John Locke’s Historical Method and “Natural Histories” in Modern Natural Sciences

Abstract

The seventeenth-century dispute between rationalists and empiricists concerned, among other things, the methods of acquiring and organizing knowledge and, consequently, the methods of reaching the truth. The confrontation of these two fundamental positions influenced the development of the model of natural sciences. The choice between their mathematization and establishing them on the basis of an experimental method revealed the philosophical aspect of the understanding of nature – the philosophy of nature. John Locke, criticizing the mathematical approach to nature and not being an empiricist like Francis Bacon or Robert Boyle, proposed yet another path: “the plain, historical method”. The method is based on the idea that while searching for the sources of our cognition – that is, the presence of concepts in our mind – it describes the process or the history of their acquisition.The main problem I raise in my paper is whether Locke’s methodological proposal can have a practical meaning in the process of building natural knowledge – “natural history”.