CORE EXPERIMENTS, NATURAL HISTORIES AND THE ART OF EXPERIENTIA LITERATA: THE MEANING OF BACONIAN EXPERIMENTATION

Experiment, as a new form of knowledge, was aBaconian creation. It was in Bacon’s project of Great Instauration and inBacon’s reformed natural history that experiment and experimentationceased to be illustrations of theories and become relatively autonomousdevices for the production of knowledge and for setting the mind straightin its attempts to gain knowledge. This paper explores the way in whichBacon’s Latin natural history transformed experiment and experimentationin such devices. More precisely, I investigate the way in which Bacon’sLatin natural histories were put together from a limited number ofsignificant experiments listed in the Novum Organum under the general title“instances of special power” or “instances of the lamp.” Contrary to thereceived view, my claim is that Bacon’s natural histories are based on alimited number of ‘core experiments’ and are generated through a specificmethodological procedure known under the name of experientia literata. Thispaper is an attempt to reconstruct the procedure of putting such naturalhistories together and a more in-depth exploration of their epistemologicaland therapeutic character.