Researcher Profile · Bacon Studies

Dana Jalobeanu

Professor of Philosophy, University of Bucharest · Professor of Early Modern Philosophy, University of Technology Nuremberg

Teaches early modern philosophy and history and philosophy of science. Her research centers on the emergence of early modern experimental philosophy and its interplay with "Baconian science." General editor of the first Romanian edition of Bacon's philosophical works, and a member of the Oxford Francis Bacon project, where she is coordinating the volume on Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum.

STUDY NO. 002

Disciplining Experience: Francis Bacon's Experimental Series and the Art of Experimenting

Argues Bacon's natural histories are built from disciplined "experimental series," generated through eight "modes" of literate experience, that serve both to produce new knowledge and to train the reader in his method.

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STUDY NO. 003

Elements of Natural History in Sidereus Nuncius

Argues Galileo wrote his telescopic discoveries in the conventions of early modern natural history, and that Kepler and Bacon both read the report as raw material for a larger, unfinished natural history of the heavens rather than a finished theoretical claim.

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Disciplining Experience connects to Grade 6 — The Method, part of the K-12 reasoning curriculum's Method Years, where students learn the full hypothesis → test → revise cycle she traces through Bacon's own experimental series. Grade 6 exists at the curriculum-architecture level; its full lessons have not yet been built.

Elements of Natural History in Sidereus Nuncius connects to Grade 9 — Idols of the Theater, part of the Idols of Society years, where students learn to weigh a new claim against an inherited authoritative system rather than deferring to it — the dynamic she traces in Kepler and Bacon's handling of Galileo's report. Grade 9 exists at the curriculum-architecture level; its full lessons have not yet been built.

Jalobeanu is president of the European Society for History of Science, co-editor of the Journal of Early Modern Studies, and co-founder of the Princeton-Bucharest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy. She co-edited the Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences (Springer, 2022) and the Cambridge History of Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Beyond Bacon, her work also covers:

Roman Stoicism and its reception in the Renaissance and early modern philosophy — including a recent book on Seneca's Letters to Lucilius
The history of cosmology and early modern physics
The reception of Baconianism across seventeenth-century Europe, including its blending with Cartesian natural philosophy

She has translated and edited several of Bacon's works into Romanian, including Sylva Sylvarum, The Advancement of Learning, and New Atlantis.