Jose Cerna

This paper analyses the impact of Spanish Renaissance science - or rather, its methodology - on the scientific thought of Francis Bacon. The aim of this study is to identify the features of Baconian thought that are similar to some of the concepts and practices of Spanish scholars. Specifically, the text tries to demonstrate the hypothetic influence of Spanish thought on Bacon’s concepts of the institutionalisation of knowledge, empirical and experimental methods of scientific research, the idea that "power is knowledge" and the ways of classification of sciences. Some simplifications and misinterpretations of the Spanish roots of Baconian science are also reappraised or refuted in this paper. © FILOSOFIA, 2013.

The study concerns the theme of human dignity in the sixteenth-century Ibero-American environment. It indicates parallels and motifs of these treatises congruent with contemporary European works about human dignity as well as their specifics. Fascination with what the discovery of the New World meant for the growth of human dignity and gnoseological optimism is considered to be a specific feature. Particular Spanish treatises about the dignity of man are examined as well as discursively diversified contemporary texts of Ibero-American provenance which connect the theme of human dignity with the discovery of the New World. © 2018, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. All rights reserved.