ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the development of early modern ‘experimental philosophy’. The last decade has seen further progress in moving away from anachronistic categories (especially ‘empiricism’ and ‘rationalism’) for understanding the phenomenon. A great deal of this progress is due to research on the experimental-speculative distinction in late seventeenth-century England. This research has posited a distinctively English ‘experimental philosophy’; moreover, it has tied in with a wave of revisionist scholarship on Francis Bacon. It is argued here that, for all the undoubted benefits of such a historiographical move, some caution should be exercised. Experimental philosophy was the gradual outcome of institutional and intellectual reconfigurations from the late fifteenth century onwards in natural philosophy, mathematics and especially medicine (the role of which continues to be systematically underplayed). In all these fields, there had been a growing emphasis on the value of knowledge derived from the senses over that derived from reason. These developments demonstrably fed into the actual practice of seventeenth-century experimental natural philosophy. Moreover, contrary to a still prevalent historiographical assumption, that experimental philosophy was not limited to England; in France, Italy and beyond, experiment was no less valorised, and apriorist speculation no less condemned.
