ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyses the successive stages of development of Francis Bacon’s criticisms of speculative thinking in ancient and modern philosophy. It demonstrates how Bacon develops an interesting and polemically charged typology of errors of speculation, some of which derive from Cornelius Agrippa and Michel de Montaigne. The book explores the place of experience and empirical argument more generally in the formation of Hobbes’ political theory. It argues that in Leviathan Hobbes does appeal to introspective experience, and even to human imagination, in order to establish man’s tendency to war. The book also argues that Locke imbibed and fully expressed the ethos of the new experimental philosophy, an ethos that was at once utilitarian, open-minded, intellectually humble and epistemically individualistic in its approach to certainty.
