Using instruments in the study of animate beings:Della Porta’s and Bacon’s experiments with plants

In this paper, I explain Francis Bacon's use of plants as philosophical instruments in the context of his Historia vitae et mortis. My main claim is that Bacon experimented with plants in order to obtain knowledge about the hidden processes of nature, knowledge that could be transferred to the human case and used for the prolongation of life. Bacon's experiments were based on Giambattista della Porta's reports from the Magia naturalis, but I show how a different metaphysics and research method made Bacon systematically rework, reconceptualise, and put to divergent uses the results of the same experimental reports

Reading Scepticism Historically. Scepticism, Acatalepsia and the Fall of Adam in Francis Bacon

The first part of this paper will provide a reconstruction of Francis Bacon’s interpretation of Academic scepticism, Pyrrhonism, and Dogmatism, and its sources throughout his large corpus. It shall also analyze Bacon’s approach against the background of his intellectual milieu, looking particularly at Renaissance readings of scepticism as developed by Guillaume Salluste du Bartas, Pierre de la Primaudaye, Fulke Greville, and John Davies. It shall show that although Bacon made more references to Academic than to Pyrrhonian Scepticism, like most of his contemporaries, he often misrepresented and mixed the doctrinal components of both currents. The second part of the paper shall offer a complete chronological survey of Bacon’s assessment of scepticism throughout his writings. Following the lead of previous studies by other scholars, I shall support the view that, while he approved of the state of doubt and the suspension of judgment as a provisional necessary stage in the pursuit of knowledge, he rejected the notion of acatalepsia. To this received reading, I shall add the suggestion that Bacon’s criticism of acatalepsia ultimately depends on his view of the historical conditions that surround human nature. I deal with this last point in the third part of the paper, where I shall argue that Bacon’s evaluation of scepticism relied on his adoption of a Protestant and Augustinian view of human nature that informed his overall interpretation of the history of humanity and nature, including the sceptical schools

Integrating laboratory creep compaction data with numerical fault models: A Bayesian framework

We developed a robust Bayesian inversion scheme to plan and analyze laboratory creep compaction experiments. We chose a simple creep law that features the main parameters of interest when trying to identify rate-controlling mechanisms from experimental data. By integrating the chosen creep law or an approximation thereof, one can use all the data, either simultaneously or in overlapping subsets, thus making more complete use of the experiment data and propagating statistical variations in the data through to the final rate constants. Despite the nonlinearity of the problem, with this technique one can retrieve accurate estimates of both the stress exponent and the activation energy, even when the porosity time series data are noisy. Whereas adding observation points and/or experiments reduces the uncertainty on all parameters, enlarging the range of temperature or effective stress significantly reduces the covariance between stress exponent and activation energy. We apply this methodology to hydrothermal creep compaction data on quartz to obtain a quantitative, semiempirical law for fault zone compaction in the interseismic period. Incorporating this law into a simple direct rupture model, we find marginal distributions of the time to failure that are robust with respect to errors in the initial fault zone porosity

A Bayesian Framework to Rank and Combine Candidate Recurrence Models for Specific Faults

International audienceWe propose a probabilistic framework in which different types of information pertaining to the recurrence of large earthquakes on a fault can be combined in order to constrain the parameter space of candidate recurrence models and provide the best combination of models knowing the chosen data set and priors. We use Bayesian inference for parameter and error estimation, graphical models (Bayesian networks) for modeling, and stochastic modeling to link cumulative offsets (CO) to coseismic slip. The cumulative offset‐based Bayesian approach (COBBRA) method (Fitzenz et al., 2010) was initially developed to use CO data to further constrain and discriminate between recurrence models built from historical and archaeological catalogs of large earthquakes (CLE). We discuss this method and present an extension of it that incorporates trench data (TD). For our case study, the Jordan Valley fault (JVF), the relative evidence of each model slightly favors the Brownian passage time (BPT) and lognormal models. We emphasize that (1) the time variability of fault slip rate is critical to constrain recurrence models; (2) the shape of the probability density functions (PDF) of paleoseismic events is very important, in most cases not Gaussian, and should be reported in its complexity; (3) renewal models are in terms of intervals between consecutive earthquakes, not dates, and the algorithms should account for that fact; and (4) maximum‐likelihood methods are inadequate for parameter uncertainty evaluation and model combination or ranking. Finally, more work is needed to define proper priors and to model the relationship between cumulative slip and coseismic slip, in particular, when the fault behavior is more complex

Francis Bacon on Motion and Power

This book offers a comprehensive and unitary study of the philosophy of Francis Bacon, with special emphasis on the medical, ethical and political aspects of his thought. It presents an original interpretation focused on the material conditions of nature and human life. In particular, coverage in the book is organized around the unifying theme of Bacon\u2019s notion of appetite, which is considered in its natural, ethical, medical and political meanings. The book redefines the notions of experience and experiment in Bacon\u2019s philosophy of nature, shows the important presence of Stoic themes in his work as well as provides an original discussion of the relationships between natural magic, prudence and political realism in his philosophy. Bringing together scholarly expertise from the history of philosophy, the history of science and the history of literature, this book presents readers with a rich and diverse contextualization of Bacon\u2019s philosophy