English 233:Introduction to Western Humanities--Baroque & Enlightenment

Study Guide to selections from

Francis Bacon's Novum Organon

Note:   We will not be reading the article by Laurence Stone or the passage by John Locke mentioned below.  The same goes for the passages you are referred to from Thomas Aquinas' two Summae.  You may ignore these references.  Nor will we be reading excerpts from Book II of the Novum Organum.

You may wish to use this sheet for taking notes (in your own words) on your reading of the assigned excerpts.  If you want it to print out in its entirety, and you are using a printer in one of the KSU public labs, you'll need to go into the File menu, choose Page Set-up, and click on Black Type.

Before undertaking the selections from the Bacon's Novum Organum (our main business), be sure you have read

• the discussion of Bacon's and Descartes' departures from scholasticism in philosophy
• and the introduction to Francis Bacon.

Bacon's critique of the philosophical tradition

In Bacon's picture, the method of generating knowledge still in force in educated circles is unfit to meet the demands that we are entitled to put upon it.

• What are those demands? (Cf. Aphorisms #3 and 11.)
• What is the general name of "the logic [i.e., method] now in use" among formally educated people? (What term did we use in class for this approach? Note the terminology Bacon employs for its practitioners in #45 of Book 1 and #15 of Book 2.)
• What are the properties of this method that make it unfit to meet the demands we should be placing on it? Hints:
  • What is the role of the syllogism in this method?
  • What are the properties of the syllogism that guarantee that if the premises are true the conclusion must be true? I.e., what is it about the form of valid syllogism that makes them valid? (Consult your class notes on this point: recall the point of the diagram test of validity.)
  • What does a syllogism need besides validity if it is to be a sound argument? (Cf. class notes.)
  • What does the currently prevailing method rely on for selecting its premises? (Here it is a good idea to examine the practice of Aquinas in the passages you have available from the Summa contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologiae.) What is the problem Bacon sees in adopting this practice? (Cf. #12.)
    • What does Bacon refer to under the term "axiom"? (#19, 25.)
    • What does Bacon refer to under the term "notion"? (#12, 14, 36.)
    • What does he say is often wrong with the axioms and notions we tend to take over uncritically from the past? (#25, 36-44, 15.)
    • What procedure in general gives rise to false axioms in the first place? (Cf. #19, 25, 26.)
    • What are the 4 types of defective notions he discusses? (Cf. #37-44.)
      • In addition to the names, you should be able to describe the defining qualities of each. Be prepared to cite examples of each and to explain how they qualify as examples of the category in question.
      • What is the remedy or antidote to them (in general)? (Cf. #36.)

What parallel develops between Bacon's critique of traditional knowledge and the critique brought forward a hundred years earlier by the Protestant Reformers? (Cf. #31 and 38.)

A useful exercise:  Show how this common tendency operates when brought to bear on the notions of "substance" and "accident" as they appear in the Catholic doctrine of the sacrament of communion. (Consult the class handout sketching a chain of syllogism employing these notions.)

Be able to relate this to the trends discussed in the article by Lawrence Stone on "The Disenchantment of the World."

Bacon's critique of the artisanal tradition

In Bacon's picture, too, there is something deficient for the generation of the sort of science we need in the way in which practical artisans approach their task ­ craftsmen who have been educated as apprentices, within the guild system.

• What is Bacon's term for this category of "handlers of sciences" (i.e., persons who deal in knowledge of one sort or another)? (Cf. #95, 99.)
  • What virtue do they--or do their procedures ­ have that the formally educated people of Bacon's era lacked, in his opinion? (Cf. #95.)
  • What, however, do their methods nevertheless lack for their own part? (Cf. #95, 99.)
    • Can you see how #101 can be regarded as a rewriting in new terms of the point that was made in #95 by an elaborate analogy?

Bacon's proposal for a new way

What is Bacon's proposal for correcting the complementary defects of these two inherited traditions for dealing in knowledge?  Here we should note how certain sections provide us with convenient "nodes," each presenting us with a different level of elaboration of his project for an effective scientific method:

• Book 1:  31  --->  95   --->  105   --->   Book 2

• Can you outline the method set forth in Book 2 in a way that displays how it would result in the bee (of Book1, #95), and avoid the defects both of the spider and of the ant?
  • What is the equivalent of the ants' gathering of their material?
  • What are the phases of inquiry that make possible the "digesting" and "assimilation"?

Connections urther afield

What is "empiricism"?

• What is the derivation of the term (from ancient Greek)?
• What about Bacon qualifies him as an "empiricist"?
• In how many ways does the empiricist element of scientific method get stressed in Newton's "Rules for Reasoning" in his Principia mathematica naturalis philosophiae?

How does the Baconian stress on the goal of obtaining power over the natural world (for what end, by the way?) importantly compare (or contrast)

• with Locke's assumptions about the human urge to acquire property, and the basic factor that distinguishes unowned from owned portions of nature? (Cf. chapter V of The Second Treatise of Civil Government.)
• with what Aquinas settles on as the end of existence for any intelligent being?
• with Locke's idea of the role of man within nature?

  Go to the Introduction to Bacon.

  Go to Selections from Bacon's Novum Organum.

  Go to a discussion of Bacon's and Descartes' complementary departures from scholasticism in philosophy.

 

  Return to Reading List #3.

  Return to the Home Page for English 233 (Introduction to Western Humanities:  Baroque & Enlightenment).

  Suggestions are welcome.  Please send your comments to lyman@ksu.edu .

      Contents copyright © 199 by Lyman A. Baker. 

Permission is granted for non-commercial educational use; all other rights reserved.

  This page last updated 11 October 2000.