Bacon, Novum Organum
Class Notes (some from Kate)
- shortly after Copernicus's death
- making a new version of AristotleAristotle
Aristotle
Books
[[Aristotle, Poetics|Poetics]]
[[Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics|Nicomachean Ethics]]
[[Aristotle, Categories|Categories]]
among many others
Aristotle's Paradigm (Middle Ages bkgrd)
Matter is eternal and exists w/o forms
Forms only exist with matter
No sensations, no imagination, no intellect w/o forms, phantasms, or species in the mind
Impressions on a passive mind
impressions are the things we see, sense
Active intellect perceives pas...'s Organum, moving away from Aristotle - proposed Inductive reasoning
- science can be used to figure out the world
- Key Thought: examination of empirical evidence through a systematic consistent way (scientific method)
Summary
Bacon saw that science was being held back by ignorance and mental blocks. Enumerating some of these mental blocks, he included: the four kinds of idols, man's tendency to color his reason with his desires, the philosophies of the ancients, and the apparent necessity for science to be practical. These mental blocks had come into place because of the lack of human intelligence focused on this problem. Rarely in history has there been dedicated mental effort working for the improvement of natural science that would have identified these blocks. Bacon said that he was one of the first to do so. As the result of his work, Bacon proposed a new method of science which goes from sensory observations to very specific axioms, and then moves slowly up through middle axioms to general axioms. Instead of letting his intellect run wild, he proposed to regulate it with the information from the senses.