Perhaps no major figure has been subject to so many fluctuations in the history of ideas as Francis Bacon. In the 1980s three feminists (Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Carolyn Merchant) set out to discredit Bacon, and the Scientific Revolution to which he contributed, by alleging that he had advocated "the rape and torture" of nature. Their indictment, which was well received in feminist circles, produced several effective rebuttals from historians of science. In September 2006 the journal Isis published (...) a "Focus" symposium entitled "Getting Back to The Death of Nature: Rereading Carolyn Merchant." Two of the contributions, by Katharine Park and Carolyn Merchant herself, reassert the feminist case against Bacon. In this essay I want to review their indictment and to strengthen Bacon's defense. (shrink)

This authoritative edition was first published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It includes The Advancement of Learning, the Essays, and New Atlantis as well as other texts, in modernized spelling and with generous annotation.

Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance; Debora K. Shuger; Princeton University Press; ISBN - 9780691067360Rhetorics of Reason and Desire: Vergil, Augustine, and the Troubadours; Sarah Spence; Cornell University Press; ISBN - 9780801421297.

Ramsey's “Facts and Propositions” is terse, allusive, and dense. The paper is far from easy to understand. The present essay is an effort, largely following Brian Loar's account,1 to say what Ramsey's goal is, to spell out what he took to be the means to accomplish it, and to show how those means, at least in the terms of F&P, cannot accomplish that end. I also contrast Loar's own account of judgment, explicitly modeled on Ramsey's view, with the latter. (...) The exercise is not at all academic. Loar makes clear the striking depth and originality of Ramsey's insights. (shrink)

Ramsey's “Facts and Propositions” is terse, allusive, and dense. The paper is far from easy to understand. The present essay is an effort, largely following Brian Loar's account,1 to say what Ramsey's goal is, to spell out what he took to be the means to accomplish it, and to show how those means, at least in the terms of F&P, cannot accomplish that end. I also contrast Loar's own account of judgment, explicitly modeled on Ramsey's view, with the latter. (...) The exercise is not at all academic. Loar makes clear the striking depth and originality of Ramsey's insights. (shrink)

Professor Vickers extracts two or three sentences out of a long article I wrote on a completely different topic and misreads them, attributing to me statements I never made and positions I have explicitly argued against. When Francis Bacon used the metaphor of rape to refer to the Baconian natural philosopher's relationship to nature, which he did relatively infrequently, he invoked the classical, "heroic" sense of rape as the act whereby gods and heroes found dynasties and empires, as in (...) the rape of the Sabine women, the rape of Europa, and the rape of the daughters of Leucippus. (shrink)