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Antonio Perez-Ramos argues in his contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Bacon that while Bacon\u2019s method has been severely criticized, Bacon\u2019s program of human improvement through scientific and technological progress has not been, until the early part of the 20th century (he references Hans Jonas, Adorno and Horkheimer as skeptics of Baconism): \u201cBacon\u2019s insight that scientific knowledge is the main guide through the turmoil of history and of Nature and that science effectively can (and should) beget the reconciliation of man with himself and with the outside world became an anthropological certainty of European mankind relatively soon.\u201d <\/p>\n
At the center of Bacon\u2019s program is the idea of a \u201cgood\u201d science, that is, that scientific advance is a good in itself: \u201cFor Bacon science is itself a moral good which has to be integrated into the fabric of society as a whole, though the ambivalence of the technocratic form of culture that lurks behind this aspiration is not clearly understood or unveiled.\u201d <\/p>\n
Bacon\u2019s use of gunpowder as an example of advancement \u201cmakes it possible to construe Bacon\u2019s insight as a decisive step in the gradual perception of the self-acting potentialities of technology; so science becomes autotelic.\u201d The only check on scientific progress is the self-policing of scientific research itself \u2013 the possibility that later research will falsify earlier: \u201cin good Baconian doctrine a science which led to the improvement of artillery or to the invention of artificial means of preserving good was equally good, because it was equally useful for the end required, that is, a purely technical challenge that research had proposed to meet. Hence \u2018good\u2019 science is not the antonym of \u2018bad science\u2019 but of useless or rather idle knowledge.\u201d <\/p>\n
Whatever his intentions, Bacon contributes to the \u201cdisenchantment ( Entzauberung <\/em> ) of the world with which Max Weber vividly characterized European culture in the modern age has been expressed in a plurality of fields. One of them was religious reform but not less significant in the domain of cognitive goals was the victorious image of Nature as a soulless mechanism, a vast storehouse or an insensitive witness to be cross-questioned in the most severe fashion . . . . Bacon\u2019s program is perhaps nowhere better depicted than in the forensic image of the stern judge who dictates his questions in order to extract manipulative directions with regard to his sole practical interests.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Antonio Perez-Ramos argues in his contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Bacon that while Bacon\u2019s method has been severely criticized, Bacon\u2019s program of human improvement through scientific and technological progress has not been, until the early part of the 20th century (he references Hans Jonas, Adorno and Horkheimer as skeptics of Baconism): \u201cBacon\u2019s insight that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"yoast_head":"\n