Abstract

The Divine Fire of Francis Bacon , by John C. Duffield, addresses the principal exegetical riddle of the unquiet death of Bacon's metascientific promise: Why did Francis Bacon forsake his solemn assurances to complete the exposition of the new logic of induction, which he left in an unfinished state in the 1620 New Organon? Bacon's philosophical fate acquires a significance that exceeds mere philology in light of the historical circumstance that modern logistic metascience, while virtually unanimous in depreciating Bacon's logical insight, is equally unanimous in following "the argument of Hume" to the conclusion that scientific cognition cannot be "justified" on natural-scientific grounds. ;Part I approaches the Baconian philosophy via criticism of the anti-inductivism that today rules in the academies. Chapter one offers a specimen of the hermeneutical pastiche afforded by modern scholarship in the matter of Francis Bacon. The next chapter examines the philosophical parameters of the metascientific perspectives from which Bacon is judged; the Hume-Kant polarity emerges as seminal in this regard. The third chapter scrutinizes a representative sampling of the logistic metascience that has come to the fore in contemporary Anglo-American treatments of natural science. The contrast between induction a la Bacon and latter-day metascience is brought to a head in the fourth chapter over the logical issue of the constitutive role of theorizing subjectivity in the scientific identification of nature. ;Part II addresses the desuetude of induction a la Bacon from the side of the Baconian corpus itself. Chapter five reveals that Bacon's induction was stillborn owing to the impasse imposed upon his principium individuationis by the abstract character of the universality that Bacon enforced, ultimately on theological grounds. Adverting to Bacon's "acroamatic" works, chapters six and seven trace the "substitution of theory" that Bacon surreptitiously pursued in his contemporaneous default to spiritus-theoretic "natural histories." It is contended that the locus of Bacon's impasse has escaped the critical ministrations of modern scholarship owing to the latter's own uncritical allegiance to the entirely inadequate doctrine of individuation purveyed in the quantified variable of logistic metascience