Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Early Modern Thought: Essays to Commemorate The Advancement of Learning (1605–2005) (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)

Commemorating the 400th anniversary of the publication of Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605), this collection examines Bacon's recasting of proto-scientific philosophies and practices into early modern discourses of knowledge. Like Bacon, all of the contributors to this volume confront an essential question: how to integrate intellectual traditions with emergent knowledges to forge new intellectual futures. The volume's main theme is Bacon's core interest in identifying and conceptualizing coherent intellectual disciplines, including the central question of whether Bacon succeeded in creating unified discourses about learning. Bacon's interests in natural philosophy, politics, ethics, law, medicine, religion, neoplatonic magic, technology and humanistic learning are here mirrored in the contributors' varied intellectual backgrounds and diverse approaches to Bacon's thought. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Table of Contents 6 Contributors 8 Acknowledgments 11 Abbreviations 12 Dedication 13 1 Introduction 16 2 Bacon, Atomism, and Imposture: The True and the Useful in History, Myth, and Theory 32 3 The New Science and the Via Negativa: A Mystical Source for Baconian Empiricism 60 4 The Feminine Birth of the Mind: Regendering the Empirical Subject in Bacon and His Followers 84 5 “The Very Idea!”: Francis Bacon, E. O. Wilson on the Rehabilitation of Eidos 104 6 Francis Bacon and the Unity of Knowledge: Reason and Revelation 124 7 The Hidden Life of Matter: Techniques for Prolonging of Life in the Writings of Francis Bacon 144 8 “The Purer Foundations”: Bacon and Legal Education 160 9 A Society of Baconians?: The Collective Development of Bacon’s Method in the Royal Society of London 188 10 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, and Historical Thought 218 11 “Seated Between the Old World and the New”: Geopolitics, Natural Philosophy, and Proficient Method 238 Select Bibliography 262 Index 268 "Commemorating the 400th anniversary of the publication of Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605), this collection examines Bacon's recasting of proto-scientific philosophies and practices into early modern discourses of knowledge. Like Bacon, all of the contributors to this volume confront an essential question: how to integrate intellectual traditions with emergent knowledges to forge new intellectual futures. The volume's main theme is Bacon's core interest in identifying and conceptualizing coherent intellectual disciplines, including the central question of whether Bacon succeeded in creating unified discourses about learning."--Jacket Social scientists, historians, and scholars of literature and law argue that in order to establish English polymath Bacon's (1561-1626) overarching importance to modern culture, it is necessary to focus on how he sought to unify knowledge, both diachronically across historical time and synchronically across social and intellectual space. Among their topics are a mystical source for Baconian empiricism, regendering the empirical subject in Bacon and his followers, the collective development of Bacon's method in the Royal Society of London, and of course his The Advancement of Learning. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR Natural philosopher, jurist, essayist, statesman, and England's Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Viscount St. Albans and Baron Verulam, needs no introduction.