The Scientific Revolution

Lesson 5: The New Philosophers

Francis Bacon

The English lawyer, politician, and philosopher Francis Bacon did not perform significant scientific work himself, but wrote tracts in English and Latin to reform intellectual life.

Bacon’s relation to the scientific revolution continues to be debated by historians. He was in some ways behind the scientific thought of his time – he disdained the Copernican hypothesis and distrusted mathematics. He was an important philosopher of science, but his influence on working early modern scientists remains questioned. As a writer about science, Bacon emphasized the importance of fact over theory, gathering data from many sources, and collaboration between investigators in an institutional setting.

He also claimed scientific and technological improvement had pragmatic ends. “The true and lawful goal of the sciences is none other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.” Natural philosophy for Bacon was active, doing things rather than merely passively understanding nature. Bacon sometimes spoke of coercing or even torturing nature, but his usual approach was respectful.

This respect for nature included ridding the mind of unexamined assumptions – what Bacon called “idols.” Oster’s document 8.3 consists of extracts from different works by Bacon. What does he seem to think is the purpose of science?

As a young student at Cambridge University, Bacon had been dissatisfied with the Scholastic Aristotelianism that dominated the curriculum. He claimed his new philosophy would correct the emphasis of ancient Greek and modern Scholastic philosophy on the study of words rather than things.

For most of his career, which took him to the highest level of the English legal system, Bacon pursued natural philosophy as an avocation. He could devote full time to it only after his removal from office by impeachment in 1624. He died from a cold caught while stuffing a goose with snow to see if it could be preserved.

Bacon’s most influential published work of natural philosophy was The Advancement of Learning(1605), published in an expanded Latin edition as De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientarum (1623). In it and his other works such as The New Organon (1620), Bacon proposed a new form of inductive logic, reasoning from particular instances to general statements, to replace Aristotelian deductive logic, deducing particular statements from general ones.

Bacon also set forth an ambitious program for the classification of all sciences, seeing no absolute division between the physical and human sciences. His utopian story The New Atlantis (1627), was about a cooperative scientific institute called Solomon’s House on the mythical island of Bensalem. Solomon’s House was occupied by a hierarchy of natural philosophers and investigators where investigators gathered information and philosophers analyzed it.

Solomon’s House was closely allied with the state, which was a central element in Bacon’s vision. Bacon was suspicious of science that wasn't controlled by the government.

One weakness of Baconian method was the difficulty of getting from facts to theories. William Harvey, who was Bacon’s physician, dismissed Bacon as writing philosophy “like a Lord Chancellor,” resulting in a system devoid of practical use. Baconian science in practice could degenerate to mere fact-gathering, as in Bacon’s own Sylva Sylvarum; Or, a Naturall Historie (1627).

Bacon was also suspicious of mathematics, unlike his contemporaries Galileo and Descartes. The Baconian ideal of fact gathering and collaboration, however, attracted much interest, eventually inspiring the foundation of permanent scientific associations like the Royal Society, which we’ll be seeing later.

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