Francis Bacon 1561 – 1626

Francis Bacon was a 16th and early 17th-century English philosopher, statesman, and essayist, regarded as one of the founders of the modern scientific method and a major figure of early modern philosophy. His 1620 work Novum Organum proposed a new method of inductive inquiry to replace the deductive logic of Aristotle, and his sweeping vision of organised collaborative scientific research, sketched in The New Atlantis, prefigured the modern research institution. His Essays, first published in 1597 and expanded over later editions, are concise treatments of moral and political topics that established the philosophical essay in English. He served as Lord Chancellor of England under James I until his political career ended in disgrace in 1621. His empiricism profoundly influenced the British empiricist tradition that runs through Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) served as Lord Chancellor of England under James I and was the most influential English philosophical writer of the early seventeenth century. Born to the political establishment — his father was Lord Keeper under Elizabeth I — he combined a long parliamentary career with the development of an ambitious program for the reform of natural philosophy.

Bacon's most influential works are The Advancement of Learning (1605) and the Novum Organum (1620). The Novum Organum proposes a new method for the natural sciences against what Bacon takes to be the failures of Aristotelian scholasticism: the patient inductive collection of natural-historical data, the elimination of the idols of the mind that distort observation, and the systematic interrogation of nature through experiment. The aim is power over nature for the relief of the human estate — a frankly utilitarian conception of natural inquiry that broke with the Aristotelian ideal of theoretical contemplation.

Bacon's political career ended in 1621 with his impeachment for taking bribes; he spent his last years writing. His direct influence on the practice of seventeenth-century natural philosophy is contested — Galileo and Newton owed him little — but his programmatic vision shaped the founding of the Royal Society and the broader self-understanding of the scientific revolution. The Enlightenment treated him as one of its founding figures.