Tassie Gniady Phase I-- Data Set Description
I would like to build a network map centered on Francis Bacon's ideas/axioms on abnormality and monstrosity as expressed in his Novum Organum. In Bacon's time, abnormality and monstrosity were traditionally regarded as disruptions of nature and as omens of evil (see Marvelous Protestantism by Julie Crawford). However, Bacon saw them as a kind of 'test' against 'normality'. Bacon was attempting no less than what he called the “Great Instauration” in which all of natural philosophy would be affected by a new application of reason to learning. From Lisa Jardine's introduction to the English edition:
The New Organon belongs to an early seventeenth-century English intellectual milieu which included William Gilbert’s work on magnetism and Harvey’s on the circulation of the blood, which took into account technological innovation on the Continent, and which looked forward to Robert Boyle’s and Robert Hooke’s experiments with air-pumps in the 1650s. It is an extraordinary attempt to give formal shape to a rapidly emerging (but hitherto largely problem-driven and ad hoc) new experimentally based science. (Introduction xii)
My network map will draw connections between Bacon's ideas on monstrosity and those of his contemporaries (including specifically Harvey, Boyle, Gilbert, and Hooke). It may also include philosophers following more Classical ideals from Aristotle and Plato to Galen and Paracelsus.