Reckoning Words

"Using the tools of rhetorical and poetic analysis, this study of Baconian science reveals how the construction of scientific and philosophical discourse in early-modern England cannot be separated from literary-rhetorical production and political partisanship. By calling into question the usual way of dividing disciplines into logic, rhetoric, and poetics, Bacon suggested the constructed nature of these disciplines, and of traditional forms of knowledge.

Bacon did not call into being a fissure of science and the arts; rather he conceptualized a unique relationship between the two by creating an experimental (and rhetoricized) "logic" that allowed nature to shape and fashion the perceiving mind of the witness in order to advance the political fortunes of Elizabethan and Stuart England."--BOOK JACKET.