Language of Reality and Reality of Language in Francis Bacon’s Philosophy

Abstract

The most important Francis Bacon’s argument to reject Aristotelian syllogistic logic as a main method of investigation was his doctrine of Idols, closely connected with contemporary Anglican theological views on imperfect human nature. According to his criticism of the first notion of human mind, based on mistakan abstraction, Bacon separated “ars inveniendi”, “ars judicandi” and “ars tradendi» and argued a new nonverbal form of communication, based on “real characters”, should be constracted. Bacon's conventional concept of the universal language, strongly influenced by Aristotel, was not realized by the philosopher himself, but it was of great popularity in both European rationalism and British empiricism in the middle – second half of 17th century.