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Weinberger - New Atlantis & Great Instauration [Francis Bacon] (1989)

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This is Jerry Weinberger's amazing book New Atlantis and the Great Instauration (1989) which is an annotated version of standard nineteenth-century text of Francis Bacon's works that set the foundation of modern thought and applied the scientific method to political sphere. They coupled realistic politics with a new science of nature in order to transform the age-old view of mankind's place in the world. They argued that once the efforts of the human intellect were directed from traditional concerns to new ones—from contemplation to action, from the account of what men ought to do to what they actually want to do, and from metaphysics to the scientific method for examining natural causes—the harsh inconveniences of nature and political life would be relieved or overcome. No longer to be revered or endured, the worlds of nature and society would become the objects of human control. Bacon called his enterprise "the great instauration," an ambiguous term that means at once great restoration and great founding. For Bacon, reason directed by new means and ends would change completely man's place in the whole of things. Bacon's project, as explained in his unfinished New Atlantis, was thus far more than a mere reformation of human reason and even more than the founding of a new intellectual or political order - a new world order. 115 pages. A must read for everyone.