Francis Bacon

English philosopher, essayist and statesman (1561–1626), born in London into an influential courtly family, trained in law at Cambridge and active throughout his life in English politics, where he rose to the office of Lord Chancellor under James I before falling into disgrace in 1621, convicted of corruption charges he himself partly admitted and which cost him the end of his public career, though not his freedom or personal fortune. Regarded as the father of the modern scientific method and English empiricism, Bacon proposed in his unfinished magnum opus, the Novum Organum (1620), a radical reform of the method of scientific knowledge, replacing the Aristotelian deductive logic dominant until then with a rigorous inductive method based on the systematic observation of natural phenomena, the cumulative gathering of experimental data, and the methodical elimination of prejudices and systematic errors of thought, which Bacon classified in his famous theory of the 'idols of the mind': the idols of the tribe (errors common to all human nature), of the cave (biases stemming from individual education and experience), of the marketplace (confusions arising from ordinary language) and of the theatre (errors inherited from dogmatic philosophical systems accepted uncritically). Bacon argued that scientific knowledge should have as its ultimate purpose not mere speculative contemplation but the practical mastery of nature to improve humanity's material condition, summed up in his famous maxim 'knowledge is power'. His unfinished scientific utopia, New Atlantis (published posthumously in 1627), describes an imaginary society organised around a collective scientific research institution called Salomon's House, regarded as a prophetic anticipation of future scientific academies and modern research institutions. Although Bacon himself did not practise experimental science systematically, his programmatic insistence on observation, experimentation and the practical utility of knowledge exerted a decisive influence on the founding of the Royal Society of London and on the entire seventeenth-century scientific revolution.

8 works

• Bacon's Essays, and Wisdom of the Ancients
• Novum organum or, True suggestions for the interpretation of nature
• Phenomena of the Universe Or Natural History for the Building Up of Philosophy
• The Advancement of Learning
• The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
• The Great Instauration
• The New Atlantis
• Valerius Terminus Of the Interpretation of Nature