Silvia Manzo

Universidad Nacional de La Plata | UNLP · Departamento de Filosofía

La filosofía moderna condensa una serie de perspectivas sobre el ser humano, sobre el mundo natural, social y político, y sobre la historia y la religión que fueron determinantes de muchos desarrollos teóricos tanto en el campo de las humanidades como de las ciencias sociales, naturales y exactas que llegan hasta nuestros días. Es por ello que los...

Este libro, por un lado, propone nuevas perspectivas y materiales de estudio sobre algunos de los temas, autores y textos clásicos de la filosofía moderna; por otro lado, invita a descubrir rarezas, temas, autores y textos poco conocidos o ignorados, que lleven a renovar el canon de la filosofía moderna. Realiza una revisión crítica de las categorí...

Este libro, por un lado, propone nuevas perspectivas y materiales de estudio sobre algunos de los temas, autores y textos clásicos de la filosofía moderna; por otro lado, invita a descubrir rarezas, temas, autores y textos poco conocidos o ignorados, que lleven a renovar el canon de la filosofía moderna. Realiza una revisión crítica de las categorí...

Francis Bacon and René Descartes have traditionally been presented as leaders of opposed philosophical currents. However, more and more studies show important continuities between their philosophies. This article explores one of them: their perspectives on medicine. The dominion over nature and the instinct for self-preservation are the central ele...

This paper explores how a set of observations on the weight of lead were interpreted and assessed between the 1540s and the 1630s across three different interconnecting disciplines: medicine, mineralogy and chemistry. The epistemic import of these discussions will be demonstrated by showing: 1) the changing role and articulation of experience and q...

This chapter presents the program of the true philosophy proposed by Francis Bacon in the last part of his Great Restoration, namely, the way to develop natural and experimental history following certain structure of scientific knowledge. This proposal does not consider isolated individuals, but groups of scholars or societies of knowledge with gov...

Broadly speaking, “empiricism” is a label that usually denotes an epistemological view that emphasizes the role that experience plays in forming concepts and acquiring and justifying knowledge. In contemporary philosophy, there are some authors who call themselves as empiricists, although there are differences in the way they define what experience...

Monsters as a category seem omnipresent in early modern natural philosophy, in what one might call a “long” early modern period stretching from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century, when the science of teratology emerges. We no longer use this term to refer to developmental anomalies (whether a two-headed calf, an individual suffering fro...

This paper will address the nineteenth-century reception of Bacon as an exponent of materialism in Joseph de Maistre and Karl Marx. I will argue that Bacon’s philosophy is “quasi-materialist.” The materialist components of his philosophy were noticed by de Maistre and Marx, who, in addition, point­ed out a Baconian materialist heritage. Their const...

This paper examines the views of Joseph-Márie Degérando and Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann about empiricism, and the scope and limits of experience as well as its relation to reason and its role in the attainment of true knowledge. While Degérando adopted the “philosophy of experience” and Tennemann advocated Kant’s critical philosophy, both authors bl...

In the period of emergence of early modern science, ‘monsters’ or individuals with physical congenital anomalies were considered as rare events which required special explanations entailing assumptions about the laws of nature. This concern with monsters was shared by representatives of the new science and Late Scholastic authors of university text...

The first part of this paper will provide a reconstruction of Francis Bacon’s interpretation of Academic scepticism, Pyrrhonism, and Dogmatism, and its sources throughout his large corpus. It shall also analyze Bacon’s approach against the background of his intellectual milieu, looking particularly at Renaissance readings of scepticism as developed...

There was a particular way of understanding and explaining changes in matter’s quantity whose first exposition can be traced back to the Renaissance in Girolamo Cardano’s classification of the natural motions of the universe, particularly in the motions of impulsus (impenetrability) and attractio (abhorrence of a vacuum). Cardano’s exposition was r...

This chapter focuses on the appetite for self-preservation and its central role in Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy. In the first part, I introduce Bacon’s classification of universal appetites, showing the correspondences between natural and moral philosophy. I then examine the role that appetites play in his theory of motions and, additionally,...

This article aims at studying key components of Francis Bacon’s theory of history and of his work as practitioner of civil history, particularly in regard to truth and certainty in historical narratives. It compares Bacon’s theories of history and poetry, and the way in which he conceives their relation to certainty, truth and fiction. It analyzes...

La idea de que la tarea de la ciencia consiste en dar cuenta de las leyes de la naturaleza comenzó a establecerse durante el siglo XVII mientras se estaba delineando la nueva imagen de la ciencia y de la naturaleza. Si bien distintos estudios historiográficos coinciden en situar el origen del concepto moderno de ley de la naturaleza en este siglo,...

This article aims at studying key components of Francis Bacon's theory of history and of his work as practitioner of civil history, particularly in regard to truth and certainty in historical narratives. It compares Bacon's theories of history and poetry, and the way in which he conceives their relation to certainty, truth and fiction. It analyzes...

This study shows that an important number of late medieval, Renaissance and early modern authors postulated the same teleological principle in order to argue both for and against the existence of the vacuum. That postulate, which I call the “principle of subordination,” holds that in order to preserve the good of nature, the particular and specific...

The aim of this paper is to offer a comparative survey of Bacon's theory and practice of natural history and of civil history, particularly centered on their relationship to natural philosophy and human philosophy. I will try to show that the obvious differences concerning their subject matter encompass a number of less obvious methodological and p...

There is no unanimity among recent historians about Francis Bacon's theory of matter. Disagreement exists in particular about Bacon's atomist and animistic ideas. My claim is that although Bacon changed his views on atomism repeatedly, he never rejected it completely. I shall reconstruct Bacon's various opinions in chronological order to establish...

As a prominent intellectual figure in the complex political arena of England, during the transition from Tudor to Stuart dinasties, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) assumes the medieval King's two bodies theory in his political and juridical writings. His use of this theory is extremely linked to central concepts of his natural philosphy, which testifies...

FRANCIS BACON, The Instauratio Magna Part II: Novum Organum and Associated Texts. Edited with introduction, notes, commentaries and facing-page translations by Graham Rees with Maria Wakely. The Oxford Francis Bacon, XI. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Pp. cxxviii+634. ISBN 0-19-924792-7. £120.00 (hardback). - - Volume 39 Issue 2 - SILVIA MANZO

Berkeley's thought was developed as a refusal of materialism and skepticism that in his opinion menaced philosophy. However, his intellectual interests were not confined to this aim. Scientific topics were also included in Berkeley's agenda. In the works concerned with scientific issues, the omnipresence of his metaphysics is to be found. In Siris,...

La crítica que Francis Bacon dirigió a la concepción aristotélica del movimiento no tuvo como punto de partida las obras originales de Aristóteles sino la vasta literatura de texto que durante los siglos XVI y XVII ofrecía una interpretación novedosa y ecléctica del pensamiento aristotélico. En este trabajo analizo la crítica de Bacon concentrándom...

Francis Bacon's position on the existence of void and its nature has been mostly studied with regard to his views on the atom. This approach is undoubtedly right, but it disregards further topics related to Bacon's account of void, namely the world system and the transmutation of bodies. Consequently, a more comprehensive study of Bacon's view on v...

MIGUEL ANGEL GRANADA, El debate cosmológico en 1588. Bruno, Brahe, Rothmann, Ursus, Röslin. Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, Lezioni della Scuola di Studi Superiori in Napoli, Bibliopolis, Napoli, 1996. Pp. 166. - - Volume 33 Issue 3 - Silvia A. Manzo

FRANCIS BACON, Philosophical Studies,c.1611–c.1619, edited by Graham Rees. The Oxford Francis Bacon, VI. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. cxvi+503. ISBN 0-19-812290-X. £80.00. - - Volume 33 Issue 2 - Silvia Manzo

The exact nature of the relation between science and Scripture in the thought of Francis Bacon is a well-studied but controversial field. In this paper, it is shown that Bacon, though convinced that there exists no enmity between the book of God's wisdom (Holy Writ) and the book of God's power (nature), usually tries to separate knowledge acquired...

Timaeus's explanation of changes in nature uses simultaneously mechanical, animistic and teleological conceptions of motion. The geometrical model applied to the four elements determines mechanical motions in the cycle of transmutations. Attractive causality is postulated for explaining the union of the elements with the greater mass of their conna...