Some remarks on Francis Bacon and Girolamo Cardano

MANZO SILVIA

Munich

Seminario; International Conferenece. Early Modern Philosophers and the Renaissance Legacy.; 2013

Ludwig-Maximilian Universität München

This paper aims to contribute to the study of the reception of Girolamo Cardano´s work by Francis Bacon.  I will not focus on a thorough analysis of the debts of Bacon´s natural histories to Cardano. What I intend here is to draw the attention on another aspect, so far neglected, of the reception of Cardano in Bacon´s work.  I mean the reception of his doctrines on matter, the transmutation of bodies and motion. In doing so, I want to show that Bacon not only used the experimental instances available in Cardano´s work in order to develop his own natural histories, as it has been noticed so far, but also he was interested in the theoretical views held in Cardano´s natural philosophy. Bacon agreed with Cardano on many of these issues and disagreed on many others.