Abstract
Experiment, considered in its modern sense, did not overall belong to natural philosophy proper until the Early Modern period. While the practice of experimentation existed already long before, it was rather limited, and no specific concept or even methodology was attached to it. The history of experimentation during the “long” Renaissance is properly the history of the gradual spreading and general establishment of experimental practices and methodologies for the study of nature. In our entry, we shall, after some historiographical observations, outline that development in its various strands, from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance into the Early Modern period, with a focus on Europe and the Islamic-Arabic world. Experimental practices had ancient roots in medicine, alchemy, music, and optics, and these were expanded and further developed in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Moreover, they showed up in magnetism and were given first systematic reflections. Natural Magic and the Tradition of Secrets, flourishing from the Renaissance on, had experimental procedures deeply embedded. In the early seventeenth century, all those strands were taken up and, for the first time, conceptually integrated into a large-scale programmatic framework. Moreover, they expanded to evermore fields of research, such as mechanics, natural history, and pneumatics, among others. What we see from the early seventeenth century on is a wide spread of experiment as means of natural research, and the promulgation of what was now labeled “experimental philosophy.” While the specific ways of doing experiments, and even more the ways of drawing conclusions from them, varied widely, it was out of question that experiment now counted as a viable way to learn about nature. However, it is clear that the pathway that led to that new situation is less characterized by a few singular events or authors, but was strongly rooted in broader developments of the Renaissance period.
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Steinle, F., Pastorino, C., Ragland, E. (2019). Experiment in Renaissance Science. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_258-1
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