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Roger Bacon
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For the Nova Scotia premier see Roger Bacon (politician).
Roger Bacon, O.F.M. (c. 1214–1294), also known as Doctor Mirabilis (Latin: "wonderful teacher"), was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on empiricism.
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For the Nova Scotia premier see Roger Bacon (politician).
Roger Bacon, O.F.M. (c. 1214–1294), also known as Doctor Mirabilis (Latin: "wonderful teacher"), was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on empiricism. He is sometimes credited as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method inspired by the works of Plato via early Islamic scientists.
Life
Roger Bacon was born in Ilchester in Somerset, possibly in 1214. The only source for his date of birth is his statement in the Opus Tertium, written in 1267, that "forty years have passed since I first learned the alphabet". The 1214 birth date assumes he was not being literal, and meant 40 years had passed since he matriculated at Oxford at the age of 13. If he had been literal, his birth date was more likely to have been around 1220. In the same passage he reports that for all but two of those forty years he had always been engaged in study. His family appears to have been well-off, but, during the stormy reign of Henry III of England, their property was despoiled and several members of the family were driven into exile.
Bacon studied and later became a Master at Oxford, lecturing on Aristotle. There is no evidence he was ever awarded a doctorate — the title Doctor Mirabilis was posthumous and figurative. Sometime between 1237 and 1245, he began to lecture at the university of Paris, then the centre of intellectual life in Europe. Between 1247 and 1256 he was imprisoned by the Catholic Church for practicing witchcraft, for experimentation with gunpowder, but about 1256 he became a Friar in the Franciscan Order. As a Franciscan Friar, Bacon no longer held a teaching post and after 1260, his activities were further restricted by a Franciscan statute forbidding Friars from publishing books or pamphlets without specific approval.
Bacon circumvented this restriction through his acquaintance with Cardinal Guy le Gros de Foulques, who became Pope Clement IV in 1265. The new Pope issued a mandate ordering Bacon to write to him concerning the place of philosophy within theology. As a result Bacon sent the Pope his Opus Majus, which presented his views on how the philosophy of Aristotle and the new science could be incorporated into a new Theology. Besides the Opus maius Bacon also sent his Opus minus, De multiplicatione specierum, and, perhaps, other works on alchemy and astrology.
Pope Clement died in 1268, and sometime between 1277 and 1279, Bacon was placed under house arrest by Jerome of Ascoli, the Minister-General of the Franciscan Order. Bacon's difficulties are probably related to the Condemnations of 1277, which banned the teaching of certain philosophical doctrines, including deterministic astrology. Sometime after 1278 Bacon returned to the Franciscan House at Oxford, where he continued his studies.
External links
- article on Roger Bacon's place in the history of science
- at * at Google Books. Contains the Opus Tertium, Opus Minus, and Compendium Philosophiae.
- with useful and informative introduction on the state of learning at that time.
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