This week we will back up to look at Francis Bacon (who we jumped over in order to continue following Kuhn's account of the revolution in astronomy). Bacon's contribution was much less to science itself than to thinking about science, particularly with regard to the importance of experiment, the nature of reasoning on the basis of experiment, and the social importance of scientific research.

Tuesday (10/4). Dear gives a survey of Bacon's views and compares him to others. Think especially about his relation both to typical 16th century thinkers like Paracelsus and Gilbert (who Dear discussed earlier in ch. 3) and to later contemporaries like Kepler and Galileo. The selections from Bacon in Matthews consist of two groups of "aphorisms" from Bacon's chief work, the Novum Organum (or New Organon), that contain some of its best known material.

In class, we'll look at some further selections from the Novum Organum that illustrate his views on induction. If you are curious about the work as a whole, you can find it on line at

http://www.constitution.org/bacon/nov_org.htm

(the material on induction is in book 2). An earlier work, The Advancement of Learning is available at

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/adlr10h.htm

and at

http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/%7Erbear/adv1.htm

Book 2 of The Advancement of Learning contains a classification of "parts of human learning" comparable to a "division of the sciences" that Bacon intended to precede the New Organon in a proposed larger work that he titled the Instauratio Magna (The Great Instauration or The Great Renewal).

Thursday (10/6). We will discuss Bacon's New Atlantis, which describes a utopian society. Although the work is incomplete, Bacon describes a number of features of the society. We will focus on the place he gives to science, which is the main topic of the final third of the work.