The paper presents evidence that Roger Bacon was endeavoring to structure what he considered as a “new metaphysics”. Moreover, it identifies the Opus maius as Bacon’s new preliminary text in metaphysics and morals. The evidence is found in the Communia naturalium and in the Communia mathematica, in which one finds a reference to the Opus maius as a sketch for a new metaphysics. From part seven of the latter work, namely, the Moralis philosophia, one can see that (...) Bacon views the latter work as closely connected to his new metaphysics. In fact, the material in the Communia mathematica connects his studies on languages to the communication of his moral vision. I present a review of the sources for the different parts of the Opus maius. This is followed by an account of Bacon’s philosophical sources. It becomes clear that Bacon was acquainted with Plato’s Meno, Phaedo and part of the Timaeus with Calcidius’s Commentary. The variety and significance of his Neo-Platonic sources are outlined. It turns out that Bacon was not an Avicennian substance-dualist. Moreover, the paper demonstrates the extent to which Bacon’s criticism of Averroes was based on his natural philosophy. Bacon presents an account of human intellectual knowledge which is clearly based on and refers to his account of human perceptual knowledge in his Perspectiva. He uses his account of an integrated perceptual and intellectual human individual being to question the Latin Averroist’s claim that there is one possible intellect for all human beings. (shrink)

In some passages of the Opus maius and the Opus tertium, Roger Bacon holds that mathematical objects are the immediate and adequate objects of human’s intellect: in our sensible life, the intellect develops mostly around quantity itself. We comprehend quantities and bodies by a perception of the intellect because their forms belong to the intellect, namely, an understanding of mathematical truths is almost innate within us. A natural reaction to these sentences is to deduce a strong Pythagorean or (...) Platonic influence in Roger Bacon’s theory of mathematical knowledge. However, Bacon has always followed Aristotle’s view according to which numbers and figures have no real existence apart from the sensible substances, and universal knowledge comes from sensory experience as well. It appears that Bacon’s claim that quantity is the first object of human's intellect comes from an original reading of a passage of Aristotle’s On Memory and Reminiscence. In this paper, we try to clarify Bacon’s views about mathematical abstraction and intellectual perception of mathematical forms in his Parisian questions on Physics and Liber De causis, the Perspectiva, Opus maius, Opus tertium, the Communia mathematica and the Geometria speculativa. We conclude that Bacon considered mathematical abstraction as a mode of perception of the internal structure of the physical world: mathematical abstraction does not mean for Bacon an act of separation of ideal forms from the sensible matter, but a possibility of intuition of the internal structure of the sensible world itself, a faculty which is necessary for human’s perception of space and time. (shrink)

The idea that nature is governed by laws and that the goal of science is to discover and formulate these laws, rose to prominence during the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. It was manifestly held by the most significant actors of that revolution such as Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton. But this idea was not new. In fact, it made an appearance in the Middle Ages, and it is likely to have emerged already in Antiquity.1In this paper we (...) pay close attention to the concept of law of nature in the writings of Roger Bacon, the outspoken Franciscan who promoted experimental science. We will be using Bacon as a test case to show that long before the... (shrink)

로저 베이컨(Roger Bacon)의 『상형증가론』은 서유럽 후기중세에서 전개된 다양한 상 형론의 원천을 이루는 작품으로 거론되어 왔다. 그는 로베르투스 그로세테스테(Robertus Grosseteste)로 대표되는 이른바 옥스퍼드학파의 자연철학에 기반한 상형론을 전개한다 는 점에서 차후 페트루스 요한네스 올리비(Petrus Johannes Olivi)에 이르는 중세 프란치 스코회 상형론 전통의 한 주축을 형성한다. 그럼에도 지난 베이컨 연구들은 대부분 근대과 학자의 원형으로서 베이컨을 조명하는 과학사적 접근에만 의존할 뿐, 철학자 베이컨의 초 상을 그리는데 인색했던 것처럼 보인다. 특히 과학사의 관점은 베이컨의 상형론을 중세광 학이라는 제한된 틀 안에서 그것의 일부로 다루었던 까닭에 (...) 베이컨의 상형론이 가지고 있 는 철학적 지반에 대한 분석에 충실하지 못한 일면적 관점만 제공했을 뿐이다. 하지만 우 리가 철학적-문헌학적으로 접근한다면 베이컨의 상형론은 아리스토텔레스철학의 재해석 에서 비롯된 질료의 능동적 가능태 이론의 산물로서 나타난다. 더욱이 베이컨의 상형론은 이처럼 독창적인 질료형상론의 토대로부터 우주와 지구 사이의 자연적 변화작용과 지각하 는 주체의 시각이론 양자 모두를 동시에 설명할 수 있는 일종의 보편수학을 구성한다. 따 라서 우리는 베이컨의 상형론의 원천적 기원과 그것이 도달하는 학문적 결과를 분석함으 로써 기존의 과학사 서술에서 벗어난 철학자 로저 베이컨의 면모들 중 하나를 드러내고자 하며, 나아가 이 분석을 기초로 베이컨의 상형론은 ‘중세광학’보다도 ‘시각학적 자연철학’ 이라 규정될 필요가 있다고 주장하려 한다. (shrink)

Early in the 1240s the University of Paris hired a recent graduate from Oxford, Roger Bacon by name, to teach the arts and introduce Aristotle to its curriculum. Along with eight sets of questions on Aristotle's natural works and the Metaphysics he claims to have authored another eight books before he returned to Oxford around 1247. Within the prodigious output of this period we find a treatise on logic titled Summulae dialectices, and it is this that is here (...) annotated and presented in translation. The book is unique in several respects. First, there is the breadth of its sources. Not only do we find explicit reference to the usual authors such as Aristotle, Plato, Boethius, Porphyry, Cicero, and Priscian, we also find unexpected reference to Augustine, Bernardus Silvestris, Donatus, Terence, and Themistius, along with mention of the Muslim philosophers Algazel and Ibn Rushd. Second, it is clear that Bacon is drawing on or reacting to an extraordinarily wide variety of medieval sources: Garland the Computist, Hugh of St. Victor, Master Hugo, Hugutius of Pisa, Isidore of Seville, Nicholas of Damas, Nicholas of Paris, Richard of Cornwall, Robert Kilwardby, Robert of Lincoln, and Robert the Englishman. Third, it unexpectedly presents a full-blown treatment of Aristotle's theory of demonstration. And finally, Bacon reveals a highly unorthodox view of the signification of common terms. Bacon, here, takes his students and us deeper into medieval sources and controversy than any of his rivals do. (shrink)

My goal in this paper is to contribute to the literature on Roger Bacon's epistemology by focusing on the issue of perception of quantity. The reading I aim to substantiate is that Bacon's account is best understood in terms of indirect realism. I call it indirect realism because although we have access to quantities as they exist in nature, the account is mediated by the use of a quasi-syllogism. The quasi-syllogism is constructed based on three inputs, the (...) species of the eye, colour, and light. To defend this reading I follow five steps. First, I analyse the importance of quantity in perception, and then, in steps two and three, I look at Bacon's theory of perception from its two sides, extramission and intromission. In the fourth step I look at the quasi-syllogisms that mediate cognition of quantities, and in the fifth and final step, I draw all the threads together and make the case for Bacon's indirect realism of quantity perception. (shrink)

In Posterior Analytics 1.13, Aristotle introduced a distinction between two kinds of demonstrations: of the fact (quia), and of the reasoned fact (propter quid). Both demonstrations take a syllogistic form, in which the middle term links either two facts (in the case of quia demonstrations) or a proximate cause and a fact (in the case of propter quid demonstrations). While Aristotle stated that all the terms of one demonstration must be taken from within the same subject matter, he admitted some (...) exceptions in which the fact and the reasoned fact are instantiated by terms from different sciences, as when mathematics provides the reason and another science the empirical fact. This was the methodological foundation of the “mixed sciences”, a subject of varying interpretations in the thirteenth century. Roger Bacon (C. 1220–1292), adhering to Robert Grosseteste’s (C. 1168–1563) commentary on Posterior Analytics, presented a unique interpretation of this exception. He replaced propositional demonstrations with geometrical considerations and diagrams, thus producing geometrical arguments for theorems in natural philosophy. I focus on Bacon’s propter quid arguments, as applied in three case studies: (1) the heat caused by a body moving to its natural place; (2) the motion of the scale; (3) and the contraction of water. Based on an analysis of these demonstrations, I argue that Bacon’s interpretation of propter quid demonstration reflects his application of a scientific methodology that imbues geometrical objects with causal power over material bodies. (shrink)

This edition, with translation and notes, by an outstanding historian of medieval optics, should serve to make Roger Bacon better understood and appreciated by those interested in the history of Western thought. Some time ago Bacon was lauded as a precursor of modern science, as an inventor, an innovator in the use of experimental and mathematical methods, a man ahead of his time whose genius went unnoticed by his contemporaries. Then a reaction set in, and the claim (...) was made that his results were all anticipated by others, especially by Robert Grosseteste, and that he had really contributed little to the advance of scientific knowledge. Lindberg sets the record straight in his careful and documented study of these seminal writings. As he notes in summary: "[T]his work did not foreshadow the science of subsequent ages...; rather, it represents an intelligent and creative response to a variety of ancient traditions. Bacon did not possess a seventeenth-century or twentieth-century mind, but a very good thirteenth-century one; and there is no possibility of understanding his achievement unless we view it in medieval context". (shrink)

The paper examines Roger Bacon’s use of the concept virtus in the Communia naturalium and De multiplication specierum. It focuses on the roles which virtus and species play as vehicles of causality in the inanimate realm. It analyses the distinct functions played by virtus in the motion of celestial spheres, the power of natural place, the attraction of iron to magnet, and the universal nature. The analysis concludes that virtus is an efficient power, a feature of form, capable (...) of causing local motion and instigating natural processes. Species is matter’s response to the stimulation made by virtus through which every natural action, to the exclusion of local motion, is made. Species is a non-efficient power, an ‘appetite’ internal to matter. It is an expression of matter’s inherent inclination to promote and perfect itself, the result of matter’s ‘active potentiality’. (shrink)

The paper argues that Roger Bacon adhered to a unique form of geometrical atomism, according to which elemental matter can be analysed into cubic (when at rest) or pyramidal (when in motion) portions. Bacon addressed geometrical atomism from the perspective of the Aristotelian review, using his interpretation of Aristotelian principles to render the theory plausible. He was mostly concerned with solving the contradiction between the angular shapes of the portions and the shape of the elemental spheres. His (...) motivation for doing so, I argue, was his conviction in the applicability of geometry onto natural philosophy, and his goal was to render matter capable of geometrical analysis. In this way, he was convinced, geometrical properties can be considered efficient causes of matter’s spatial formation and motion. (shrink)

A critical edition and facing-page translation, accompanied by substantial analytical introduction and notes, of Perspectiva by Roger Bacon, a foundational text of modern optics written in about 1260, which defined the subject for the next 350 years.

The paper examines the different uses of and responses to Aristotle’s account of science in the first wave of interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of science and works in natural science and metaphysics in the early 13th century in Roger Bacon and Albert the Great. The author argues that Bacon reduces all the disciplines to mathematics as the most scientific discipline, even as he argues that experimentum is at the center of scientific evidence and conclusions. Albert the Great, (...) by contrast, gives a more strongly analogical account of science, with broader differences between different disciplines as operating according to different intellectual ‘lights’ and methods. Albert champions experimentum in physics in a special way, rejecting a mathematical physics. (shrink)

This article is devoted to Roger Bacon’s understanding of perspectiva as “the first of all natural sciences.” After considering a few alternative medieval definitions and classifications of this discipline – such as al-Fārābī’s, Grosseteste’s and Kilwardby’s – the author turns to Bacon’s arguments for according to perspectiva so exceptional a role. He shows that Bacon’s arguments are grounded in his peculiar understanding of the visual process: according to Bacon, vision is indeed the only sense in (...) which perception takes place “by reasoning”. The author argues that this theory of perception also lays the foundations for Bacon’s – prima facie amiss – claim that “concerning vision alone, and no other sense, have philosophers developed a separate science.” The author explores this point by contrasting with one another Bacon’s conception of perspectiva and of music, and closes with some more general remarks on the implications of Bacon’s account of the visual process for his theory of knowledge. Based on his theory of a “vision by reasoning,” the author concludes that Bacon came to reinterpret perspectiva as the organon of visual knowledge. (shrink)

Book one consists of Bacon's scathing attack on current philosophy and on the scientific method. He attacks the syllogistic method, and the various idols that prevent men from investigating Nature in a reasonable way. The lack of attention paid to natural philosophy and the excessive reverence for ancient authors are key reasons why man's knowledge of nature has progressed so slowly. Book Two is a detailed explanation of Bacon's method, using various examples. It begins by creating tables of (...) the various instances that meet in the nature to be investigated. After the relevant instances have been presented to the intellect, the task of induction can be carried out. Induction acts by excluding various possibilities, until an affirmative has been achieved. The next stage is the consideration of privileged instances, which assist the process in terms of information or of practice. (shrink)

Este artículo presenta la traducción al español de la parte sexta del De multiplicatione specierum de Roger Bacon, originalmente escrito en latín, y que posee como tema transversal la filosofía natural. Esta traducción tiene el carácter de ser comprensiva, esto es, fue escrita de tal forma que pueda ser entendida por el lector. También, para efectos de un mejor ejercicio pedagógico, se propone un comentario filosófico– crítico, es decir, una breve paráfrasis explicativa, que otorgue luces a la comunidad (...) de habla hispana en función de potenciar el acercamiento a este texto traducido. Nos encontramos ad portas de la primera traducción comentada en español de una parte de la obra de Roger Bacon3, quien es real e indudablemente el padre del método científico y el verdadero reformador de la ciencia moderna. (shrink)

The Philosophy and Science of Roger Bacon offers new insights and research perspectives on one of the most intriguing characters of the Middle Ages, Roger Bacon. At the intersections between science and philosophy, the volume analyses central aspects of Bacon's reflections on how nature and society can be perfected. The volume dives into the intertwining of Bacon's philosophical stances on nature, substantial change, and hylomorphism with his scientific discussion of music, alchemy, and medicine. The (...) Philosophy and Science of Roger Bacon also investigates Bacon's projects of education reform and his epistemological and theological ground maintaining that humans and God are bound by wisdom, and therefore science. Finally, the volume examines how Bacon's doctrines are related to a wider historical context, particularly in consideration of Peter John Olivi, John Pecham, Peter of Ireland, and Robert Grosseteste. The Philosophy and Science of Roger Bacon is a crucial tool for scholars and students working in the history of philosophy and science and also for a broader audience interested in Roger Bacon and his long-lasting contribution to the history of ideas. (shrink)

In his major works for the pope, as well as several other works from his maturity, Bacon focused on the utility of natural knowledge, both in terms of human know-how and what that know-how could produce. He looked to the courtly sciences, which privilege application and knowledge gained through the sensorium, as sources of natural knowledge and as exemplars for the potential of natural knowledge. This essay argues that Roger Bacon’s work ought to be understood within the (...) context of the court. Bacon’s emphasis on devices in the pursuit of knowledge and utility demonstrates the extent to which the courtly sciences were valued alongside traditional natural philosophical frameworks, and need to be understood in that context. Both the courtly sciences and Bacon’s theory of scientia experimentalis focus on materials, sensory knowledge, and knowledge of particulars in pursuit of applied ends. Bacon drew inspiration from the courtly sciences in theorizing how natural knowledge could serve ruling power. By examining Bacon’s major works on scientia experimentalis and analyzing his reliance on examples from the history of Alexander the Great, this essay demonstrates the interrelation of political power and erudite knowledge, and how they intersected through the cultivation and application of experimentum and technology. Finally, Bacon’s interest in the utility of knowledge suggests that courtly settings in this period are significant locations for the development and applications of natural knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Garrulus sum et loquax et expedire nescio. Diu te tenui in istis, sed de cetero procedam.” These are the words of Richard Rufus of Cornwall, a thirteenth-century Scholastic and lecturer at the Universities of Paris and Oxford. Rufus is apologizing to his readers: “I am garrulous and loquacious, and I don’t know how to be efficient. I have detained you with these things a long while, but let me (...) now proceed to another topic.” This apology introduces the third part of the Speculum animae, a preliminary modern edition of which we publish here. In this short treatise, Rufus presents a unique Aristotelian theory of perception, describes what is and is not intelligible, and finally proves to his own satisfaction the immortality of the rational soul. To us this would hardly seem the place to apologize for being long-winded; indeed, we might wonder how Rufus could accomplish such an ambitious task in such a short treatise. We would certainly not accuse him of excessive verbosity. But Rufus was a man of exceptional humility, who once referred to himself as the least of the lesser thinkers of his time.1Despite Rufus’s humility, he was no minor figure in the development of Scholastic philosophy. A teacher at the Universities of Paris and Oxford ,2 he is the author of the earliest known, surviving lectures on several of Aristotle’s major texts, including the Metaphysics, the Physics, De generatione et corruptione, and De anima3 . In fact, Rufus was one of the very first lecturers to teach the libri naturales at Paris after a ban on such instruction was effectively lifted in 1231 A.D. His works were influential not only among his contemporaries, but also among later authors, particularly John Duns Scotus. Roger Bacon, though a harsh critic of Rufus, acknowledged Rufus’s influence and fame decades after his death, albeit among what Bacon termed the “vulgar multitude.”4The Speculum animae is one of Rufus’s later works. He begins the treatise by posing the following question: “In what way is the soul all things?” This refers, of course, to a familiar doctrine Aristotle establishes in the De anima—that the soul is, in some way, all things —and Rufus is here seeking to clarify it. But this is, in fact, only the first of five questions addressed in the Speculum. The five questions Rufus posits and answers in this treatise are, in order:1. In what manner is the soul all things?2. In what manner do a sensible and the sense, or an intelligible and the possible intellect, become one?3. What is predicated and of what is it predicated?4. What is intelligible?5. What is the cause of the immortality of the soul?In this short work, therefore, Rufus addresses apparently diverse topics including perception, understanding, logic, and the nature of the soul. But, in fact, the Speculum is principally a summary of Rufus’s theory of human perception and understanding. Like other medieval theories of perception and understanding, Rufus’s theory centers around the notion of species, a kind of form that is received in the soul when a person senses something or grasps something intellectually.5 In this, and in other aspects of the theory, Rufus was heavily dependent on Aristotle and St. Augustine. Rufus was working in a philosophical tradition based on Aristotle’s categories that had been accepted for centuries in the West. But in his lifetime, the Aristotelian corpus was enlarged to include Aristotle’s psychology and more generally his natural philosophy and metaphysics, together with the commentaries of Averroës . As is well known, this philosophical tradition was respected and continued not just by Rufus but by many authors after his time.So what makes Rufus’s theory.. (shrink)

It is often supposed that in order to refute the view that laws of nature are necessary truths it is sufficient to appeal to Hume's argument from the conceivability of to the possibility of their being false. But while Hume's argument does present the necessitarian with insuperable difficulties it needs to be made clear just what these are. The mere appeal to Hume is quite insufficient for what he says can be interpreted in more than one way. And if it (...) constitutes an argument rather than a mere assertion Kneale has given reason to suppose that it is at least not obviously valid. The upshot of this article is that Hume's argument may be seen as a direct challenge to the notion that there could be propositions whose modal value is necessarily "opaque to the human intellect". (shrink)

Par-dela les limites de la methode experimentale, tributaire des sens exterieurs, se deploie une experience toute spirituelle du monde suprasensible, royaume des choses morales et substances incorporelles, ainsi que du monde surnaturel, celui des arcanes de la grace et de la gloire. Meme dans le domaine des choses corporelles, ou l'experience sensible reste imparfaite, cette experience mystique qu'est l'illumination interieure est necessaire pour suppleer a l'insuffisance de l'experience des sens, simplement humaine et philosophique. Roger Bacon nous apparait a (...) travers cet ouvrage comme mystique, mais aussi comme humaniste et savant: cette harmonie dans sa personne n'est pas sans repondre a l'harmonie des choses ou le surnaturel s'ajoute a la nature pour la parfaire, puisque apres tout ces deux facons de connaitre le Createur et la creature peuvent bien eter la double manifestation d'un seul et meme gout imperieux pour l'experience. Roger Bacon peut bien s'eprnedre des donnees de la nature et des idees de la litterature profane sans pour autant se dejuger: s'il est vrai que c'est le meme Dieu qui a fait la Nature et l'Ecriture, c'est le meme Dieu qui nous illumine de l'illumination generale dans l'experience physique et de l'illumination interieure dans l'experience mystique. (shrink)

Back in thirteenth-century Europe, in the early years of the great universities, learning was spiced with the danger of mob violence and a terrifyingly repressive religious censorship. Roger Bacon, a humble and devout English friar, seems an unlikely figure to challenge the orthodoxy of his day - yet he risked his life to establish the basis for true knowledge. Born c.1220, Bacon was passionately interested in the natural world and how things worked. Such dangerous topics were vetoed (...) by his Order, and it was only when a new Pope proved sympathetic that he began compiling his encyclopaedia on everything from optics to alchemy - the synopsis took a year and ran to 800,000 words and he was never to complete the work itself. Sadly, the enlightened Pope died, and Bacon was tried as a magician and incarcerated for ten years. Legend transformed Bacon into a sorcerer, 'Doctor Mirabilis', yet he taught that all magic was based on fraud, and his books were the first flowering of the scientific thinking that would transform our world. He advanced the understanding of optics, made geographical breakthroughs later used by Columbus, predicted everything from horseless carriages to the telescope, and stressed the importance of mathematics to science, a significance ignored for 400 years. His biggest contribution was to insist that a study of the natural world by observation and exact measurement was the surest foundation for truth. Clegg uncovers the realities of life in a medieval university and friary, setting out the shadowy facts of Bacon's life alongside his writings. The result is both a fascinating biography and a picture of the age. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Bodyheartminding” (xin 心): Reconceiving the Inner Self and the Outer World in the Language of Holographic Focus and FieldRoger T. Amesin body consciousness: a philosophy of mindfulness and somaesthetics, Richard Shusterman expands upon a professional oeuvre in which his exploration of the phenomenon of “body consciousness” has effected nothing less than a somatic turn in the contemporary Western philosophical narrative.1 But his contribution does not end there. Over the (...) past two decades, the reach and influence of his “somaesthetics” has been extended to the gates of China. Indeed, it has become a theme engaged by scholars of China’s indigenous philosophical traditions, thus providing an opportunity for a further edifying conversation between the Chinese and Western philosophical traditions.2 And it is this conversation, as it has been inspired by Shusterman’s work, that I propose to join in this short essay.In Body Consciousness, Shusterman tells the story of how John Dewey advances the pragmatic project of not only understanding the body better, but indeed of applying the Alexander Technique as his way of using his own body properly.3 Just as Dewey has been a prominent resource for Shusterman in his development of somaesthetics, for Dewey in turn, it was William James’s Principles of Psychology that was a self-confessed inspiration for the development of his own evolving interpretation of pragmatism.4 Indeed, one way of reading Dewey’s philosophical career and his thirty-seven-volume opus is that it is a sustained effort to take the radical “stream-of-consciousness” insights developed in James’s Principles to their logical, systematic conclusion. In pursuing this project, while appreciative, Dewey is at times impatient with James’s dualistic lapses in which he continues to separate individuals from community, mind from body, emotions from intellect, agents from actions, and theory from practice. Dewey takes these unfortunate reversions to old ways of thinking as serving only to confound James’s holistic doctrines of pure experience and radical empiricism. Given Dewey’s own postulate of [End Page 100] immediate and continuous empiricism, one way of tracking his journey from having been inspired by James’s biological naturalism to achieving his own philosophical coherence is to register his unrelenting aversion to dualism in any form.But Dewey himself was not always consistent in this respect. Shusterman gives an account of the early neo-Hegelian Dewey who, affirming the familiar transcendent conception of soul we associate with idealism, unsurprisingly embraces a clear soul and body dualism. And in spite of the philosophically mature Dewey’s best efforts to think “process,” he has no choice but to use both a language and a grammar freighted with substance ontology that resists his more holistic insights. On occasion, even while trying to remain consistent in his thinking, Dewey seems to fall victim to terminology that if not dualistic is at best ambiguous. Dewey’s struggle against this problem of equivocation is particularly apparent in some of the language he appeals to in attempting to put the Humpty Dumpty of mind and body together again. In his effort to register the irreducible continuity and inseparability of the nonanalytic abstractions we differentiate as body and mind—the ontological givenness or “hadness” of “bodyminding”—Dewey still at times invokes terms such as “combination,” “integration,” “unity,” and so on, that take as their suppressed premise “two things becoming one.” By way of contrast, in the correlative vocabulary of Chinese process cosmology, expressions such as yinyang 陰陽, the natural/cultural and the human (tianren 天人), and knowing and doing (zhixing 知行), primacy is given to vital relationality and the continuity it entails. It is not putting two things together that is referenced with these binomials, but the deepening of the horizon of constitutive, internal relationships that transforms the two aspects of the same phenomenon qualitatively into harmonics (he 和) for yinyang, sagacity (sheng 聖) for tianren, and acting wisely (zhi 智) for zhixing. In each instance, the two aspects themselves are simply conceptual abstractions from a complex relational process. The proper and effective measure (du 度) sought in this Confucian cosmology is not quantitatively more or less of two distinct things—taking mind and body as our example—but rather a qualitative and transformative change that... (shrink)

Oscar Wilde remarked in The Picture of Dorian Gray that, ‘It is only the shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’ Over three centuries of natural science show that, at least as far as the study of the natural world is concerned, Wilde's epigram is itself shallow. Weber used the term ‘disenchantment’ to mean the elimination of magic from the modern scientific world view: the intellectual rationalisation of the world embodied in modern science has made it impossible to believe (...) in magic or an invisible God or gods, without a ‘sacrifice of the intellect’. (shrink)

To this date Roger Bacon remains one of the controversial and colorful figures in the history of empirical science. This paper is an attempt to ascertain his views regarding the nature and function of empirical science and to compare his writings on this topic with those of the more famous Francis Bacon. The ground for comparison is the fact that both men have often been cast in the same role in the history of science; i.e., they have (...) both been acclaimed as the first in the western world to emphasize and bring out the importance of experimental method in the accumulation of knowledge. In this connection Francis, of the sixteenth century, has long been acknowledged as the father of the experimental method in preference to Roger, of the thirteenth century. In effect, therefore, this paper probes the relative merits of the claims for each thinker. (shrink)

Roger Bacon is a remarkable figure for his theory of the sign. According to the new reading hypothesis presented in this article, the whole theory is grounded on the relational nature of the sign. Every sign is involved in two relations: one to the interpreter, the other to the significate, the first being “more essential” than the second. The hypothesis allows for a better understanding of Bacon’s central claim that speakers constantly re-impose words in colloquial practice, as (...) well as of its main technical developments. In his whole semantics, Bacon’s focus is not so much on entities as on relations holding between entities. From a comparative point of view, the paper offers considerations on the theological background of Bacon’s ideas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionWhen I first came across Dieter Hattrup's analysis of the De reductione I noted that the professor from Paderborn was trying, step by step, to trace the authorship back to friars influenced by Roger Bacon – a reductio ad Baconem, if you will. Hattrup's argument that Roger Bacon was indirectly involved in the composition of the De reductione evoked the fleeting memory of a pop (...) culture game created by American college students in the 1990s called the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," whereby the characters in any given film must be linked to a film with the Hollywood actor, Kevin Bacon, by comparing no more than six films. To mention the esteemed theologian in such a fleeting cultural context is not meant to trivialize his argument in any way; rather, the intent is to underscore, admittedly tongue in cheek, the intricacies of his argument against Bonaventurian authorship of the De reductione as outlined in the monograph Ekstatik der Geschichte: Die Entwicklung der christologischen Erkenntnistheorie Bonaventuras and the journal article, "Bonaventura zwischen Mystik und Mystifikation: Wer ist der Autor von De reductione?" While Hattrup hesitates to claim Bacon as the author of De reductione, he does develop a systematic study that eventually leads, step by step, association by association, back to Roger Bacon. This essay examines and disputes Hattrup's claim by analyzing the historical context of his argument, the chronology and sources in question, the theme of the fourfold light and scripture, and the relationship between the sciences and theology. The numerous questions raised will underscore the fragility of his argument. Subsequent essays will treat the contemporary theological implications as well as the literary-theological genre and academic occasion of Bonaventure's De reductione.Historical ContextBefore we examine Hattrup's argument against Bonaventure as the author of the De reductione, let us first evoke the historical situation he suggests as the possible origin of the text. In 1267, Bonaventure warns his Minorite confreres of the dangers inherent in the sciences in the Collations on the Ten Commandments, and then, once again in 1268 in the Collations on Gifts of the Holy Spirit. The brothers in Bacon's circle are concerned because they contend that the sciences must be cultivated and consequently compose the De reductione. Their intent is to demonstrate how the sciences are integral to theology, such that even natural philosophy contains the wisdom of God. Hattrup sees this text stemming from Bacon's circle as a conscious attempt to subvert Bonaventure's understanding of the relationship between faith and reason in favor of the sciences by utilizing some of the General Minister's own language as mirrored in the Journey of the Soul into God and Francis of Assisi's experience of God in the natural world. The resulting text of the De reductione, according to Hattrup, is an intentional mystification of Bonaventure's own mystical or ecstatic methodology.Hattrup suggests that the De reductione came to Bonaventure's attention in 1270, but he is preoccupied with affairs in the early 1270s and only returns later to address the dangers he recognizes in the De reductione in another collation series in May of 1273, the Collations on the Six Days, or Hexaëmeron. The General Minister warns of those who entered religious life as friends of the sciences, the "hospites scientiae." They must place limits on their efforts in these fields of inquiry and not promote them as essential to theological reflection, as posited by the De reductione, if they wish to remain faithful to the ascetical-mystical vision of the Minorite Order. Unable to finish the Hexaëmeron due to ecclesial obligations, Bonaventure died unexpectedly in July of 1274 at the Council of Lyon. The text of the De reductione, found among Bonaventure's other writings, was dutifully copied and included among the Seraphic Doctor's literary corpus since at first glance this kurze Denkschrift appears to be from the deceased General Minister.Hattrup readily admits that.. (shrink)

Published in 1897, this was the first complete edition of Roger Bacon's influential thirteenth-century encyclopedia of science.

Francis Bacon (15611626) wrote that good scientists are not like ants (mindlessly gathering data) or spiders (spinning empty theories). Instead, they are like bees, transforming nature into a nourishing product. This essay examines Bacon's "middle way" by elucidating the means he proposes to turn experience and insight into understanding. The human intellect relies on "machines" to extend perceptual limits, check impulsive imaginations, and reveal nature's latent causal structure, or "forms." This constructivist interpretation is not intended to supplant inductivist (...) or experimentalist interpretations, but is designed to explicate Bacon's account of science as a collaborative project with several interdependent methodological goals. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Contents Acknowledgements vii Illustrations ix Preface xi Further Bibliography of A.C. Crombie xiii 1 Designed in the Mind: Western visions of Science, Nature and Humankind 1 2 The Western Experience of Scientific Objectivity 13 3 Historical Perceptions of Medieval Science 31 4 Robert Grosseteste 39 5 Roger Bacon [with J.D. North] 51 6 Infinite Power and the Laws of Nature: A Medieval Speculation 67 7 Experimental Science and the Rational Artist in Early Modern Europe 89 8 Mathematics and (...) Platonism in the Sixteenth-Century Italian Universities and in Jesuit Educational Policy 115 9 Sources of Galileo Galilei’s Early Natural Philosophy 149 10 The Jesuits and Galileo’s Ideas of Science and of Nature [with A. Carugo] 165 11 Galileo and the Art of Rhetoric [with A. Carugo] 231 12 Galileo Galilei: A Philosophical Symbol 257 13 Alexandre Koyré and Great Britain: Galileo and Mersenne 263 14 Marin Mersenne and the Origins of Language 275 15 Le Corps à la Renaissance: Theories of Perceiver and Perceived in Hearing 291 16 Expectation, Modelling and Assent in the History of Optics: i, Alhazen and the Medieval Tradition; ii, Kepler and Descartes 301 17 Contingent Expectation and Uncertain Choice: Historical Contexts of Arguments from Probabilities 357 18 P.-L. Moreau de Maupertuis, F.R.S. : Précurseur du Transformisme 407 19 The Public and Private Faces of Charles Darwin 429 20 The Language of Science 439 21 Some Historical Questions about Disease 443 22 Historians and the Scientific Revolution 451 23 The Origins of Western Science 465 Appendix to Chapter 10: 479 Sources and Dates of Galileos Writings [with A. Carugo] Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico [with A. Carugo] Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier Corrections to Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought 495 Index 497. (shrink)

Francis Bacon’s elusive notion of experience can be better understood when we relate it to his views on matter, motion, appetite and intellect, and bring to the fore its broader philosophical implications. Bacon’s theory of knowledge is embedded in a programme of disciplinary redefinition, outlined in the Advancement of Learning and De augmentis scientiarum. Among all disciplines, prima philosophia plays a key foundational role, based on the idea of both a physical parallelism between the human intellect and nature (...) and a theological parallelism between nature and God. Failure to assess Bacon’s distinctive position concerning the way in which the mind mirrors both the natural and the divine world, that is to say, the meaning of “reality,” has resulted in notoriously jejune discussions on Baconian empiricism, monotonously driven by epistemological concerns. As a result, the standard view on Bacon’s empiricism is as epistemologically comforting as it is imaginary, an “idol” in a genuinely Baconian sense. In this article, Bacon’s notion of experience will be discussed by examining those steps that he considered to be the crucial initial stages in the formation of human experience, stages described as a process of experiential literacy or, in emblematic terms, as a hunting expedition led by the mythological figure of Pan. I argue that a well-rounded analysis of Bacon’s experientia literata needs to take into account the complementary notion of the “spelling-book of nature”, that is, the original code of the primordial motions of matter. By getting acquainted with the first rudiments of experience through its spelling-book, one learns to read the book of nature and, most of all, to write new pages in it. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe paper examines the relevance of the nomological view of nature to three discussions of tide in the thirteenth century. A nomological conception of nature assumes that the basic explanatory units of natural phenomena are universally binding rules stated in quantitative terms. Robert Grosseteste introduced an account of the tide based on the mechanism of rarefaction and condensation, stimulated by the Moon's rays and their angle of incidence. He considered the Moon's action over the sea an example of the general (...) efficient causality exerted through the universal activity of light or species. Albert the Great posited a plurality of causes which cannot be reduced to a single cause. The connaturality of the Moon and the water is the only principle of explanation which he considered universal. Connaturality, however, renders neither formulation nor quantification possible. While Albert stressed the variety of causes of the tide, Roger Bacon emphasized regularity and reduced the various causes producing tides into forces. He replaced the terminology of ‘natures’ by one of ‘forces’. Force, which in principle can be accurately described and measured, thus becomes a commensurable aspect of a diverse cosmos. When they reasoned why waters return to their place after the tide, Grosseteste argued that waters return in order to prevent a vacuum, Albert claimed that waters ‘follow their own nature’, while Bacon held that the ‘proper force’ of the water prevails over the distant force of the first heaven. I exhibit, for the thirteenth century, moments of the move away from the Aristotelian concerns. The basic elements of these concerns were essences and natures which reflect specific phenomena and did not allow for an image of nature as a unified system. In the new perspective of the thirteenth century the key was a causal link between the position of the Moon and the tide cycle, a link which is universal and still qualitative, yet expressed as susceptible to quantification. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Symbolic Mathematics and the Intellect Militant: On Modern Philosophy’s Revolutionary SpiritCarl PageWhat makes modern philosophy different? My question presupposes the legitimacy of calling part of philosophy “modern.” That presupposition is in turn open to question as regards its meaning, its warrant, and the conditions of its applicability. 1 Importance notwithstanding, such further inquiries all start out from the phenomenon upon which everyone agrees: philosophy running through Plato and Aristotle (...) looks significantly different from philosophy running from Descartes to Kant.My concern in this essay is with the phenomenon of the difference itself, rather than with the second-order questions associated with how properly to assign it historical meaning. I take the difference between ancient and modern philosophy to be as significant as differences in philosophy’s history can be: modern philosophy rests on a new interpretation of the nature and fulfillment of human reason, and disputes about the nature of human reason are the ultimate battles of philosophy. But the general thesis is not my main point. 2 The focus of this essay falls on what may be called the integrity of the phenomenon, on the specific interpretation of human reason that lends modern philosophy its peculiar face. [End Page 233]Modern philosophy’s strikingly revolutionary spirit is my point of departure. When Descartes writes in the first of his Meditations that “it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last,” 3 he reveals the same enthusiasm for total reform later found in Kant: “This attempt to alter the procedure which has hitherto prevailed in metaphysics, by completely revolutionizing it in accordance with the example set by the geometers and physicists, forms indeed the main purpose of this critique of pure speculative reason.” 4 How exactly did philosophy become so convinced that its central tradition—a sprawling, disorganized, ugly city, as Descartes has it in the Discourse (I:116)—needed razing to the ground in the interest of some rational town-planning? Moreover, the calls for revolution have not abated, despite contemporary disillusionment with both Cartesian rationalism and Enlightenment philosophy in general; they have grown more shrill. The confidence with which rationalism, foundationalism, universalism, logocentrism, Platonism, and so on are currently set at naught for the sake of contingency, particularity, and difference reveals the same revolutionary and totalizing spirit that marks the earlier phase of philosophy’s modernity. Such enthusiasm is reason’s freedom taken to an extreme. 5 What inspires this march of the intellect militant? What, if anything, justifies its hubristic self-assertions in the domain of philosophy? These are the questions I address.Descartes is commonly identified as the father of modern philosophy. While the full story of modern philosophy’s parentage is more complicated than this, it is fair to say that in Descartes self-consciousness of a new mode of doing philosophy emerges with a focus and revolutionary sense of purpose that caught philosophical imagination in his own time and continues to do so in ours. 6 Motifs of modern philosophy may be found in many places—Machiavelli, Hobbes, Francis Bacon, Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Jakob Boehme—nonetheless, Descartes’s intensely single-minded, even jealous advocacy commends itself to all but the most stubborn antiquarian mentality as modernity’s almost perfect philosophical representative. [End Page 234]That Descartes stands on a remarkable philosophical cusp is apparent in the contrast between the title and the subject matter of his most influential philosophical work: Meditationes de Prima Philosophiae (1641). To that point prima philosophia or First Philosophy had been construed as the metaphysics. It was not concerned with the critical question of how metaphysical sciences are possible and was not directly related to any doctrine of the human soul—except perhaps on the one point of the divinity of nous, the human soul’s highest part. In Descartes’s Meditations, on the other hand, the landscape has altered. Doubt, certainty, knowledge, the ego cogitans and its stream of representations are the new subject matter. What is first in philosophy is no longer what... (shrink)

INTRODUCTION If Roger Bacon is known for anything today it is for his association with the medieval beginnings of what we now call experimental science, ...

Recent students of late medieval intellectual history have treated Oxford theologians' Sentences lectures from the 1320s to 1330s as revealing the interface of the theological, logical, and scientific thinking characteristic of a historically momentous ‘New English Theology’. Its conceptual achievement, historians generally concur, was the casting off of the speculative metaphysics of such thirteenth-century authors as Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon; its methodological novelty made it akin to twentieth-century analytic philosophy and seminal for the early Scientific Revolution. Yet (...) the metaphysically cast thirteenth-century sciences of perspectiva and astrologia persisted among scholars long into the early modern period. To show how this apparent paradox may be dissolved, this article details the intersection of thirteenth-century metaphysics and fourteenth-century analysis in the lectures of a controversial and influential proponent of the Oxford theology of the 1330s. (shrink)