Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy

This ambitious and important book provides the first truly general account of Francis Bacon as a philosopher. It describes how Bacon transformed the values that had underpinned philosophical culture since antiquity by rejecting the traditional idea of a philosopher as someone engaged in contemplation of the cosmos. The book explores in detail how and why Bacon attempted to transform the largely esoteric discipline of natural philosophy into a public practice through a program in which practical science provided a model that inspired many from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Stephen Gaukroger shows that this reform of natural philosophy was dependent on the creation of a new philosophical persona: a natural philosopher shaped through submission to the dictates of Baconian method. This book will be recognized as a major contribution to Baconian scholarship, of special interest to historians of early-modern philosophy, science, and ideas.

• Only philosophical study of Francis Bacon available • The kind of ambitious history of philosophy that does well for us (like Schneewind) • Gaukroger is well know to early-modern philosophers through his biography of Descartes (1995), now in paperback

1. The nature of Bacon’s project; 2. Humanist models for scientia; 3. The legitimation of natural philosophy; 4. The shaping of the natural philosopher; 5. Method as a way of pursuing natural philosophy; 6. Dominion over nature; 7. Conclusion.