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|Brief=a British natural philosopher and founder of experimentalism and empirical science.
|Summary=Sir Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount of St. Alban (January 22, 1561 – April 9, 1626) was a prominent figure in English society, making significant contributions to the world as a philosopher, scientist, statesman, juror, orator, author, attorney general, and lord chancellor of England. Perhaps his most significant, lasting impact was in natural philosophy and the role he played during the scientific revolution (the period between the publications of Copernicus’s Revolutions and Newton’s Principia). In the later part of his life, he worked to establish empiricism and constructed his scientific methodology, first introduced in his revolutionary text Novum Organum, describing his reformulation of scientific thinking that employs inductive reasoning to make predictions about the world.
|Historical Context=Bacon began his studies at Cambridge University’s Trinity College in 1573 at the age of twelve.[[CiteRef::Jones (1868)|pp. 60-65]] While there, he became dissatisfied with the tradition of Aristotelian philosophy and deemed it unfruitful.[[CiteRef::Marguerite Lea and Quinton (2017)]][[CiteRef::Klein (2016)]][[CiteRef::Lovejoy (1888)|p. 8]] Bacon lived during the beginning of the scientific revolution, shortly after the publication of Copernicus’s Revolutions and thus would have likely been influenced by the new heliocentric cosmology that was beginning to take root, which brought the validity of the Aristotelian mosaic into question.[[CiteRef::Briggs (Ed.) (1996)]] During this time, the study of empirical natural philosophy, which set the foundations upon which modern scientific practices and methodologies were based, took its form. During this era, there was a major revolution wherein many elements of the earlier mosaic were replaced. Bacon’s early education occurred at the very beginning of this revolution, putting him in the ideal context to revolutionize how science was carried out.
At the time of Bacon’s education, there were three central ideas that defined the worldview of the time; Aristotelian scholasticism, scholarly and aesthetic humanism, and occultism.[[CiteRef::Marguerite Lea and Quinton (2017)]] The tradition of Aristotelian scholasticism formed the scientific mosaic at the time of Bacon’s education and this mosaic included such theories as astrology and alchemy and the methodology employed during that era was one that demarcated scientific theories by their ability to describe the world intuitively. The prevalent renaissance humanism of the time brought many thinkers back to the ancient traditions of the Greeks, putting an emphasis on critical, evidenced-based discussion rather than dogmatism. This setting allowed the academic air of the time to be such that Bacon’s normative methodology could be well-received and eventually accepted by the scientific community. The influences of occult thinking at the time lead people to believe that not all that is real is physical and so the spiritual world was equally as important as the physical world.
During his lifetime, Bacon bore witness to many of the great discoveries that defined the science of his era and that would later shape the nature of scientific thought. In particular, he was alive when Kepler published his first two laws of planetary motion, and also when Galileo published the first telescopic observations. Such events were of great importance to the academic community of the time and as such, would have had a great impact on Bacon and how he perceived the state of science in his time. In fact, the acceptance of Kepler’s laws, and of Galileo’s observations directly contradicted the foundations of Aristotelian geocentric cosmology and therefore, with these new ideas being proliferated, there was a general stance that perhaps science would need to be reformulated. It was this reformulation that Bacon sought to carry out from early in his studies, although he did not publish any material on the subject until much later in his life.
Following his studies, Bacon pursued a legal career in the court where he held a variety of roles and eventually pursued political endeavours, eventually sitting as a member of Parliament.[[CiteRef::Jones (1868)|pp. 60-65]][[CiteRef::Lovejoy (1888):pp. 10-12]] However, in 1621, several of Bacon’s enemies had him convicted of bribery and he was, among other things, was banned from ever holding a state position again.[[CiteRef::Marguerite Lea and Quinton (2017)]][[CiteRef::Jones (1868)|pp. 60-65]][[CiteRef::Lovejoy (1888)|pp. 139-160]]
No longer able to pursue a state position, Bacon resigned himself to intellectual endeavours for the remaining years of his life and it is during this period that he made his significant contributions to natural philosophy, having already spent decades refining his intellect and critical thinking in the courts and in politics.[[CiteRef::Lovejoy (1888)]] In 1620, shortly before his political downfall, Bacon published his Novum Organum, where he sought to supply “true directions concerning the interpretation of nature”.[[CiteRef::Bacon (1878)]] In this text, Bacon makes a normative suggestion as to how the methodology should be revised from the Aristotelian methodology to the first empirical methodology. A variation of the inductive, empirical methodology that he introduced was eventually adopted by all natural philosophers that immediately succeeded him, such as Descartes and Newton.
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::Briggs (Ed.) (1996)]] 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)|pp. 60-65]] 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.
