Overview
Throughout his works, Francis Bacon struggled with the problem of discovery, attempting to find rules and methods that would guide the inquirer in the investigation of nature. Bacon criticized traditional methods of inventio and traditional forms of demonstration. To replace them, he proposed an art of inventing new arts, a discipline with two branches. One of them was called experientia literata (“Experientia Literata”). The other, the novum organum. Neither of these two disciplines was ever fully developed. Although in 1620, under the general title Instauratio magna, we can find a book with the title Novum organum, this book was not the “new logic,” or the art of discovery, properly speaking, but merely an unfinished sketch of it (Rees 2004). The experientia literata is even less visible across Bacon’s corpus. One can find references to it in a number of early writings, in some of the aphorisms of book I of the Novum organum and in book V of De augmentis scientiarum....
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Jalobeanu, D. (2021). Bacon’s Art of Discovery. 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_632-1
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