Insect and crustacean lineages diverged over 500 Myr ago, and there are continuing uncertaintles about whether they evolved from a common arthropod ancestor or, alternatively, they evolved independently from annelid worms. Despite the diversity of their limbs and lifestyles, the nervous systems of insects and crustaeeans share many common features both in development and in function. Cellular and molecular embryology techniques reveal good evidence for homologies in the developing segmental ganglia. In the visual system, this seemingly common programme of insect (...) and crustacean CNS development culminates in common adult neural function. Comparisons of the cellular anatomy and physiology of animals as diverse as flies and crayfishes indicate that the neural circuits in the lamina of their optic lobe have been inherited largely unchanged from a common ancestor with good compound eyes. (shrink)

Excerpt from The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, and Lord High-Chancellor of England, Vol. 3 of 3: Methodized, and Made English, From the Originals; With Occasional Notes, to Explain What Is Obscure; And Shew How Far the Several Plans of the Author, for the Advancement of All the Parts of Knowledge, Have Been Executed to the Present Time Ibe Nores occafionally added, we bope, will more fully open tbe De fign and Scope of (...) tbe P: ece', jo as to render it generally intelligible, and lead to its fart/oer Advancement. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Excerpt from Bacon's Advancement of Learning and the New Atlantis To the King: acts performed by Kings and others for the advancement of learning (p. Three parts of human learning (p. 75) About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the (...) aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

A number of arguments purport to show that vague properties determine sharp boundaries at higher orders. That is, although we may countenance vagueness concerning the location of boundaries for vague predicates, every predicate can instead be associated with precise knowable cut-off points deriving from precision in their higher order boundaries. I argue that this conclusion is indeed paradoxical, and identify the assumption responsible for the paradox as the Brouwerian principle B for vagueness: that if p then it's determinate that it's (...) not determinate that not p. Other paradoxes which do not appear to turn on B turn instead on some subtle issues concerning the relation between assertion, belief and higher order vagueness. In this paper a theory of assertion, knowledge and logic is outlined which allows one to avoid any kind of higher order precision. A class of realistic models containing counterexamples to B and a number of weakenings of B are introduced and its logic is shown to support vagueness at every order. (shrink)

A number of `no-proposition' approaches to the liar paradox find themselves implicitly committed to a moderate disquotational principle: the principle that if an utterance of the sentence `$P$' says anything at all, it says that $P$ (with suitable restrictions). I show that this principle alone is responsible for the revenge paradoxes that plague this view. I instead propose a view in which there are several closely related language-world relations playing the `semantic expressing' role, none of which is more central to (...) semantic theorizing than any other. I use this thesis about language and the negative result about disquotation to motivate the view that people do say things with utterances of paradoxical sentences, although they do not say the proposition you'd always expect, as articulated with a disquotational principle. (shrink)

On Roger Bacon's life and works, by A. G. Little. -- Der Einfluss des Robert Grosseteste auf die wissenschaftliche Richtung des Roger Bacon, von L. Baur. -- La place de Roger Bacon parmi les philosophes du xiie siècle, par F. Picavet. -- Roger Bacon and the Latin vulgate, by F. A. Gasquet. -- Roger Bacon and philology, by S. A. Hirsch. -- The place of Roger Bacon in the history of mathematics, by D. E. (...) Smith. -- Roger Bacon und seine Verdienste um die Optik, von E. Wiedemann. -- Roger Bacon's Lehre von der sinnlichen Spezies und vom Sehvorgange, von S. Vogl. -- Roger Bacon's art des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens dargestellt nach seineer Schrift De speculis, von Würschmidt. -- Roger Bacon et l'horreur du vide, par P. Duhem. -- Roger Bacon : his relations to alchemy and chemistry, by M. M. P. Muir. -- Roger Bacon and gunpowder, by H. W. L. Hime. -- Roger Bacon and medicine, by E. W, Withington. -- Roger Bacon in English literature, by Sir J. E. Sandys. -- Roger Bacon's works with references to the mss. printed editions, by A, G. Little (p. [375]-425). (shrink)

In this well-structured monograph, Stephen A. McKnight seeks to correct the view that Francis Bacon’s use of religious motifs and tropes is “manipulative,” “cynical,” and “disingenuous,” a view McKnight considers the “prevailing” one. To accomplish his goal, McKnight subjects several of Bacon’s works to a close reading. He concludes that the “pervasiveness of religious motifs, scriptural references, and biblical doctrines” in Bacon’s writings “establish the central role religion plays in Bacon’s thought”. McKnight holds that Bacon’s (...) religiosity is not disingenuous, but sincere. . . . . In documenting religious motifs in several of Bacon’s writings, this book is a valuable success. In characterizing Bacon’s religious beliefs and how they influenced the rest of his thought, it is much less convincing. (shrink)

In this thesis I investigate the behaviour of uncertainty about vague matters. It is a fairly common view that vagueness involves uncertainty of some sort. However there are many fundamental questions about this kind of uncertainty that are left open. Could you be genuinely uncertain about p when there is no matter of fact whether p? Could you remain uncertain in a vague proposition even if you knew exactly which possible world obtained? Should your degrees of belief be probabilistically coherent? (...) Should your beliefs in the vague be fixed by your beliefs in the precise? Could one in principle tell what credences a person has in the vague? (shrink)

Introduction by E. A. Burtt.--Bibliography (p. xxiii-xxiv)--Bacon, Francis. The great instauration. Novum organum.--Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan.--Locke, John. An essay concerning human understanding. An essay concerning the true original, extent, and end of civil government.--Berkeley, George. A treatise concerning the principles of human knowledge.--Hume, David. An enquiry concerning human understanding. Dialogues concerning natural religion.--Gay, John. Concerning the fundamental principle of virtue or morality.--Bentham, Jeremy. An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation.--Mill, James. Government.--Mill, J. S. Utilitarianism. On liberty.

In the seventeenth century the new science was introduced through the works of Bacon, Hooke, Boyle, Power, and others. The advocates of the new science promised to divulge the inner workings of nature and to help man overcome his painful fallen state by means of controlling nature. The new sciences of mechanism and corpuscularism were to be based on objective experiments that would reveal the secret inner natures of minerals, vegetables, animals, the sun, moon, and stars. These experiments were (...) done with new and improved telescopes and microscope with magnifications of up to 100 times. One early critic of the new science was Margaret Cavendish. Cavendish was skeptical of the ambitious claims, methodology, instruments, and institutions of the new science. In her work, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, Cavendish argued against “experimental and dioptrical writers,” provided her own account of the natural world, investigated aspects of chemistry, medicine, and the nature of heat and color, as well as many other topics in natural philosophy (OEP 10). While many think Cavendish landed on the wrong side of history with respect to her skepticism regarding microscopes and telescopes, her criticisms of the new science were wide ranging and she was by no means the only one to question the value of such experiments and instruments. While several commentators, like Eve Keller (1997), have argued that Cavendish was against all things experimental, several recent commentators, Emma Wilkins (2014) and Deborah Boyle (2018), have tried to show the much more complicated relationship between Cavendish and the Royal Society and medical studies, respectively. In addition, some commentators, such as Lisa Sarasohn (1984, 2010) and Eve Keller (1997), have argued that Cavendish’s criticisms of the new science are based on her belief that Nature, as a representation of the feminine, was under attack by the experimentalists desire to “penetrate” and “manipulate” her for their own ends. While it is certainly true that Cavendish and many of the experimentalists personified nature as a woman, and that Cavendish does portray the men as trying to make her into something she is not, I agree with Deborah Boyle (2004) that these descriptions are not the focus of her objections to experimentalism. Rather than hold that Cavendish is concerned with, as Sarasohn claims, “the sexual implications for both women and nature of the new philosophy” (2010: 147), it seems that Cavendish’s objections were largely based on her philosophical commitments. However, I believe there is one aspect of the new science that Cavendish does critique from a feminist perspective, and that is what she sees as its institutional nature and its exclusion of women on the basis of sex, and to this I will turn in the last section of the chapter.1 My aim is to address Cavendish’s three major critiques of the new science. The chapter is divided as follows: The first section provides a brief overview of Cavendish’s views on the nature of bodies and perception. The second regards her critique of the methods and aims of the new science as represented by Bacon and Boyle. The third section examines her critique of Hooke and the instruments of experimentalism. The final section lays out her feminist critique of the institution of the new science. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

This work intentionally joins Stephen A. McKnight’s The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought in arguing that Sir Francis Bacon was more deeply religious than he is conventionally thought to have been. Though the book is full of interesting suggestions, a lack of breadth, rigor, and precision will leave many readers unconvinced. . . . Those who know the corpus and secondary literature enough to read critically will find here provocative suggestions and intriguing leads. Others will need to (...) be cautious about the book’s arguments and conclusions. (shrink)

Jardine examines the evolution of concepts of dialectics during the Renaissance and problems of methodology that influenced the teachings of the founder of philosophy in the modern era, F. Bacon. The work traces the sources of these problems in the dialectics of antiquity and its medieval interpretation. Sources little known to the Soviet reader are cited. In order to evaluate Bacon's reaction to the dialectics of his day, the author also describes works named in the statutes of Cambridge (...) University in the sixteenth century as textbooks on dialectics. They are writings by humanists — bearers of the ideas of the Enlightenment — I. Caesarius, R. Agricola, D. Seton, and others. To a certain extent they were based on the work by Peter the Spaniard Summulae Logicales, which is taken as a point of departure for the further evolution of dialectics. (shrink)

In a sense it would be inappropriate to speak of “Hegel’s system of philosophy,” because Hegel thought that in the strict sense there is only one system of philosophy evolving in the Western world. In Hegel’s view, although at times philosophy’s history seems to be a chaotic series of crisscrossing interpretations of meanings and values, with no consensus, there has been a teleological development and consistent progress in philosophy and philosophizing from the beginning; Hegel held that his own version of (...) “German idealism” was simply bringing to final expression the latest refinements of an ongoing, perennial system. If we take Hegel at his word, then one of the best entries into his system would be through the history of philosophy, showing how systems and schools of thought prior to Hegel led up to his system. The most important currents to focus on, however, would be in modern philosophy, in which especially intensive changes led ultimately to German idealism and Hegel’s immediate predecessors. Fortunately, Hegel lectured extensively on the history of modern philosophy and structured his lectures in such a way as to throw light on the status of the “one system” of Western philosophy at the time — the status to which Hegel felt he had been contributing and was continuing to contribute. These lectures are of interest, first of all, as a systematic chronicle of philosophical positions in the heyday of modern philosophy, from Bacon to Hegel. Second, they are interesting because Hegel’s critical comments on his predecessors clarify his own positions: for example, the dialectic method and the importance of triplicity, the relationship of philosophy to the scientific method, the necessity for avoidance of the extremes of empiricism and of idealism, the subject/object problematic, the “identity” of rationality and reality, and the technical meaning in Hegel’s philosophy of “absolute,” “infinity,” and the “idea.”. (shrink)

A revisionist account of how philosophical induction was conceived in the ancient world and how that conception was transmitted, altered, and then rediscovered. I show how philosophers of late antiquity and then the medieval period came step-by-step to seriously misunderstand Aristotle’s view of induction and how that mistake was reversed by humanists in the Renaissance and then especially by Francis Bacon. I show, naturally enough then, that in early modern science, Baconians were Aristotelians and Aristotelians were Baconians.

Review:Geeks & Geezers: How Era, Values, and Defining Moments Shape Leaders. Book by Warren G. Bennis and Robert J. Thomas. Published by Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 2002, 224 pp., ISBN: 1 57851 582 3,.

A study of the descent of Western idealism in the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions as continued by outstanding creative thinkers from St. Thomas Aquinas to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Includes as well the following representatives of the Platonic descent: Paracelsus, Francis Bacon, Jakob Boehme, and Immanuel Kant. These philosophers and mystics have influenced profoundly the entire course of modern civilization. Their lives are significant, for only when we know the men themselves can we interpret correctly the force and character of (...) their ideals through the examples of their lives and ideas. (shrink)

The bulk of this massive collection is comprised of selections from about twenty medieval, modern, and contemporary writers, on legal philosophy. These selections cover the traditions of natural law, positivism, and realism on the problem of the nature of law. It would be impossible to fault Professor Christie on the pieces he has included. Each one, old or new, is an acknowledged classic or standard. The omission of Lon L. Fuller who represents a notable variety of non-Thomistic natural law should, (...) however, be mentioned. In the very last part of the book, covering the topic of legal reasoning, the philosopher will be pleased to find extensive extracts from Aristotle and Francis Bacon. (shrink)

How induction was understood took a substantial turn during the Renaissance. At the beginning, induction was understood as it had been throughout the medieval period, as a kind of propositional inference that is stronger the more it approximates deduction. During the Renaissance, an older understanding, one prevalent in antiquity, was rediscovered and adopted. By this understanding, induction identifies defining characteristics using a process of comparing and contrasting. Important participants in the change were Jean Buridan, humanists such as Lorenzo Valla and (...) Rudolph Agricola, Paduan Aristotelians such as Agostino Nifo, Jacopo Zabarella, and members of the medical faculty, writers on philosophy of mind such as the Englishman John Case, writers of reasoning handbooks, and Francis Bacon. (shrink)

Aristotle said that induction (epagōgē) is a proceeding from particulars to a universal, and the definition has been conventional ever since. But there is an ambiguity here. Induction in the Scholastic and the (so-called) Humean tradition has presumed that Aristotle meant going from particular statements to universal statements. But the alternate view, namely that Aristotle meant going from particular things to universal ideas, prevailed all through antiquity and then again from the time of Francis Bacon until the mid-nineteenth century. (...) Recent scholarship is so steeped in the first-mentioned tradition that we have virtually forgotten the other. In this essay McCaskey seeks to recover that alternate tradition, a tradition whose leading theoreticians were William Whewell, Francis Bacon, Socrates, and in fact Aristotle himself. The examination is both historical and philosophical. The first part of the essay fills out the history. The latter part examines the most mature of the philosophies in the Socratic tradition, specifically Bacon’s and Whewell’s. After tracing out this tradition, McCaskey shows how this alternate view of induction is indeed employed in science, as exemplified by several instances taken from actual scientific practice. In this manner, McCaskey proposes to us that the Humean problem of induction is merely an artifact of a bad conception of induction and that a return to the Socratic conception might be warranted. (shrink)

This is the 1992 Marquette Aquinas lecture, the fifty-third in a distinguished series sponsored by the Wisconsin Alpha Chapter of Phi Sigma Tau. Though presented as a lecture, it is clearly the outline of a project that draws upon Ernan McMullin's considerable knowledge of the history of the philosophy of science and his realistic assessment of contemporary scientific inquiry. His is a large canvas and he admittedly paints with wide brush strokes. His major thesis, contra the positivism that lingers in (...) some quarters, is that nothing other than a realist philosophy of science will enable one to make sense of contemporary natural science. A very literal reading of Aristotle leads him to distance himself from the Stagirite in certain respects, but McMullin's is fundamentally an Aristotelian analysis of science. To have science is not merely to know what is given in experience and codified in laws of nature, but to have an explanation of the given in terms of its proper causes. It is not enough to know that copper is malleable, conducts electricity, takes on a certain hue under such and such circumstances, and has a melting point of 1083 degrees centigrade. To have scientific knowledge of a material which has been used since antiquity is to know why it has these properties. Such knowledge is not obtained by simple observation, but is gained by the inference which leads to the postulation of an unobserved structure. McMullin believes that empiricists in the tradition of Bacon, Hume, and Mill are hard pressed to explain the inferential leap from observed effect to inferred cause. In passing he notes, "Though Bacon is trying very hard to separate himself from the Aristotelian tradition, one can still catch echoes of [Aristotle's] epagoge". Reviewing Mill's logic of science, McMullin observes that at the same time Mill was writing that causal relations hold only between observables, "the growing reliance of natural scientists on non-inductive inference to and from observables was leading to dramatic advances in fields like optics, chemistry and theory of gases". (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)

This edited volume will be of interest to specialists in the history of early modern philosophy and in the history and philosophy of science. It contains ten chapters related to the themes of experimental philosophy, speculative philosophy, and the relationships of both to religion. Most of the book considers these themes in the thought of six early modern philosophers, with a chapter for each of the following: Bacon, Boyle, Cavendish, Hobbes, Locke, and Newton. The remaining chapters focus upon these (...) themes by looking at particular debates or more broadly by considering contexts beyond those of the six aforementioned philosophers. The level of attention to detail by the authors in this book regarding how... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Roger Bacon and the Origins of “Perspectiva” in the Middle Ages: A Critical Edition and English Translation of Bacon’s “Perspectiva” with Introduction and Notes by David C. LindbergJeremiah HackettDavid C. Lindberg. Roger Bacon and the Origins of “Perspectiva” in the Middle Ages: A Critical Edition and English Translation of Bacon’s “Perspectiva” with Introduction and Notes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. cxi + 411. NP.This (...) new critical edition of the Perspectiva (= Opus maius, Part Five) of Roger Bacon is a landmark in Roger Bacon studies and in medieval philosophy. One needs to be able to depend on critical texts. In the case of Bacon’s Perspectiva, no such printed text existed. Professor David C. Lindberg in this new critical edition of the Perspectiva has rectified this absurd situation. And he has done a magnificent service to scholarship. He has produced the first adequate text and translation of this major philosophical text by Roger Bacon. To appreciate his achievement, a review of the previous editions is in order.Prior to Lindberg’s critical edition, there have been three Latin editions: Combach (1614), Jebb (1733, 1750), Bridges (1879 Bridges (1900). Combach used a single Oxford manuscript which is no longer extant. Jebb claimed to have used four manuscripts, but appears to have relied on Combach’s text. In 1897, Bridges used two manuscripts (Dublin and Oxford) and consulted three others. These two Mss. were late and not very reliable. Lindberg’s judgment on the inadequacy of these editions, especially that of Bridges, is, alas, only too true: “My text, found below, corrects the texts of Combach, Jebb, and Bridges in perhaps a thousand readings (my italics)—many of modest significance, but others crucial to an understanding of Bacon’s intent.”Further, a major difficulty arose in regard to the important geometical figures [End Page 133] which are closely linked to the argument in the text. The printed editions were much less adequate than the scribal manuscripts.There is just one translation of the Perspectiva into English, that done by Robert Belle Burke (Philadelphia, 1928). This translation, based on Bridges’s deficient text, was very unsatisfactory.Lindberg used twenty-three of the thirty-nine extant manuscripts, and has examined all of the thirty-nine manuscripts. This enabled him to identify five manuscript families. Six early manuscripts representative of the major families were used as the base text and were fully transcribed. Three manuscripts represent version 1; the four other families are represented by one manuscript each. Eight more manuscripts were used with some frequency, and sparing use was made of another nine manuscripts. A further sixteen manuscripts were not used since they were very late or were fragments.The relationship between the manuscripts is so complex that the editor declined to construct a stemma codicum. He did this with good reason. Bacon had a working practice of producing multiple versions of the same text and this makes for difficulties. In the case of the Perspectiva, however, it would appear that the major differences in text seem to be limited to the Preface and to section 1.9.1. Examples of these are provided in Appendix 1 and 2 of the edition. It would seem then that a stable text of the Perspectiva existed from the beginning, and that minor editorial changes were made only in the Preface and at 1.9.1. Further, in the introduction (xiii), Lindberg notes: “It [the Perspectiva] may have been written about 1263, as Easton guesses.” Still, a question remains open: To what extent was the text itself altered by Bacon between 1263 and 1268 in preparation for Pope Clement IV? Was there not an evolution in the text by way of correction, emmendation, addition?An examination of MS. P (Paris, Bibliothèque National, MS Lat. 7434) [= 18 in Lindberg’s list, p. ciii] would, in my estimation, provide grounds for the belief that family 5 (“Hic aliqua dicenda sunt de perspectiva”) may well be an edited version of family 1 (“Positis radicibus”). That is, the (“Hic aliqua dicenda”) may have been intended as part of the text and not just as a Preface. Further, I now believe that the traditional dating of... (shrink)

Aristotle's definition of the soul should be interpreted as: 'the soul is the entelechy of a natural body that serves as its instrument'.

This work provides an original account of Francis Bacon's conception of natural inquiry. P'erez-Ramos sets Bacon in an epistemological tradition that postulates an intimate relation between objects of cognition and objects of construction, and regards the human knower as, fundamentally, a maker. By exploring the background to this tradition, and contrasting the responses of major philosophers of the 17th century with Bacon's own, the book charts Bacon's contribution to the modern philosophy of science.

The criminal law presently distinguishes between actions and omissions, and only rarely proscribes failures to avert consequences that it would be an offense to bring about. Why? In recent years it has been persuasively argued by both Glover and Bennett that, celeris paribus, omissions to prevent a harm are just as culpable as are actions which bring that harm about. On the other hand, and acknowledging that hitherto “lawyers have not been very successful in finding a rationale for it,” Tony (...) Honoré has sought to defend the law's differential treatment. He proposes a “distinct-duties theory” that in addition to the general duties we owe to everyone, we also owe distinct duties to a more limited collection of people and associations, specified by features of our relationship with them. Where a distinct duty holds, breach by omission may well be no better than breach by positive action. But absent a distinct duty, omissions, per Honoré, are less culpable. They are mere failures to intervene and improve or rectify things, whereas actions are positive interventions which make things worse. And, thus, the law has good reason to differentiate between them. (shrink)

This paper explores the Offence Principle. It discusses whether two constraints, additional to the criteria stated in conventional analysis, ought to be met before the Offense Principle can be satisfied: (i) that offensive conduct must be a wrong, and (ii) that the conduct must also lead to harm. The nature of the Harm Principle, and its relationship to the Offense Principle, are also considered. The paper suggests that, even if all cases in which offense should be criminalized also involve harm, (...) nonetheless there may be good reasons to retain a separate Offense Principle. (shrink)