Ed Simon at The Hedgehog Review:
This April marks the quadricentenary of Bacon’s death, the man who, though his own scientific innovations were middling, was arguably the philosopher most responsible for championing the empirical technocracy that our world has largely become. “I open and lay out a new and certain path for the mind to proceed in,” Bacon wrote in his 1620 Novum Organum, “starting directly from the simple sensuous perception.” Bacon’s method was inductive, the careful tabulation of observation and experiment, the methodical calculation of possibility and the invention of models to describe nature, the models themselves ever-contingent and shifting based on the reception of new and better data.
Science (though that word wouldn’t be used in this way yet) had certainly existed before that English philosopher, but his genius lay in his ability to properly describe just how its methods worked.
More here.
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