CISSCT Annual Symposium, “Francis Bacon and the Problem of Method”

Please join us for Duke’s Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory (CISSCT) annual symposium, on the topic of “Francis Bacon and the Problem of Method.”
The goal of our spring 2016 symposium is to discuss how the Baconian method (broadly conceived) has provoked and inspired methodological debate, both in past centuries and in the present, about the nature and goals of “science.” The symposium features three speakers drawn from the history of science, philosophy, and literary criticism. In bringing together these scholars from different disciplines, we will consider topics such as the divergent afterlives of Bacon’s method; the extent to which Bacon’s method has been understood as central to the past and modern practices of the sciences; whether there are specifically “Baconian” sciences; and how Bacon method has been understood as a proxy (in the work of Horkheimer and Adorno, for example) for more general processes of modernity and Enlightenment.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory and the Franklin Humanities Institute.

Friday, February 12th

10:20-10:40 Coffee and breakfast pastries

10:40-11:00 Julianne Werlin, Duke University, Assistant Professor of English: Introduction to the Symposium

11:00-12:30 Peter Dear, Cornell University, Professor of the History of Science: “The Sylva sylvarum and the Practice of Baconian ‘Method’”

12:30-1:30 Lunch break (lunch provided!)

1:30-3:00 Richard Serjeantson, University of Cambridge, Fellow and Lecturer in History: ‘The New Organon vs. “our philosophy”: Debating Bacon’s method in Second Reformation Europe’

3:00-3:15 Coffee break

3:15-4:45 Henry Turner, Rutgers University, Associate Professor of English: “Bacon’s Art”

Please direct any inquiries about this event to Davide Carozza at mailto:davide.carozza@duke.edu

For directions to the FHI Garage, see the following Duke campus map