Re: scientia experimentalis

tttito wrote:
Newton refers to "philosophia experimentalis" (experimental philosophy)
in the "Principia". Looking for the origins of that expression I have
been led to Roger Bacon's "scientia experimentalis", which in a
previous post ([1]) I naively translated as "experimental knowledge".

Quite so. Scio = to know, + experimentalis = by experience, could be a
far cry from what we now understand by the linguistic (and conceptual)
developments in the phrase 'experimental science'

It seems to me that the stronger root lies the word "philosophia" as
employed in the (then) widely used term "natural philosophy"
(philosophy pertaining to nature), which, I suspect, has its roots in
ancient Greece.

It turns out that "experiential knowledge" is a more accurate rendering
of the Latin original.

Certainly. If Newton meant "experiential philoshophy" when using his
phrase, then this is closer to the traditional meaning of natural
philosophy. This is also consistent with Newton's approach to physics,
which was to develop a more powerful philosophy to explain experiential
(including experimental) knowledge.

It is of some interest to note that the latin "experimentalis" appears
to have now, in any event, transmuted to "experiment" in English. This
does not seem to be too great a shift either conceptually or
linguistically, since we do, of course, have free will. Similarly the
dividing line between experiential and experimental is still not
completely clear when applied, e.g. to our knowledge of the cosmos. Is
knowledge gained by looking through a telescope experiential or
experimental? I would be inclined to say the former.

[snip]

I now surmise that "scientia experimentalis" translates Alhazen's
Arabic "al-itibar", which I have seen translated as "learning by
example" and "instructive example" as well as "observation". Roger
Bacon was a keen reader of Alhazen's works (cf. [3]) and some scholars
claim (correctly I believe) that some of his key ideas come from there.

Certainly the Arabian library (was it at Alexandria?) was the greatest
repository of human knowledge in the world (was this around the 10th
century?), and Western recovery of ancient knowledge (as well as
subsequent innovations) was primarily from such Arabic sources. Even
our modern numbering system is Arabic, including our introduction to
the profound concept of zero (which the Arabs imported in their turn
from Indian philosophy).

Having said this, perhaps I am wrong about the roots of natural
philosophy being in ancient Greece. Documentations such as the Vedas
suggest that India had by far the most ambitious (and credible)
cosmology of the ancient world, long before Greek natural philosophers
started putting 'pen to paper'

John Bell
http://global.accelerators.co.uk
(Change John to Liberty to respond)

.