Publisher's Synopsis
How have we arrived at a capacity for taking cold, hard looks at the facts of nature - and whether we ever truly have done so - are questions that continue to engage both historians of science and students of culture. In any such discussion, Francis Bacon figures prominantly. Historians of modern European intellectual history commonly credit Bacon with laying the groundwork for a mode of study that begins without presuppositions, religious or otherwise, the kind of searching we know as research and long have credited as being "disinterested.";In this work, the author shows how "disinterestedness" became a dominant principle of intellectual modernity by examining Bacon's notion of self-distancing against the background of early modern political ideology, socioeconomic behaviour, and traditions of learning. The author places him between two cultures - Jacobean monarchical mercantilism and the self-distancing strategies of the early 17th-century traders and travellers. She shows that Bacon - by virtue of his prominant political position within the Jacobean court, familiarity with prevailing commercial practices, and humanistic learning - made his signal contributions to natural philosophy because of where he stood at a critical juncture. While showing how much of the rise of "scientific objectivity" owed to sociohistorical circumstances, Solomon nevertheless challenges the naive, single-minded reliance upon the explanatory power of social-construction theory within the context of literary and cultural studies of science.
