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

Contro alla peste : Il consiglio di messer Marsilio Ficino, Il co[n]siglio di maestro Tommaso del Garbo, Vna ricetta duna poluere co[m]posta da maestro Mingo da Faenza, Vna ricetta fatta nello studio di Bolognia et molte altri remedij.

Pie de imp. tomado del colofón.Marca tip. en H4v (Zapella, 648).Sign.: A-G8, H4.Hojas imp. por ambas caras.Huecos para iniciales con letras de aviso

‘Italian Renaissance Love Theory and the General Scholar in the Seventeenth Century’.

In his Traité de l’esprit de l’homme , Louis de La Forge argues that everything that can be observed in a living body can be explained without resorting to any form of knowledge. La Forge’s target, never explicitly mentioned, is Marin Cureau de La Chambre, who in his work as a whole had developed the thesis that animals act through the presence of a form of knowledge that is different from that of the intellect and that can be attributed to the body. In claiming the necessity of a form of knowledge in organic events, Cureau was answering to a problem raised by Campanella in his De sensu rerum . La Forge’s contention that no knowledge is required to explain nature is addressed against the permanence of Renaissance vitalism in the name of the original inspiration of Cartesian new science.Cureau de La Chambr