Tag: David Hume
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Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy and medicine
JMS Pearce Hull, England Fig 1. Novum Organum Scientiarum, 2nd edition, 1645. EC.B1328.620ib, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. Lord Bacon was the greatest genius that England, or perhaps any country, ever produced. – Alexander Pope, 1741 The early seventeenth century was a time when natural philosophy, the precursor of modern…
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The anatomy of beauty in nineteenth-century England
Alan W. BatesLondon, United Kingdom Few characteristics seem more subjective and less amenable to scientific study than beauty. As the philosopher David Hume wrote in 1741, “Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.” How then did some nineteenth-century European anatomists come to see human beauty as a branch of science for which…