In the Spirit of Bacon: Descartes on Communicating Knowledge and Ignorance in the Discourse on the Method

This essay calls for integrating Baconian and Cartesian scholarship. Using Stephen Gaukroger’s Descartes: An Intellectual Biography as a point of departure, the chapter examines Bacon’s influence on Descartes’ Discourse on the Method (1637). Gaukroger argues that the Discourse is a public exercise in self-knowledge, a necessary prerequisite for attaining knowledge and instructing others. While Bacon and Descartes’ work and approach to the sciences differed in significant ways, this essay argues that, in the 1630s, Bacon’s collaborative vision for perfecting the sciences found fertile ground in Descartes’ Discourse. The essay argues that Descartes espoused Bacon’s view of how to communicate incomplete knowledge and specify ignorance at a time when the goal of attaining certain knowledge was waning.