Makin' Bacon: An Insightful Guide to Sir Francis Bacons' Rhetorical Contributions
Ahh, bacon. Quite possibly one of the most adored breakfast foods. You might be wondering why this seemingly creepy man is blocking your view of the crispy meat strips we know and love, and honestly who could blame you? While Sir Francis Bacon is not the man actually responsible for the bacon we're familiar with today, Sir Francis Bacon is known as an empiricist rhetorician, alive and thriving in the enlightenment period.
You might find yourself asking, what the heck is rhetoric, who the heck is this guy, and why the heck are we not discussing the breakfast food? Fear not, as a student who has survived the trials and tribulations that accompany the rhetoric course offered (and required!) here at FSU, i'm here to aid you in your journey, hopefully proving not only rhetoric's relevance, but the relevance of Sir Francis Bacon and his rheotrical contributions as an empiricist in particular!
As a first year EWM student, you'll enevitably be learning about rhetoric, the study of purposeful communication, which will aid you in your future writing endeavors. Believe it or not, it's incredibly useful and easy to get what you want, when you know how to communicate effectively. Sir Francis Bacon, along with many other famous rhetoricians, have aided us in our understanding of communication, be it speech, text, what have you, as well as the relationship between rhetoric and knowledge, which is known as epistemology, and depicts how we know what we know. While a seemingly difficult abstract concept to wrap your head around, an understanding and appreciation of rhetoric proves useful in a plethora of situations.
*An Overview*
Belonged to a group of scientific philosophers known as The Empiricists, who believed "that science and logic could solve all problems and that mututal agreement among experts could verify truth" They also believed that language could not accurately represent pure and objective knowledge, and so they were therefore critical of language (and rhetoric) and sought to purify it.
Epistemology: knowledge comes from experience, specifically through inductive reasoning, which birthed the scientific method. The empiricist way of thinking was also linked with psychology, as they worked to understand our internal processess.
Defined rhetoric as: "The function of applying reason to imagination for the better moving of the will"
