Beyond Enlightenment Error: The Christian Dimension of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum
Beyond Enlightenment Error: The Christian Dimension of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum

Summary/Abstract: This article explores the religious dimension of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum and of the Baconian method formulated within by looking at the various prayers, prophecies and divine invocations that are present in the treatise. In conversation withStephen A. McKnight and Steven Matthews, I argue against the Enlightenment understanding of Bacon as an irreligious scientist avant la lettre and contend that the book’s religious dimension is not solely reducible to rhetoric, but is a constituent part of its philosophical system.

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