Bacon and Descartes
Two rival accounts of how knowledge should be built.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 17 years
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Early Modern, Holocene
Francis Bacon's Novum Organum of 1620 argues for systematic experiment and inductive generalisation, and against reasoning from received authority. Descartes' Discourse on Method in 1637 argues the opposite direction — doubt everything until something indubitable remains, then reason outward — and along the way invents analytic geometry, joining algebra to geometry. The tension between empiricism and rationalism runs through everything that follows.