Overview
The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge emerged in post-Restauration England dressed up in Baconian clothes. In the prefaces of works dedicated to the Society, in the apologies and defenses of experimental learning, on the title page of Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), Francis Bacon figured prominently as a forerunner and a founding father. In their private correspondence, as well as in the pages of the newly established Philosophical transactions “The Royal Society”, “Philosophical Transactions”, most of the virtuosi emphasized, time and again, that they are working towards the realization of Bacon’s plans and projects for the advancement of learning. Meanwhile, from the very beginning to the present day, there was a certain ambiguity regarding the precise meaning of this overt Baconianism. After all, Bacon was a man of many parts, and his many unfinished works are not always easy to read and interpret “Francis Bacon”, “Baconian Natural...
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Jalobeanu, D. (2021). Baconianism and the Royal Society. In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_631-1
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