Quantitas materiae and void in Francis Bacon's Matter Theory

MANZO, SILVIA

Regensburg, Alemania

Workshop; Workshop Early Modern Matter Theories and their Foundations: Historiographical and Methodological Issues; 1998

Universität Regensburg, Institut für Philosophie, Lehrstuhl für Wissenschaftsgeschichte.

As it is known, Francis Bacon’s view on the existence of a void in nature was a changing one. Only in one of his earlier works, the Cogitationes de Natura Rerum (1603), we find a categorical acceptance of the existence of interspersed vacuum (vacuum commistum). The reasons why Bacon had later doubted about and finally discarded this first claim are far to be clear. In this paper I try to show that Bacon’s vacillating account of vacuum depends, at least in part, upon the evolution of his doctrine of matter, notably as far as matter is defined in quantitative terms. In fact, Bacon developed a quantitative approach of nature which intends matter as an active quantitatively determined entity. This definition has both theoretical and empirical foundations which were ever coexistent and interrelated. On the one hand, Bacon’s speculative cosmology played an important role in the definition of the quantitative properties of matter. On the other hand, the experimental developments tending to know and to manipulate the subtle matter, allowed alternative explanations of the motions of expansion and contraction which were compatible with a quantitative approach. In the following I will reconstruct the general successive stages of the quantitative conception of matter in order to make clear its relation with Bacon’s idea of void.