Abstract

The most important of Francis Bacon’s argument against Aristotelian syllogistic logic as a main method of investigation was his doctrine of Idols, closely connected to the contemporary Anglican theological views on imperfect human nature. In his criticism of the first notion of human mind, based on mistaken abstraction, Bacon separated “ars inveniendi”, “ars judicandi” and “ars tradendi” and argued for a new nonverbal form of communication, based on “real characters”. Bacon's conventional concept of the universal language, strongly influenced by Aristotle, was not realized by the philosopher himself, but it was of great popularity in both European rationalism and British empiricism in the middle – second half of the 17th century.