Knowledge, Power, Mathematics

Bacon's fundamental principle--Knowledge is Power--means that Knowledge is fundamentally Techne, i. e. Know-How, a formulation usually falsified by its fragmentation into Knowing-That and Having-Power-Over.  Likewise, the foundation of Modern Epistemology is Method, from which, in accordance with that fragmentation, competing concepts of Knowing-That emerge--Rationalism and Empiricism.  Thus, still remaining disavowed by mainstream Philosophers, is the rogue insight two centuries later that Descartes' Discourse on Method is an expression of a Will to Power.  Also overshadowed in the Meditations, the usual attention to which is on a Jesuit's wrestling with orthodox Theology, is its more radical heterodoxy--the introduction of Mathematics as Techne, i. e. founding it on the Cogito, thereby supplanting the tradition, beginning with Pythagoras, of it as a Knowing-That.  So, Descartes can be conceived as advancing Baconism with a principle that is formulated as: Mathematics is Power, the consequences of which have been much of subsequent history.