Francis Bacon's reputation as pioneer of the scientific method and prophet of a culture of technological inquiry was firmly established well before the end of the seventeenth century. In the twentieth century, classic works by Benjamin Farrington and Paolo Rossi strengthened this celebratory depiction of the philosopher–Lord Chancellor. They argued that his vision stimulated the replacement of a humanistic, rhetorical model of learning with one committed to investigation of mechanical and technical arts. Bacon's devotion to inductive reason and the manual arts, they argued, prompted scholars to see the creation of knowledge as a progressive enterprise, one in which insights into the natural world could be extracted, compiled, and furthered by accretion. The contributors to Philosophies of Technology: Francis Bacon and his Contemporaries revisit this interpretation, examining how learned interactions with technologies both transformed and were transformed by the work of Bacon and other early modern scholars.
The collection is broken into four parts. The first, “Beginnings,” addresses the context in which Bacon developed his ideas. The contributors note that Bacon's well-known attention to artisanal practices was widespread throughout early modern Europe, and that his understanding of craft knowledge derived from reading scholarly works or attending lectures rather than from observing artisans at work. Most notable among these essays is Arianna Borelli's exploration of the various ways in which early modern observers explained the marvel of the weatherglass. As she shows, the fundamental technology of what would become the thermometer was long known to early modern scholars, but they had appraised its fluctuations as heralding an imminent change in weather rather than as an index of temperature. As she shows, philosophical schools interpreted this technology in wildly divergent ways in accordance with their beliefs about nature.
The essays of part 2, “Bacon: Mechanics, Instruments, and Utopias,” reveal how Bacon drew on mechanical knowledge to characterize his inductive philosophy as a means of discovery. Sophie Weeks effectively considers the role of mechanics in Bacon's thought. She shows that he valued artisanal devices as essential experiments in the complex sequence of philosophically analyzing natural forms, rather than as emblems of a program elevating craft expertise above theoretical knowledge. Dana Jolobeanu suggests in her article that Bacon owed a greater debt to Seneca's ideals of intellectual communities than has been recognized.
Part 3, “Metaphoric Models,” examines the ways in which Descartes and William Harvey deployed analogical reasoning. Andrés Vaccari illustrates Descartes's reliance on machine metaphors to characterize the acts of creating, displaying and perceiving knowledge, while Claus Zittel reconsiders the balance in Descartes's work between reason and experiment to attribute a more central place to the latter. The final section, “Bacon's Legacy: The Impact for the Arts and Sciences,” investigates the relationship between philosophy and technology in the activities of philosophers, hydraulic engineers, and natural historians through the eighteenth century. Thomas Brandstetter, for example, shows that amateur mechanics submitted a wide array of innovative schemes for the abortive 1784 competition to renovate the water-works at Marly conducted by the Parisian Academy of Sciences. Their schemes, he shows, eschewed a mechanistic conception of nature in favor of a sensibilist approach and often included explicit disavowals of theoretical knowledge.
As with most collections of this sort, the quality and focus of the articles varies widely, and some fit uneasily with their groupings. Considered as a whole, the collection's greatest strengths are its attention to oft-overlooked fields such as hydraulics, pneumatics, and meteorology, and the demonstrations by Borelli, Weeks, Vaccari, and Zittel of how artisanal and mechanical investigations were perceived as experimental, exploratory means of discovery.
Many readers, however, will be exasperated by the uncritical reliance of many authors on works by Rossi, Farrington, Boas, and Hall, and a consistent neglect of relevant recent work by Shapin and Schaffer, Biagioli, and Newman, to name only a few. They will also be frustrated by poor proofing, curious structures of argumentation, and occasional inexcusable howlers, such as the claim that Bacon is associated with mathematical rather than experimental approaches to knowledge.
