Essays of Francis Bacon

by Francis Bacon

Overview

One of the great minds of the English Renaissance, Francis Bacon was a scholar, politician, and early advocate of scientific thinking who set no limits on the scope of his enquiries. In these compact and vibrant essays, Bacon addresses an astonishingly diverse range of subjects including religion, politics, personal relationships, morality and even architecture. Evident throughout the volume is his considerable rhetorical skill, incisive wit, and an unwavering belief in the power of reason.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781605124124
Publisher:	Akasha Classics
Publication date:	03/12/2009
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.41(d)

About the Author

Francis Bacon, (22 January 1561 - 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, and author. He served both as Attorney General and as Lord Chancellor of England. After his death, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution.

Bacon has been called the father of empiricism. His works argued for the possibility of scientific knowledge based only upon inductive and careful observation of events in nature. Most importantly, he argued this could be achieved by use of a skeptical and methodical approach whereby scientists aim to avoid misleading themselves. While his own practical ideas about such a method, the Baconian method, did not have a long lasting influence, the general idea of the importance and possibility of a skeptical methodology makes Bacon the father of scientific method. This marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framewor for science, the practical details of which are still central in debates about science and ethodology today.

Bacon's seminal work Novum Organum was influential in the 1630s and 1650s among scholars, in particular Sir Thomas Browne, who in his encyclopaedia Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646-72) frequently adheres to a Baconian approach to his scientific enquiries. During the Restoration, Bacon was commonly invoked as a guiding spirit of the Royal Society founded under Charles II in 1660.