Abstract

Unlike Descartes, Francis Bacon never wanted to cast aside traditional philosophy in order to mark new beginnings for the intellectual enterprise. He was as much a historian as an inquirer into nature. But he had a peculiar and idiosyncratic understanding of the scope, purpose and uses of the history of philosophy. As Jalobeanu shows in this chapter, Bacon envisaged a theoretically informed, highly engaged and polemical history of philosophy whose major purpose was to diagnose and classify errors. He never managed to complete this ambitious project. However, a careful investigation of its remaining fragments can unveil both the complexity of his typologies of errors and their multiple functions in Bacon’s project of a natural and experimental history. Jalobeanu demonstrates, first, that in constructing successive typologies of errors, Bacon revisited some of the traditional anti-sectarian language and critical arguments we can find in authors such as Cornelius Agrippa and Michel de Montaigne with the purpose of creating general maps of (teaching and) learning. Strategies of signposting generic errors were then used to navigate the tortuous waters of ‘experience’, avoiding some of the most common pitfalls and blunders of naïve empiricism. Second, and more importantly, she shows how Bacon’s critical reflection upon historical (and historiographic) errors also provided tools for the construction of heuristic strategies of investigation, delimiting (and hence learning how to avoid) various forms of ‘bad science’ and biases in experimental investigation. Last but not least, Bacon’s theoretically informed history of philosophy provided empirical material for the construction of his theory of idols.