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After only a six years of writing, having produced numerous volumes of great importance to natural philosophy, Bacon died in 1626. Throughout his life, the scientific community was undergoing a shift from Aristotelian science,[[CiteRef::Peltonen (2006)]] to the natural philosophy that would eventually be shaped by the likes of Descartes and Newton. Many of the ideas central to Aristotelian physics, such as geocentrism, were overturned during Bacon’s lifetime however, it was Bacon who was responsible for initiating a revolution in how scientists did science leading the way for natural philosophers to construct theories that were based on evidence rather than intuition.

|Major Contributions=During his career, Bacon primarily wrote about subjects of legal or political interest as well as some works of great literary acclaim.[[CiteRef::Jones (1868)]] However, pertaining to the philosophy of science and the theory of scientific change, Bacon’s most significant contribution was in developing the Baconian methodology of science that was then adapted by the Cartesian and Newtonian schools, and still has many common elements to most current methodologies such as ascribing value to experimentation and inductive generalization. He also further developed the problem of sensations and the problem of induction, and proposed a solution to the problem of sensations. Initially, Bacon’s Novum Organum (in reference to Aritotle’s work Organon, the foundation of Aristotelian logic) was published as the first two books in a much larger collection known as Insuratio Magna which promised to be an even greater, six book reformulation of natural philosophy although most of the collection was never written and most of that which was published was incomplete. However, through these contributions, Bacon had a significant, still lasting impact on scientific methodologies and the theory of scientific knowledge.

'''Criticizing the Aristotelian Worldview'''

In his 1605 publication The Advancement of Learning, Bacon continues to reject the traditional Aristotelian school of thought since the Aristotelian logic puts its main emphasis on metaphysics and claims that which is revealed to our senses is necessarily the true behavior of reality.[[CiteRef::Klein (2016)]] Effectively, he argues that the Aristotelian logic fails to take into account the problem of sensations and thus is not a sufficient system of enquiry in natural philosophy. He also criticizes the techniques of learning and writing about natural philosophy that were common in his time. In particular, he criticizes Cambridge University for its curricular emphasis on dialectical training, and the scholars of the time for their intellectual focus on book learning which he believed to be an ineffective way to study the physical world as no experiment or observation of the world could be made in this way.[[CiteRef::Klein (2016)]] Here, Bacon first expressed his belief that experimentation should be of the foremost importance to studying the physical world, an element of the Baconian methodology that is still today employed.

'''Empiricism and the Baconian Methodology'''

Bacon was not an instrumentalist however, he did believe that, only by interrogating nature itself, can we reach an understanding of its true form that can be of any practical significance.[[CiteRef::Peltonen (2006)]] The major shift from the Aristotelian methodology to Bacon’s methodology was that the former drew generalized conclusions from individual observations and took these to be axiomatic, and then proceeded deductively to derive its scientific theories whereas the later supposes that the scientific theories are themselves the generalized axioms arrived upon through experimentation and observation; Bacon puts the generalization of observations as the conclusion rather than as the premise as the Aristotelians did.[[CiteRef::Peltonen (2006)]] Furthermore, for Bacon, science was meant to be a democratic, collaborative endeavour where the people worked together towards a common goal rather than a subject shrouded in mystery that only an elite few could ever learn.[[CiteRef::Peltonen (2006)]]

'''The Idols'''