Bacon's Last Instalment

Abstract

The name 'Francis Bacon' is almost synonymous with the emergence of modern reflections about the nature of science. If one speaks of early modern theorising on method in natural philosophy, the discipline that eventually became modern science, one inevitably speaks of the illustrious Lord Chancellor. However, too often Bacon has been interpreted through the lens of nineteenthand twentieth-century preoccupations with inductive reasoning as a method for the acquisition of knowledge in science. This has led to the neglect of Bacon's practice of the method of experiment and natural history. For those who have only read Bacon in this light, for those who have traversed little farther than the New Organon , the recent issue of the definitive Oxford Francis Bacon may seem rather obscure, foreign, even idiosyncratic. Yet this impression is to be resisted, for the writings that appear in volume XIII, as well as those already published in volume VI, are central to the concerns of the early modern period, and exerted at least as much influence as the New Organon upon the seminal thinkers of the Scientific Revolution.