Special Issue Introduction: Individuality, Self-Care, and Self-Preservation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Science.

Between the 1970s and the early 2000s, influential historians of philosophy and science laid down the claim that the period between the thirteenth century and seventeenth century marked a watershed in the way we conceptualize the very purpose of natural philosophy and mathematics. From this angle, Foucault insisted on the empirical reality of a certain type of human practice that takes one's own everyday conduct as the object of a process of ethical and aesthetic self-fashioning, which in turn serves as preparation for authentically accessing truth. With Cardano, Bacon shared a strongly naturalistic analysis of divination (the imagination plays a starring role for Bacon). [Extracted from the article]