Bacon Philosopher Quotes

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

The thirteenth-century philosopher Roger Bacon claimed that “nobody can obtain to proficiency in the science of mathematics by the method hitherto known unless he devotes to its study thirty or forty years.” Today, the entire body of mathematics known to Bacon is now acquired by your average high school junior.

As Francis Bacon remarked, quoting from a speech by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, “The good things which belong to prosperity are to be wished, but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.

He does not admire the merely contemplative life; like Goethe he scorns knowledge that does not lead to action: "men ought to know that in the theatre of human life it is only for Gods and angels to be spectators.

Examining the Homeric epics from the perspective of when and by whom they were composed, Vico refutes generations of interpreters who had assumed that because Homer was revered for his great epics he must also have been a wise sage like Plato, Socrates, or Bacon. Instead Vico demonstrates that in its wildness and willfulness Homer’s mind was poetic, and his poetry barbaric, not wise or philosophic, that is, full of illogical fantasy, gods who were anything but godlike, and men like Achilles and Patrocles, who were most uncourtly and extremely petulant.

They’re both technicians. They don’t have intelligence. They have what I call ‘thintelligence.’ They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it ‘being focused.’ They don’t see the surround. They don’t see the consequences. That’s how you get an island like this. From thintelligent thinking. Because you cannot make an animal and not expect it to act alive. To be unpredictable. To escape. But they don’t see that.” “Don’t you think it’s just human nature?” Ellie said. “God, no,” Malcolm said. “That’s like saying scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast is human nature. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s uniquely Western training, and much of the rest of the world is nauseated by the thought of it.” He winced in pain. “The morphine’s making me philosophical.” “You want some water?

From Bacon, Diderot learned that science need not bow down before a Bible-based view of the world; it should be based on induction and experimentation, and, ideally, used to further humankind’s mastery of nature. Locke delivered two related concepts. The first was a theory of mind that rejected the long-standing belief that humans were born with innate ideas (and, therefore, with an inborn understanding of the divine). In Locke’s view, the mind is a blank slate at birth, and our understanding of the exterior world comes about solely through sensation and reflection. This entirely nonspiritual view of cognition set up a second critical lesson. Since, according to the English philosopher, true knowledge is limited to what we can learn through our senses, anyone involved in seeking out nature’s secrets must rely on observation and experiment — on a so-called empirical approach — and avoid building huge systems based on fantasy.

forever. I would add to my reply as well, the borrowing of a simple invitation from the 13th-century English philosopher Roger Bacon: “Contemplate the world!” Because if we do not store in our heart a profound reverence for the miracles of nature as well as for the accomplishments of men and for their sometimes kind and illustrious way of thinking — even if our life is at its beginning and we have seen nothing yet; or if we’ve seen it all and find man evil — we will not be capable of recognizing those marvels, we will not be

Nearly four centuries ago, the philosopher and scientist Sir Francis Bacon wrote about the ways in which the mind errs, and he considered the failure to consider absences among the most serious: By far the greatest impediment and aberration of the human understanding arises from [the fact that]…those things which strike the sense outweigh things which, although they may be more important, do not strike it directly. Hence, contemplation usually ceases with seeing, so much so that little or no attention is paid to things invisible.6

Johnson continually sketched out ideas for books he hoped, aspired or intended to write. These included a history of criticism, a set of biographies of the great philosophers ‘written with a polite air’, a history of Venice, a prayer book, a dictionary of ancient mythology, editions of Chaucer and Bacon, a compendium of proverbs, a collection of epigrams, a history of the ‘revival of learning’ in Renaissance Europe, a cookbook laid out ‘upon philosophical principles’, a history of his melancholy, and an autobiography (these last two surely very much

The rule of science is the one posited by Bacon: obey in order to command. The philosopher neither obeys nor commands; he seeks to be at one with nature. From this point of view, moreover, the essence of philosophy is the spirit of simplicity. Whether we contemplate the philosophical spirit in itself or in its works, whether we compare philosophy to science or one philosophy with other philosophies, we always find that any complication is superficial, that the construction is a mere accessory, synthesis a semblance: the act of philosophising is a simple one.

The matter of sedition is of two kinds: much poverty and much discontentment....The causes and motives of sedition are, innovation in religion; taxes; alteration of laws and customs; breaking of privileges; general oppression; advancement of unworthy persons, strangers; dearths; disbanded soldiers; factions grown desperate; and whatsoever in offending people joineth them in a common cause.' The cue of every leader, of course, is to divide his enemies and to unite his friends. 'Generally, the dividing and breaking of all factions...that are adverse to the state, and setting them at a distance, or at least distrust, among themselves, is not one of the worst remedies; for it is a desperate case, if those that hold with the proceeding of the state be full of discord and faction, and those that are against it be entire and united.' A better recipe for the avoidance of revolutions is an equitable distribution of wealth: 'Money is like muck, not good unless it be spread.' But this does not mean socialism, or even democracy; Bacon distrusts the people, who were in his day quite without access to education; 'the lowest of all flatteries is the flattery of the common people;' and 'Phocion took it right, who, being applauded by the multitude, asked, What had he done amiss?' What Bacon wants is first a yeomanry of owning farmers; then an aristocracy for administration; and above all a philosopher-king. 'It is almost without instance that any government was unprosperous under learned governors.' He mentions Seneca, Antonius Pius and Aurelius; it was his hope that to their names posterity would add his own.

I watched her face. She reminded me of a Francis Bacon painting, fading in and out of her resemblance to anything human, struggling to resist disappearing into an undifferentiated world of pain. I brushed her hair out of her face, made braids again. ㅤㅤㅤWomen’s bravery, I thought as I worked on her hair from bottom to top, untangling the black mass. I would never be able to go through this. The pain came in waves, in sheets, starting in her belly and extending outward, a flower of pain blooming through her body, a jagged steel lotus. ㅤㅤㅤI couldn’t stop thinking about the body, what a hard fact it was. That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should have spent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He’d have had to change his whole philosophy. ㅤㅤㅤThe mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain. Gasping on the bed, Yvonne bordered on the unrecognizable, disintegrating into a ripe collection of nerves, fibers, sacs, and waters and the ancient clock in the blood. Compared to this eternal body, the individual was a smoke, a cloud. The body was the only reality. I hurt, therefore I am.

for the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws than its own, shines through it. It is the standing problem which has exercised the wonder and the study of every fine genius since the world began; from the era of the Egyptians and the Brahmins, to that of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon, of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There sits the Sphinx at the road-side, and from age to age, as each prophet comes by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle. There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, preexist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections, in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world. “Material objects,” said a French philosopher, “are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side.

Like so much academical philosophizing, it was superficially plausible yet wholly divorced from reality.

Why should Milton, Shakespeare, and Lord Bacon, and Sir Philip Sidney die? Perhaps yet they shall not wholly die. I am not contented to visit the house in Bread-Street where Milton was born, or that in Bunhill-Row where he died, I want to repair to the place where he now dwells. Some spirit shall escape from his ashes, and whisper to me things unfelt before. I am not satisfied to converse only with the generation of men that now happens to subsist; I wish to live in intercourse with the Illustrious Dead of All Ages. I demand the friendship of Zoroaster. Orpheus, and Linus, and Musaeus shall be welcome to me. I have a craving and an earnest heart, that can never be contented with anything in this sort, while something more remains to be obtained. And I feel that thus much at least the human race owes to its benefactors, that they should never be passed by without an affectionate remembrance. I would say, with Ezekiel, the Hebrew, in his Vision, ‘Let these dry bones live!’ Not let them live merely in cold generalities and idle homilies of morality; but let them live, as my friends, my philosophers, my instructors, and my guides! I would say with the moralist of old, ‘Let me act, as I would wish to have acted, if Socrates or Cato were the spectators of what I did!’ And I am not satisfied only to call them up by a strong effort of the imagination, but I would have them, and men like them, ‘around my path, and around my bed,’ and not allow myself to hold a more frequent intercourse with the living, than with the good departed.

And Mendeleev’s guesses showed that induction is a more subtle process in the hands of a scientist than Bacon and other philosophers supposed. In science we do not simply march along a linear progression of known instances to unknown ones. Rather, we work as in a crossword puzzle, scanning two separate progressions for the points at which they intersect: that is where the unknown instances should be in hiding. Mendeleev scanned the progression of atomic weights in the columns, and the family likenesses in the rows, to pinpoint the missing elements at their intersections. By doing so, he made practical predictions, and he also made manifest (what is still poorly understood) how scientists actually carry out the process of induction. Very

roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, chips, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup and, for some strange reason, mint humbugs.

Maybe Francis Bacon had it wrong—at least in Ayer’s case. Instead of finding meaning in religion as the result of studying philosophy in depth, Ayer found that meaning by not thinking like a philosopher at all for a few divine moments.

For a time it seemed that the destruction was final. It is still expressed in the amazing fact that (in the North) modern men can still write histories of philosophy, in which philosophy stops with the last little sophists of Greece and Rome; and is never heard of again until the appearance of such a third-rate philosopher as Francis Bacon.

Most early scientists were compelled to study the natural world because of their Christian worldview. In Science and the Modern World, British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead concludes that modern science developed primarily from “the medieval insistence on the rationality of God.” Modern science did not develop in a vacuum, but from forces largely propelled by Christianity. Not surprisingly, most early scientists were theists, including pioneers such as Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Johannes Kepler (1571– 1630), Blaise Pascal (1623–62), Robert Boyle (1627–91), Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and Louis Pasteur (1822–95). For many of them, belief in God was the prime motivation for their investigation of the natural world. Bacon believed the natural world was full of mysteries God intended for us to explore. Kepler described his motivation for science: “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics.

It’s a matter of balance between deduction and induction—between reason and empiricism—and in 1620 the English philosopher Francis Bacon published his Novum Organum, or “new instrument,” which described science as a blend of sensory data and reasoned theory. Ideally, Bacon argued, one should begin with observations, then formulate a general theory from which logical predictions can be made, then check the predictions against experiment.37 If you don’t give yourself a reality check you end up with half-baked (and often fully baked) ideas,

Bacon was but a precursor of the Darwinian war of reasoned teachings against dogmatic beliefs, which left such a deep mark on the thought of the last century. Whatever may have been the place of blind faith during former centuries, it cannot again for long assume leadership in a century when reason has so visibly and so tangibly shown its triumphs all around us. We

Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and many more great minds laid the groundwork for the development of modern science. Over the foundation of philosophy, history witnessed the daring ventures of human excellence by both philosophical and scientific geniuses, such as Leonardo-da-Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Darwin, Newton and so on. And the chain of reaction they triggered with their extraordinarily abnormal thinking, given their surrounding ignorance and fundamentalism, resulted into the evolution of our modern science.

said Percy airily. ‘He’s a genius! Best wizard in the world! But he is a bit mad, yes. Potatoes, Harry?’ Harry’s mouth fell open. The dishes in front of him were now piled with food. He had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, chips, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup and, for some strange reason, mint humbugs. The Dursleys had never exactly starved Harry, but he’d never been allowed to eat as much as he liked. Dudley had always taken anything that Harry really wanted, even if it made him sick. Harry piled his plate with a bit of everything except the humbugs and began to eat.

Harry's mouth fell open. The dishes in front of him were now piled with food. He had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table; roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon, and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, chips, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup and, for some strange reason, mint humbugs.

But what will a scientist do to resolve his problem? Something of which he can be quite certain is that no more compilation of factual information will serve his purpose. No new truth will declare itself from inside the heap of facts. It is true that Bacon and Comenius and Condorcet too sometimes wrote as if they believed that the collection and classification of empirical facts would lead to an understanding of nature but in taking this view they were guided by a rather special consideration they felt under a strong obligation to refute the idea that deduction was an act of mind that could lead to the discovery of new truth that an act of mind alone could enlarge the understanding. The the philosophic and scientific writing of the 17th century particularly the writing of Bacon, Boyle, and Glanville for example is full of dismissive references to Aristotle's way of thinking in the tradition of which they had all grown up.

All right, thirty-seven then,’ said Dudley, going red in the face. Harry, who could see a huge Dudley tantrum coming on, began wolfing down his bacon as fast as possible in case Dudley turned

Different cultures have different systems for learning in part because of the philosophers who influenced the approach to intellectual life in general and science in particular. Although Aristotle, a Greek, is credited with articulating applications-first thinking (induction), it was British thinkers, including Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century and Francis Bacon in the sixteenth century, who popularized these methodologies among modern scholars and scientists. Later, Americans, with their pioneer mentality and disinclination toward theoretical learning, came to be even more applications-first than the British. By contrast, philosophy on the European continent has been largely driven by principles-first approaches. In the seventeenth century, Frenchman René Descartes spelled out a method of principles-first reasoning in which the scientist first formulates a hypothesis, then seeks evidence to prove or disprove it. Descartes was deeply skeptical of data based on mere observation and sought a deeper understanding of underlying principles. In the nineteenth century, the German Friedrich Hegel introduced the dialectic model of deduction, which reigns supreme in schools in Latin and Germanic countries. The Hegelian dialectic begins with a thesis, or foundational argument; this is opposed by an antithesis, or conflicting argument; and the two are then reconciled in a synthesis.

For example, the philosopher Roger Bacon (1214–94) is noted for rejecting dogma, advocating observation as a way of discovering the truth (albeit by ‘induction’), and making several scientific discoveries.

The first movement in human history to trust the ordinary person's ability to judge the weight of evidence for themselves was the drive to get people to read the Bible for themselves...The Scientific Revolution then extended that 'judge for yourself' attitude to all of physical reality by explicitly treating nature as a second sacred book. Thus it is not surprising that Francis Bacon, with whom the 'scientific method' is normally associated, was also instrumental in the production of the King James version of the Bible.

philosophers of science from Francis Bacon to Karl Popper had argued that a quintessential prerequisite for a scientific finding to be valid resides in its reproducibility (i.e., the ability of other scientists to replicate it)

An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan. Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us. We are not likely, for example, to be indifferent to the voices of the Sakharovs and the Timmermans and the Walesas. We take arms against such a sea of troubles, buttressed by the spirit of Milton, Bacon, Voltaire, Goethe and Jefferson. But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter? I fear that our philosophers have given us no guidance in this matter.

One philosopher, Karl Popper, contended that the limitations of the inferential, experimental method, which characterized science since Bacon, could not establish the truth of a proposition; it could only eliminate the alternative explanations that were tested.13 Thus, “truth” was tentative, waiting to be modified or even upended by the next set of experiments. The other, Thomas Kuhn, contended that, in fact, scientists were not objective seekers of truth, but rather, engaged in confirming the current “truth,” what Kuhn called the prevailing “paradigm” in the discipline. In the practice of what Kuhn called “normal science,” scientists were merely elaborating on this paradigm or using it to explain away any anomalies in their findings. It was only when anomalies accumulate to the point of crisis, when the current paradigm can no longer hold up, that the science opens to new, revolutionary ways of thinking that replace the old.

As philosopher Francis Bacon put it in 1620, “the human understanding, once it has adopted an opinion, collects any instances that confirm it, and though the contrary instances may be more numerous and more weighty, it either does not notice them or else rejects them, in order that this opinion will remain unshaken.”46

Sir Francis Bacon was one of the most all-round clever people who has ever lived. He did more different things than most of us can dream of. He was an English statesman, philosopher and Irish painter, who lived at the time of Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II. He not only became Lord Chancellor in 1618, but still found time to write one of the first science books in 1620, and, after a short rest, painted the painting Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of The Crucifixion in 1944. Some people believe he had a hand in writing Shakespeare’s plays, and his portrait of Lucien Freud, painted in 1969, when he was 408 years old and drunk, is one of the most expensive ever sold. He did so many things that he is one of the few historical English/Irish figures to require two completely different and contradictory Wikipedia pages.

This was a revolutionary change from deductive reasoning as espoused by Aristotle, which is what makes Bacon so interesting as a philosopher. He believed the best way to acquire scientific knowledge was to observe phenomena and use inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is the use of experimental, empirical data as premises to draw a broader conclusion.

Ever since Sir Francis Bacon, in the early seventeenth century, scientists and philosophers of science have cautioned against the tendency to reject evidence that conflicts with our preconceptions, and to make assumptions about what assuredly would be true if only the appropriate measurements or experiments could be performed.

Scientists, according to [Francis] Bacon, should not be like ants, busy doing mindless practical tasks, nor like spiders, weaving tenuous philosophical webs, but like bees, mining nature for her goodness and using it to make useful things.

Reading

Reading makes a full man; Speaking a ready man; writing an exact man

Bacon says that the true philosopher, that is, the scientist, must neither be the 'empirical' ant, who merely gathers and stores, nor the 'rationalist' spider, who spins webs from out of its own substance, but the bee who collects materials but also transforms them.

Bacon says that the true philosopher, that is, the scientist, must neither be the 'empirical' ant, who merely gathers and stores, nor the 'rationalist' spider, who spins webs from out of its own substance, but the bee who collects materials but also transforms them.

roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, chips, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup