Stanley Fish, in a renowned essay on Bacon’s Essays , concludes that the essays are “unfinished with a purposefulness that makes the bestowing of the adjective less a criticism than a compliment.” He insists on the provisionality of knowledge, and “communicates that provisionality [in the Essays ] by letting the information he has collected spill out of an organizational scheme that remains visible and compelling despite its obvious failure.” Yet, “the style of the essays, their manner or presentation, simultaneously... Read more

Stanley Fish, in a renowned essay on Bacon’s Essays , concludes that the essays are “unfinished with a purposefulness that makes the bestowing of the adjective less a criticism than a compliment.” He insists on the provisionality of knowledge, and “communicates that provisionality [in the Essays ] by letting the information he has collected spill out of an organizational scheme that remains visible and compelling despite its obvious failure.” Yet, “the style of the essays, their manner or presentation, simultaneously... Read more

Blumenberg writes ( Legitimacy of the Modern Age ) that with Bacon, Kepler, and particularly Leibniz, the Augustinian suspicion of curiosity is overcome, and knowledge thereafter “justifies itself; it does not owe thanks for itself to God; it no longer has any tinge of illumination or graciously permitted participation but rests on its own evidence, from which GOd and man cannot escape.” More elaborately, the scholastics “had seen man’s relation to reality as a triangular relation mediated by the divinity.... Read more

Blumenberg says that Bacon drew a distinction between metaphysics and physics in terms of human control: “The former has as its object the unalterable law beyond man’s influence; the latter comprises all knowledge of the operative and material causes that man can transpose in order to influence given states of affairs.” He cites Novum Organon 2.9 in support. What Bacon actually says there, however, is quite different: (more…) Read more