Projection and critic of the scientific culture of Francis Bacon and Jonathan Swift

Abstract

The conception of technology in Bacon ap­pears throughout the Novum Organurn, the second part of his unfinished work, Instauratio Magna. In it Bacon sets a precedent for thje role that contemporary philosophy of science grants to techno­logy in the construction of scientific rationality. But it is in the Utopian fiction Nueva Atlantida where he best establishes his ideas about the role of science and technology in the shaping of the human world. A similar view of the role of scien­ce is Swift's. Both Bacon and Swift illus­trate one of the traits of British tradition between the XVII and the XIX centuries in the approach toward technology: its tendency for fictional tales.