Francis Bacon

• Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, who was a Lord keeper of the great Seal.
• Francis Bacon entered Parliament when he was 23 and became advisor to Essex.
• When Essex fell from favour with Parliament, Bacon helped in his prosecution. Bacon was blamed for his treachery and ingratitude towards Essex by some, but this was quite unjust because he worked with Essex while Essex was a noble man, but then abandoned him when continued loyalty to him would have been treasonable. 
• In 1618 Bacon became Lord chancellor, he held this position for two years, then he was prosecuted for accepting bribes from Litigants. For this he was fined £40,000, imprisonment in the tower, perpetual banishment from court and inability to hold office. This sentence was only partially executed because he was not made to pay the fine, was only kept in the tower for four days, but he was compelled to abandon public life and was ordered to spend the rest of his days writing important books.

Francis Bacon

• After five years in retirement, he died from a chill, whilst experimenting on refrigeration by stuffing a chicken with snow.
• Bacon's most important book is The advancement of learning and he is widely known as the originator of the saying 'knowledge is power'.
• He believed that philosophy should be kept separate from theology and shouldn't be intimately blended with it as in scholasticism.
• Bacon was the first of a long line of scientific minded  philosophers  who have emphasised the importance of induction as opposed to deduction. He wished to discover the nature of heat, which he rightly supposed to consist of rapid irregular motions of the small parts of bodies. His method was to make a list of hot bodies, a list of cold bodies and a list of bodies of varying degrees of heat. He hoped that these lists would show certain characteristics always present in hot bodies but absent in cold bodies, and present in varying degrees in bodies of different degrees of heat.
• One or the most famous parts of Bacon's philosophy is his enumeration of what he calls 'idols'. By this he means bad habits of the mind that cause people to fall into error.
• My opinion is that, in terms of Bacon's scientific and philosophical  discoveries, his role in philosophy is very small. Although the few things he did discover are very impressive and it seems to me that he would more be seen as a noble man because of his work in parliament. Even though he did except a bribe, but back in those days it seems as if taking bribes were a common occurrence, it was just unfortunate that he got caught. Also I can see how his political life could be relevant to the history of journalism.