Recreating a Hero of Modern Science: The Making, Reception and Legacy of The Works of Francis Bacon

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The monumental Victorian edition of The Works of Francis Bacon ('Works') appeared some 150 years ago, in the midst of the 'Second Scientific Revolution'. With the Oxford Francis Bacon project yet to be completed, it is still the standard edition of Francis Bacon's (1561-1626) collected works. The edition itself, however, has never been studied in any detail. This is remarkable since, by presenting the most up-to-date Baconian canon, it played a key role in the creation of 'Baconianism', an outlook crucially formative of 19th-century British science and philosophy. A major intellectual event, the Works climaxed the emergence of serious Bacon scholarship and propelled the search for a single scientific method, shared across disciplines, in the work of Baconians like John Herschel, William Whewell and John Stuart Mill. At the same time, it marked the start of a decades-long process of revisionism which made that Bacon eventually lost of his status as legislator of modern science and induction seized to be seen as the motor of scientific progress. This project provides the first-ever history of the making, reception and extraordinary legacy of the Works, revealing its centrality to 19th-century philosophical debates on science as well as its significance for 20th- and 21st-century Bacon scholarship. It will combine fresh archival research, historical contextualization and philosophical analysis, carried out at the world-leading Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca' Foscari University of Venice (host) and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge (secondment). The project's original results will be disseminated through a monograph and peer-reviewed articles, and communicated through various targeted outreach activities. It will enable the researcher to acquire significant new skills and expertise that will further strengthen his position as a leading scholar of the history of science and philosophy in the 19th century.