Francis Bacon was an English philosopher, lawyer and essayist who lived at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. Counted among the founders of empiricism, he contributed to the creation of modern scientific research methods. ¹⁾

In 1595 he became a member of Parliament, in which he sat for the next nine years. He pursued his career mainly in the fields of legislation and the judiciary, reaching the position of advisor to King James I Stuart in 1604, then a chief prosecutor in the country (royal custodian of the law) in 1614. ²⁾

In his views, he believed that there was little point in exploring science for its own sake. He valued experimental methods much more highly. Learning about the mechanisms of nature was, in his opinion, crucial in the process of man's mastery over the world. ³⁾

Bacon is regarded as the forerunner of the theory of eliminative induction. It is based on the idea of starting from details and single facts to generalized laws and mechanisms occurring e.g. in nature. In order to prove whether the presented view and theory are true, he recommended making hypotheses that could be later confirmed or disproved. ⁴⁾

In his work De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (1623), he reviewed and personally classified all the sciences. Bacon divided them into history/memory (the description of facts that have previously occurred), poetry/imagination and philosophy/reason (any kind of cognition). ⁵⁾