Thinker · TH-0157
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon was an English statesman, lawyer and philosopher who rose to become Lord Chancellor under James I. He called for a reform of…
Also known as Baron Verulam, Viscount St Alban
1561 – 1626 · London; Cambridge; Gorhambury
Traditions: Modern European
Schools: Empiricism
Francis Bacon was an English statesman, lawyer and philosopher who rose to become Lord Chancellor under James I. He called for a reform of learning based on careful observation and experiment, and his Novum Organum proposed a method of induction that proceeds gradually from particulars, using tables of instances to eliminate false hypotheses. His account of the 'idols' that distort the mind remains a classic diagnosis of bias, and later scientific societies took him as a patron of experimental science.
Key ideas
- Knowledge of nature should be built by gradual induction from carefully gathered observations and experiments.
- The mind is distorted by four idols: of the tribe, the cave, the marketplace and the theatre.
- Negative instances matter: a single contrary case can overturn a generalisation that many agreeing cases seemed to support.
- Knowledge should serve the improvement of human life.
Major works
- Essays (1597; expanded 1612 and 1625)
- The Advancement of Learning (1605)
- Novum Organum (1620)
- New Atlantis (1627, posthumous)
In the conversation
- Question Is a controlled experiment a new source of knowledge, or only perception with discipline?
- Reading group Reading group: Bacon’s idols of the mind in the Novum Organum, Book One
- Discussion How should a journalist judge a study in a field she knows nothing about?
- Discussion What Ibn al-Haytham actually did, and why “father of the scientific method” overstates it