Bacon isn't the scientific revolution. He was a lawyer and a politician who wrote some essays and books _about_ how to do natural philosophy. As far as I know his main attempt to contribute positively to natural philosophy was to attempt to stuff a dead chicken with snow, testing the hypothesis that cold slows decay, which attempt shortly thereafter lead to his own demise. Bacon's philosophy of science is also not as primitively inductivist as it's sometimes painted.
But with respect to Donne, you have to recall that the scientific revolution was not very far advanced when he wrote the poems people write about. Copernicus had published, Donne certainly knew his conclusions and that some people were taking them seriously, but he certainly didn't have the math or the technical ability to read De Revolutionibus. (Like who does? In his day, maybe three people. In ours, maybe 50. Maybe.) Kepler had published, but his stuff was extremely obscure and I don't think anything in Donne picks up on anything but the most general sorts of ideas you find in Kepler, there's nothing that refers to Kepler's discovery that the orbits of the planets are elliptical or that their revolution sweeps out equal areas in equal times, etc. Galileo's Two World Systems wasn't published till 1632, a year after Donne was dead, although some of Galileo's work, e.g., The Starry Messenger, was out and about twenty years earlier. Descartes, Hobbes,
Boyle, much less Newton -- all these were post-Donne.
So what Donne had to react against wasn't the Principia with its austere mathematicization of the world, but a somewhat inchoate current of ideas very much in formation; He showed an amazing sense of where things were going, but it was a good intuitive guess, not a reaction to a finished system of the sort that Newton didn't get around to actually publishing till 1687, 56 years after the bell tolled for Donne.
Joanna and Carrol know way more about Donne that I ever will, but I used to do this scientific revolution stuff. Like Dr. Science, I even have a Master's Degree in HPS! I'm astounded that I remember this much of it. It's been a long time. But that was in another country (literally), and besides, the wench is dead. (Actually, I just looked her up -- my old HPS teacher Mary Hesse -- and I am happy to say that she is still with us. Mary's great.)
--- On Fri, 5/16/08, Joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> From: Joanna <123hop at comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] in which I'm accused of repressing the reptilian brain
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Friday, May 16, 2008, 12:19 PM
> Carrol Cox wrote:
> > Joanna wrote:
> >
> >> By the 19th century the two truths of science and
> art were an
> >> established fact.
> >>
> >> In the 17th century you see the beginnings of that
> distinction. Bacon
> >> talks about it, as does Sidney in the Defense of
> Poesy. And there are
> >> lots of others. The whole notion that Donne was
> reacting to the truth of
> >> the scientific revolution also depends on a
> perceived difference in the
> >> 17th century.
> >>
> >
> >
> > Well, yes and no. Science (or, rather, Natural
> Philosophy) at that time
> > (esp. in Bacon) was pretty close to pure empiricism;
> Keats on the other
> > hand was clear that science was essentially abstract
> explanation of
> > facts rather than a mere accumulation of facts. His
> objection to the
> > rainbow disappearing in Newton's equations was a
> far better
> > understanding of science than you can find in Bacon or
> the Royal Society
> > of the 17th c. As Susanne Langer remrks, had
> scientists followed Bacon's
> > advice to put their notions aside there never would
> have been any
> > science.
> >
> Yes and no. Bacon also said that "mathematics was the
> language of
> nature" -- by which he meant more than arithmetic.
> But you're mostly right about Bacon.
> > That aside, I'm not sure what y9u mean by the
> "notion that Donne was
> > reacting...." I would think that a v ery
> debatable question:
> Yes it's a debatable question. But there was about 20
> years worth of
> criticism, (from 50's on) that argued exactly this:
> that metaphysical
> poetry and Donne in particular were reacting to the
> "scientific
> revolution."
> > I don't
> > think one should put too much weight on his reference
> to the new science
> > [knowledge] putting all in doubt, and his moving of
> the earth was almost
> > certainly a reference to earthquakes, not to Galileo.
> >
> Possibly. But he was a very learned man, certainly knew
> about the claims
> of the new science and pointedly refers to it at the end of
> the Sunne
> Rising: "This bed thy center is/ These walls thy
> sphere."
>
> Joanna
> > Carrol
> >
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
> >
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