Francis Bacon’s Qualification as a Principal Empiricist Philosopher

The purpose of this paper is to determine if there is any basis for regarding Francis Bacon as a principal empiricist philosopher. This involves effort to determine what constitutes, in essence, the qualities of a principal empiricist philosopher. Are there any criteria that qualify one as a principal empiricist philosopher? Proceeding with this inquiry, our paper examines, on the one hand, the views of those who argue in defence of Bacon’s qualification as a principal empiricist philosopher. Here it is argued that there is no empiricism without Bacon. That is to say, for this group of thinkers, modern empiricism is the brain child of Francis Bacon. It uses inductive methodology and it got adequate attention, in the period, from Francis Bacon. On the part of those opposed to Bacon’s qualification as a principal empiricist philosopher, it is argued that Bacon’s philosophy is a scientifically centered system of thinking and lacks argumentative ingredients of a good philosophy, its empiricist background notwithstanding. After a critical examination of the above views, amongst others, we discovered that empiricism, from the epistemological point of view, is opposed to rationalism in its attitude to the question of innatism. Bacon did not tackle this question of innatism. Again Bacon did not question the intellectual powers of man. In the opinion of our paper, therefore, the facts that Bacon neither tackled the epistemological question of innatism nor questioned the intellectual powers of man disqualify him as a principal empiricist philosopher.