How Not To Trust Your Own Mind: From Bacon to Locke

• Department of History

A series of talk organized by the History of Science and Medicine Working Group

Between the sixteenth and seventeenth century a crisis of the intellect led several thinkers to devise new solutions to remedy the human mind’s alleged inability to know and control reality. Bacon and Locke shared the same sceptical view about the scope and limits of the mind but moved from different premises and envisioned different solutions. Bacon referred to a technology of thinking which he understood as mirroring and echoing the material life of things. Here the model was the original identity of matter, free from the distorting mirror of the imagination (the idols) and from the diaphragm of the intellect. Locke appealed instead to an idea of consciousness and personality that gestured beyond the limits of human identity. In this view, the role of memory was crucial, for ‘recollection’ was the supreme function of consciousness. Precisely by recalling the past and anticipating the future, memory could shape one’s personal identity. By contrast, Bacon had looked at memory as a trace of knowledge imprinted in the things themselves, which first of all was record and testimony of the original formative motions of the universe, sedimented in the most ancient myths of the living cosmos. This memory Bacon called sapientia veterum and I suggest that it would be correct to call it the vetus organum of Bacon’s general programme of logic.

This session is based on a pre-circulated text, if you wish to receive the material send an email to Maxime Guttin

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