Francis Bacon on the active subject of cognition

The article attempts to see the methodology of empirical science proposed by Francis Bacon from an epistemological point of view. It considers the concept of the subject of cognition and its interaction with the cognizable object. The term “active subject of cognition” could not be used by an English philosopher, since this term reflects one of the later approaches to understanding the process of cognition. The article shows that Bacon points to the activity-based nature of the scientific experiment. This approach allows us to give a solution to the problem of the role of sensory data in cognition, which allows us to avoid the acathalepsy of ancient skepticism. The article shows that Bacon’s understanding of the experiment can be considered as the first approach to the representation of the givenness of the object of cognition in the forms of practice. At the same time, the reason why this attitude was not developed in the theory of cognition of the 17th and 18th centuries is analyzed. The author of the article sees the explanation of this fact in the exceptional role of anthropological concepts adopted in the philosophy of the European Enlightenment. The selfsufficiency of the epistemological subject, its cognitive autonomy, is the anthropological basis of the theory of cognition of the past. It is manifested in the classical concepts of sensualism, rationalism and Kantian transcendentalism, which fully realized the idea of a self-sufficient epistemological subject. Epistemological search cannot ignore this circumstance. The modern solution to the problem of cognition requires a new anthropology based on the study of the cultural and active evolution of human communities, and an explanation for the formation of a cognitive attitude to the world and human cognitive abilities. The author shows that Bacon was one of the initiators of an active version of the theory of knowledge. The justification of the validity of this judgment is the subject of this article. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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