This text focuses, in a preliminary way, on the relations between Francis Bacon's reflections on the limits of our cognitive faculties and philosophical skepticism, a theme not much considered by most of recent commentaries, in spite of Bacon's own explicit and numerous allusions to this philosophy. Even if these allusions seem at first sight somewhat loose and not very sharp, some of them reveal, we think, not only its relevance for understanding of some aspects of his own enterprise, but also Bacon's attention to the skeptical literature produced on the period. Moreover, the particularities of his own interpretation of skepticism seem to anticipate important features of the way this philosophy was understood by later philosophers as Hume.
Bacon; Skepticism; Idols; Empiricism; Montaigne; Descartes