Front cover image for Francis Bacon : discovery and the art of discourse

Francis Bacon : discovery and the art of discourse

Lisa Jardine (Author)
By modern standards Bacon's writings are striking in their range and diversity, and they are too often considered a separate specialist concerns in isolation from each other. Dr Jardine finds a unifying principle in Bacon's preoccupation with 'method', the evaluation and organisation of information as a procedure of investigation or of presentation. She shows how such an interpretation makes consistent (and often surprising) sense of the whole corpus of Bacon's writings: how the familiar but misunderstood inductive method for natural science relations to the more information strategies of argument in his historical, ethical, political and literary work. There is a substantial and valuable study of the intellectual Renaissance background from which Bacon emerged and against which he reacted. Through a series of details comparisons and contrasts we are led to appreciate the true originality and ingenuity of Bacon's own views and also to discount the more superficial resemblances between them and later developments in the philosophy of science. -- Publisher description
Print Book, English, 1974
Cambridge University Press, London, 1974
Biographies
viii, 267 pages ; 23 cm
9780521204941, 0521204941
1532204
Dialectic and method in the sixteenth century
An English dialectical controversy
Bacon's response to the dialectical tradition
Bacon's theory of knowledge
The goal of the interpretation of nature
The interpretation of nature
Analogy and generalisation in ethics and civics
Methods of communication
Parable
Exempla
Bacon's view of rhetoric
The method of Bacon's essays
Developed from the author's thesis, University of Cambridge