Abstract

Bacon is not an empiricist. His critique concerns equally sense-experience and conceptformation. He uses the term „experience” in a wider sense, closely related to „wisdom”. Bacon is not an inductionist. The falsification-principle is explicit in his philosophy. The new meaning of „induction” in Bacon implies that judgements are not mainly guided by the presence of phenomena but by their absence. Bacon is not het precursor of modern science as regards their contents. He has been, on this point, too much influenced by Renaissance natural magic. Bacon anticipates, however, modern sciences with regard to their method. The central issue of his philosophy is, according to his own words, the „ars inveniendi”. In modern terminology: the context of discovery is the main objective of his new methodology