Knowing by Experience

Chapter 1 problematizes a schematic opposition between experimental empiricism and rationalist epistemology. It describes a crisis in perception with the rise of the new sciences and a shift toward experimentation in seventeenth-century natural philosophy. Marin Mersenne's experimental study of inaudible tones is explored as a case study. Against the background of the Vesalian Renaissance, the chapter provides a detailed analysis of René Descartes's anatomical experiments in the Low Countries. It portrays the philosopher as a fervent hands-on experimenter and further explores Cartesian epistemology in the context of Jean Fernel's distinction between practical anatomy and theoretical physiology. The chapter concludes with an evocative reading of Descartes's camera obscura experiment that associates the ox eyeball in the hand of the anatomist with a wax ball that features prominently in Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy. The chapter thus prepares the ground for a radical rereading of the wax argument in Descartes's Second Meditation.