This chapter explains the nature of Baconian natural history and the philosophy of experiment that came to be associated with it in the late seventeenth century. It also documents the practice of this form of natural history in the early Royal Society and beyond. Baconian or experimental natural history is first set in contrast to classificatory natural history which focused on natural kinds. It was an architectonic program of experiment and fact gathering and fact ordering with a view to discovering the principles of the particular science at hand. Its subject matter ranged from celestial objects to the sea bed, from bodies, states of bodies, and qualities to natural processes. We then discuss the philosophy of experiment associated with this form of natural history as found in the writings of Boyle and Hooke who took inspiration from Bacon. We argue that it is best understood in terms of a typology of experiments, including luciferous and fructiferous experiments and crucial experiments, which were theorised and tried by the first generations of experimental philosophers. Many of the virtuosi in the early Royal Society and those within its ambit practised experimental natural history, and we illustrate this in the work and writings of Christopher Merrett, Thomas Henshaw, William Petty, and Robert Plot. We then discuss the eclipse of Baconian natural history in the wake of the emergence of a new mathematical approach to experimental philosophy that derived from the work of Isaac Newton.

This chapter begins with a survey of the young Newton’s early exposure to experimental philosophy and then turns to the emergence of experimental pedagogy in the last years of the seventeenth century and its rapid expansion in the early decades of the century that followed. The proliferation of courses in experimental philosophy, both public and university-based, in Oxford, Cambridge, London, and St Andrews, is testimony to its success and legitimacy. So much so, we argue, that when his commitment to universal gravity came under attack by Continental detractors, Newton openly and very strategically aligned himself with experimental philosophy, in part because of the credibility that this approach to natural philosophy already possessed. This is not to claim that every Newtonian was partial to experimental philosophy, and in this chapter we examine the views of one opponent, the Oxford natural philosopher John Keill. We document the process by which Newton publicly declared himself to be an experimental philosopher in the second edition of the Principia of 1713, and then go on to examine his role in the eclipse of Baconian natural history.

This chapter traces the emergence of experimental philosophy in England from the late 1650s in the precursor groups to the Royal Society and, in particular, in the natural philosophical method of Robert Boyle. It provides a detailed examination of the development of Boyle’s experimental philosophy and an overview of the adoption of experimental philosophy by many virtuosi in the fledgling Royal Society. From there it turns to early opposition to experimental philosophy by the likes of Meric Causabon and Margaret Cavendish, and the application of the methodology in English medicine, particularly amongst the chymical physicians. The next sections of the chapter examine the spread of experimental philosophy to the Continent and its impact on religion. The new approach to natural philosophy was said to have a positive effect on those who practise it, and its principles were soon applied in both natural religion and Christian apologetics. Finally, we turn to the questions of the shifting speculative targets of the experimental philosophers, pointing out that Descartes’ vortex theory came in for particularly harsh criticism, and the conceptual question as to who qualifies as an experimental philosopher.

According to a widespread narrative of early modern philosophy, the early modern period was characterised by the development of Descartes’, Spinoza’s, and Leibniz’s rationalism and Locke’s, Berkeley’s, and Hume’s empiricism. The early modern period came to a close once Immanuel Kant, who was neither an empiricist nor a rationalist, combined the insights of both movements in his new Critical philosophy and inaugurated the new eras of German idealism and late modern philosophy. Several scholars have criticised this narrative for overestimating the importance of epistemological issues for early modern philosophers, portraying Kant’s Critical philosophy as a superior alternative to empiricism and rationalism and forcing most early modern thinkers prior to Kant into the empiricist or rationalist camps. Kant’s three Critiques are the first published works that explicitly contrast the terms ‘empiricism’ and ‘rationalism’. This chapter sets out Kant’s contributions to the genesis of the historiographical narrative based on the dichotomy of empiricism/rationalism and argues that Kant is not directly responsible for the biases of that narrative. Kant did not regard the empiricism/rationalism distinction as purely epistemological, did not portray most of his early modern predecessors as empiricists or rationalists, and did not place himself over and above empiricism and rationalism.

This chapter documents the widespread influence of experimental philosophy in eighteenth-century Germany. We first argue that Christian Wolff, the most influential German philosopher of the period, engaged at length with the methodological views of experimental philosophers and relied extensively on experience as the foundation of his own philosophy. However, his focus on developing a comprehensively deductive philosophical system ultimately overshadowed his commitment to basing philosophy on experiments and observations. We then show how the pair of experimental and speculative philosophy became enshrined in the structure of the Berlin Academy as a result of the rebranding of its disciplinary classes in 1746. Turning to the second half of the eighteenth century, we focus on the uptake of the methodological views of experimental philosophers in the literature on empirical psychology that flourished in the period; the reflections on the relation of experimental and speculative philosophy of Johann Nikolaus Tetens, a proponent of empirical psychology who influenced Immanuel Kant; and the contrasts between experimental and speculative methods in a range of works published toward the end of the century. As Kantian and post-Kantian philosophies rose in popularity, a priori reflection gained increasing acceptance and experimental philosophy went out of fashion.

This chapter discusses the historical origins and emergence of the distinction between experimental philosophy and speculative philosophy. It opens with a summary of certain disciplinary-specific shifts in the late Renaissance that led to an increased appreciation of the value of experiment and observation. It then turns to the crucial traditional distinction between speculative and practical knowledge, which can be traced all the way back to Aristotle and was central to medieval and Renaissance understandings of the disciplines. Traditionally, natural philosophy had been classed as a speculative science, but interesting new approaches can be found in Roger Bacon, in the practice of natural magic, and in mechanics. These developments paved the way for the emergence of Francis Bacon’s division of natural philosophy as having a speculative and a practical, or operative, side. Francis Bacon’s heirs were to embrace his emphasis on the role of experiment in the operative side of natural philosophy, and by the 1660s in England a new form of operative natural philosophy emerged that its practitioners and advocates called experimental philosophy. In many contexts, it was set against the older, speculative approach to natural philosophy.