Experimental Practices and Philosophical Traditions: Organizing and Disseminating Knowledge in Early Modern Europe
INTRODUCTION
Doina-Cristina RUSU
In an era characterized by the recovery of ancient wisdom and by geographical discoveries, the body of knowledge as understood by the scholastics was too narrow to encompass this emerging new world. This big amount of information, gathered either from nature or from books, needs to be organized, classified, utilized for the advancement of knowledge and put into suitable forms to be transmitted further. As a consequence, the Aristotelian-Scholastic authority is discarded when new arising philosophical schools provide models of investigating the natural world. Even amongst those who consider nature to be the ultimate authority, there still exists a rivalry for interpreting the results of experimental practices, for finding the genuine method of demonstration and the appropriate technique for the investigation of nature and discovery of certainty.