Questions

• In what ways does Bacon’s scientific project differ from those of medieval scholars?
• What is the Scientific Revolution and when, and where, did it occur? Dear and Barrera-Osorio answer to this question differently--what are the differences?
• Did overseas discoveries lead to the scientific revolution?

Required Primary Source

• Bacon, Francis, Novum Organum (The New Organon; or, True Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature), Encompassing Nature: A Sourcebook, ed. Robert M. Torrance, Counterpoint (Washington D.C., 1998), 878-885.
  

Required Secondary Readings

• Barrera-Osorio, Antonio, Experiencing Nature: 
The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution, University of Texas Press (Austin, 2006), Introduction.
• Dear, Peter, Revolutionising the Sciences: European Knowledge and its Ambitions, 1500-1700, Palgrave (London, 2001), Introduction.

Additional Readings

• Daston, Lorraine, ‘Baconian Facts, Academic Civility, and the Prehistory of Objectivity’, Annals of Scholarship 8 (1991): 337-363.
• Henry, John, Knowledge is Power: Francis Bacon and the Method of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), introduction.
• Martin, Craig, ‘Experience of the New World and Aristotelian Revisions of the Earth’s Climates during the Renaissance’, History of Meteorology, vol. 3 (2006).
• Portuondo, María, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, 2009).
• Sánchez, Francisco, That Nothing is Known, trans. D.F.S. Thomson, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 1988 [1576]).