and ‘interpretations’ of New
Atlantis.
In the first part of the paper I will try to clarify the meaning of Bacon’s experimental study of nature within his larger and ambitious program of reforming the powers of human intellect. The second part of my paper is devoted to a reconstruction of Bacon’s theory of idols from the perspective of such a moral/practical use of the experimental study of nature. In the last part of my paper I will draw attention to some historical sources of such a construction, showing that, in framing this therapeutic side of natural philosophy, Bacon drew upon a body of Renaissance literature: the “anatomies of the mind”.
The project aims, on the one hand, to disentangle the discussion on the nature and function of early modern experimentation from its age-long association with questions of testimony, credibility and evidence. Without questioning the role of experimentation in the assessment of scientific theories, we intend to show on particular cases that experiments have played an equally essential role in the context of (scientific) discovery: as problem-solving devices, tools for triggering creative analogies or devices for generating or ordering works of natural history.
On the other hand, our purpose is to reconstruct a series of particular case studies and discuss them comparatively in order to show how rich and how relatively unexplored is the field of what has been labeled as ‘natural history.’ We also aim to extend the field and the label ‘natural history’ into relatively unexplored writings that defy disciplinary boundaries. Works classified as cosmographies, geographies, travel literature, medical literature, spiritual medicine etc. will be the subject of our investigation, in so far that they can be shown to contain interesting and sophisticated observations and ingenious experiments. Last but not least we aim to trace the ways in which some of these observations and experiments ‘migrated’ from works of natural history into treatises of natural (and experimental) philosophy or ‘early modern science.’