RENAISSANCE AND THE AGE OF REASON

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

• Francis Bacon is one of the most important philosophers to come out of the Renaissance era due to his immense contributions in advancing natural philosophy and scientific method. Bacon was born in London in 1561.He was the youngest child of his father Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Seal and his mother Lady Anne Cooke Bacon.

• In 1573 when he was just 11 years old, he attended Trinity College Cambridge. After completing his studies in less than 3 years, he enrolled in a law program the next year. It did not take him long to realize that this school was too old fashioned for his tastes (Bacon recalled that his tutors favored Aristotle, while he was much more interested in the humanistic movement that was spreading across the land due to the Renaissance). Bacon left school and became an assistant to the ambassador in France. In 1579, when his father passed away he returned to London and resumed studying law, completing his degree.

Francis Bacon – the man

• In 1584 he was elected to Parliament and continued to work there for the next thirty six years. Eventually he became Lord Chancellor, the highest political office. It was as Lord Chancellor, at the pinnacle of his political career, that Bacon encountered a great scandal that would end his political career entirely, making way for his philosophical pursuits.

• In 1621 he was accused of accepting bribes and arrested. He pled guilty to his charges and was fined 40,000 pounds and sentenced to serve a prison sentence in the Tower of London. Although his fine was waived to 4 days in prison, Bacon would never hold a political position again. it was at this point in his life that he decided to dedicate the remainder of his life to philosophy. For the next 5 years this is what he did.

Francis Bacon the philosopher• Bacon is often credited with being the first in a tradition of

thought known as British empiricism, which is characterized by the view that all knowledge must come ultimately from sensory experience.

• He was born at a time when there was a shift from the preoccupation of the ancient world philosophers to a more scientific approach to knowledge. There had always been some innovative work by Renaissance scientists such as the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus and the anatomist Andreas Vesalius but this new period sometimes called the Scientific Revolution – produced an astonishing number of scientific thinkers, including Galileo Galilei, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton

• Although the Church had been broadly welcoming to science for much of the medieval period, with the rise of a new form of Christianity from Martin Luther and the Catholic Church loosing many of its followers, changed its stance and turned against scientific endeavor. This opposition hampered the development of the sciences.

• Bacon claims to accept teachings of the Christian Church. But he also argues that science must be separated from religion, in order to make the acquisition of knowledge quicker and easier, so that it can be used to improve the quality of people’s lives. Bacon stresses this transforming role of science. One of his complaints is that science’s ability to enhance human existence had previously been ignored, in favor of a focus on academic and personal glory.

• Unlike Plato (who claimed knowledge could be gained through understanding the meaning of words and content) and Aristotle (who placed emphasis on empirical data), Bacon emphasized observation, experimentation, and interaction and set out to create methods that would rely on tangible proof in an effort to explain sciences.

• Francis Bacon believed the works of Aristotle (which up to that point, scholastic thinkers had agreed with) actually prevented the ability to think independently and acquire new ideas about nature. Bacon argued that though the advancement of science, the quality of human life could improve, and therefore, people should no longer rely on the work of ancient philosophers. Bacon became so disillusioned with the philosophical thinking of his time that he categorized the thought process of people as four categories of false knowledge, which he referred to as “idols”. These he calls psychological barriers to pursuing scientific knowledge and calls them the ‘idols of the mind’.

• These are the “idols of the tribe”, the tendency of human beings as a species (or tribe) to generalize. False notions in our human nature that are common to everyone. Eg. human nature forces people to seek out evidence that supports their own conclusions, causes people to try to have things fit into patterns and causes beliefs to be affected by what people want to believe.

• Idols of the cave – the human tendency to impose preconceptions on nature rather than to see what is really there. Eg. Some people may favor similarities whereas others favor differences

• Idols of the marketplace – our tendency to let social conventions distort our experience. Eg. Words can have a variety of meanings, and people have the ability to name and imagine things that do not actually exist.

• Idols of theatre – the distorting influence of prevailing philosophical and scientific dogma. He believed that philosophers weren’t any better than plays. To him, sophistic philosophy like the work of Aristotle focused more on smart but foolish arguments rather than the natural world.

• According to Bacon the scientist must battle against the above four handicaps to gain knowledge of the world.

The inductive method• With his belief that knowledge should be pursued and his criticism of

present day philosophies, Francis Bacon set out to create a new and organized method that would eventually become his most impactful contribution to the world of philosophy – inductive or scientific method. He argues that the advancement of science depends on formulating laws of ever-increasing generality. He proposes a scientific method that includes a variation of this approach. Instead of making a series of observations , such as instances of metals that expand when heated, and then concluding that heat must cause all the metals to expand, he stresses the need to test a new theory by going on to look for negative instances – such as metals not expanding when they are heated.

The process of the inductive/scientific method is as follows:• Accumulate a series of specific empirical observations about

the characteristic being investigated• Classify these facts into three categories: instances when the

characteristic being investigated is present, instances when it is absent, and instances when it is present in varying degrees.

• Through careful examination of the results, reject notions that do not seem to be responsible for the occurrence and identify possible causes responsible for the occurrence.

1. What is the root of the philosophical idea of Francis Bacon. Briefly explain it.

2. What are Bacon’s four idols. Name them and briefly explain them

3. What is the inductive method. Explain.

Class work