Francis Bacon and René Descartes: The Philosophers of Method
Francis Bacon's inductive program and René Descartes' deductive method: the idols, the cogito, the New Atlantis, the mechanical philosophy, and the world reduced to matter in motion.
Francis Bacon and René Descartes: The Philosophers of Method
The Scientific Revolution was not only a matter of new discoveries. It was also, and perhaps more fundamentally, a matter of new ways of thinking about nature. Two figures stand out as the great methodologists of the seventeenth century: Francis Bacon, who argued that the proper method of natural philosophy was the patient, empirical, inductive collection of facts; and René Descartes, who argued that the proper method was the rigorous, deductive, mathematical derivation of conclusions from self-evident first principles. The two approaches were very different. They were also complementary, in a way that neither Bacon nor Descartes fully recognized. Bacon and Descartes were, opposites. Bacon was an English lawyer, parliamentarian, and Lord Chancellor; Descartes was a French soldier and gentleman. Bacon wrote in English, in an elaborate, sometimes bombastic prose; Descartes wrote in French and Latin, in a clear, precise, sometimes paradoxical style. Bacon was a man of affairs; Descartes was a man of study. Bacon spent the last years of his life in disgrace, having been convicted of accepting bribes; Descartes spent the last years of his life in the service of Queen Christina of Sweden, who insisted on philosophy lessons at five in the morning. They never met, and they did not always understand each other’s work. But they are the two great methodological thinkers of the Scientific Revolution. This page is an introduction to the two figures. Two articles treat their contributions in detail: What Was Francis Bacon’s Scientific Method? on the Novum Organum and the theory of idols, and How Did René Descartes Contribute to the Scientific Revolution? on the Discourse on Method, the mechanical philosophy, and the contributions to mathematics, optics, and physiology. The broader context in which the two figures worked is the page on the key figures of the Scientific Revolution and the philosophy of science section in the origins section.
Francis Bacon: Life and Character
Francis Bacon was born in London on 22 January 1561, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and Lady Anne Cooke, a learned woman and sister-in-law of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he came to dislike the Aristotelian philosophy that was the basis of the curriculum. He went on to study law at Gray’s Inn, and he entered Parliament in 1584. Bacon’s career in politics and law was, for the most part, distinguished but slow. He was a member of the House of Commons for nearly forty years, and he served as a counsel in a number of important cases. He rose through the legal establishment, becoming Solicitor General in 1607, Attorney General in 1613, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal in 1617, and Lord Chancellor in 1618. He was created Baron Verulam in 1618 and Viscount St Alban in 1621. In 1621, Bacon was charged with accepting bribes from litigants, and he confessed to twenty-three instances of corruption. He was fined, imprisoned in the Tower of London for a few days, and banned from holding office. He retired to his estate at Gorhambury, in Hertfordshire, and spent the last years of his life writing. He died in 1626, having caught pneumonia while stuffing a chicken with snow, in an experiment to see whether cold preserved meat. Bacon’s character was a mixture of brilliance, ambition, and weakness. He was, by all accounts, a generous and cultivated man, with wide intellectual interests. He was also a calculating politician, and his fall from the Lord Chancellorship was a consequence of his own conduct. He left a substantial body of writings, including the essays, the philosophical works, the legal works, and the histories.
Bacon’s Program
Bacon’s philosophical program is set out in a series of works, the most important of which are The Advancement of Learning (1605), the Novum Organum (1620), and the New Atlantis (1627). The program was, in brief, a critique of the Aristotelian philosophy and a proposal for a new method of natural philosophy. The critique was, severe. The Aristotelian philosophy, Bacon argued, was sterile: it was a system of words that had no contact with experience, and it could not produce new knowledge. The scholastic disputes about universals, the nature of matter, and the structure of the cosmos were, in Bacon’s view, idle speculations that had produced nothing of value. The proper aim of natural philosophy, he argued, was not the contemplation of eternal truths but the relief of the human condition. The new method, set out in the Novum Organum (the “New Organon,” a deliberate echo of Aristotle’s Organon), was inductive. The natural philosopher should begin with careful observation, tabulate the instances of the phenomenon under study, and gradually ascend from particulars to general principles. The method was a description of what good scientists actually do, and it was a prescription for how they should do it. The method is treated in detail in What Was Francis Bacon’s Scientific Method?. The New Atlantis (1627), published posthumously, was a description of a fictional island, Bensalem, in which a research institution called Salomon’s House pursued the Baconian program of inductive natural philosophy. The institution was a blueprint for a new kind of scientific society, and it was, one of the most influential works in the history of the idea of a scientific institution. The Royal Society, founded in 1660, was in part a realization of Bacon’s vision.
René Descartes: Life and Character
René Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine, France, on 31 March 1596, the son of Joachim Descartes, a counselor of the Parlement of Brittany, and Jeanne Brochard. He was educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, in Anjou, where he studied the standard curriculum, including mathematics and philosophy. He emerged, by his own later account, dissatisfied with the philosophy he had been taught, and determined to find a better foundation for knowledge. Descartes’ early life was peripatetic. He studied law at the University of Poitiers, graduating in 1616. He served as a volunteer in the Dutch and German armies in the early seventeenth century, partly out of curiosity about the world, and partly in the hope of gaining the experience that would help him in his philosophical work. He lived in Paris for a time, and he visited Italy. In 1628, he settled in the Dutch Republic, where he lived, with various relocations, for most of the rest of his life. The Dutch Republic was, in the 1620s and 1630s, the most tolerant state in Europe. Descartes valued the tolerance, and he wrote his major works there, in relative peace. The Discourse on Method was published in Leiden in 1637, with three appendices on optics, meteorology, and geometry. The Meditations on First Philosophy was published in Paris in 1641, with objections from a set of leading philosophers and theologians and Descartes’ replies. The Principles of Philosophy was published in Amsterdam in 1644. In 1649, Descartes accepted an invitation from Queen Christina of Sweden to come to Stockholm and tutor her in philosophy. The terms were harsh: the queen, who had been educated to be a monarch, expected lessons at five in the morning, in a cold castle library, in the depths of the Swedish winter. Descartes, who had spent a lifetime avoiding early mornings and cold weather, accepted. He died of pneumonia in Stockholm on 11 February 1650, at the age of fifty-three.
Descartes’ Program
Descartes’ philosophical program is set out in the Discourse on Method (1637), the Meditations (1641), and the Principles of Philosophy (1644). The program was, in brief, a critique of the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy and a proposal for a new foundation of knowledge, in which the world was reduced to matter in motion, and the laws of nature were derived from the laws of motion. The critique was, more radical than Bacon’s. Descartes did not merely say that the Aristotelian philosophy was sterile; he said that it was incoherent. The scholastic disputes about the nature of matter, the existence of forms, and the principles of motion were, in Descartes’ view, words without meaning. The only path to certain knowledge was to begin from self-evident first principles and to deduce everything from them. The first principle was the famous cogito, ergo sum — “I think, therefore I am” — and from this first principle, Descartes argued, the existence of God, the existence of the external world, and the laws of nature could all be derived. The new foundation of knowledge, set out in the Meditations and the Principles of Philosophy, was a dualism of two substances: res cogitans, thinking substance, the domain of minds; and res extensa, extended substance, the domain of bodies. The second of these, extended substance, was what physics studied. Descartes reduced the physical world to matter in motion, governed by the laws of impact and the conservation of motion, with God supplying the cosmic energy at the beginning. The program is treated in detail in How Did René Descartes Contribute to the Scientific Revolution?. The Discourse on Method was a manifesto. It was written in French, in a clear, accessible prose, and it reached a wide audience. The book set out the principles of the Cartesian method: never to accept anything as true that was not known to be so, to divide every problem into parts, to proceed from the simplest to the most complex, and to make enumerations so complete and reviews so general that nothing was omitted. The book was a description of the new method of natural philosophy, and it was, one of the most influential works in the history of modern philosophy.
The Two Methods
The two methods — Bacon’s induction and Descartes’ deduction — were, complementary. Bacon began with the data and tried to reason up to general principles. Descartes began with general principles and tried to reason down to the data. The two approaches, taken together, describe the full range of natural-philosophical reasoning. In practice, however, the two methods were not always compatible. The Baconian inductivists distrusted the deductive approach, with its elaborate mathematical apparatus, and they preferred patient observation and careful experimentation. The Cartesian rationalists distrusted the inductive approach, with its dependence on the vagaries of experience, and they preferred the rigorous deduction of conclusions from self-evident first principles. The dispute between the two camps was the dispute between the English and the Continental traditions of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century. The dispute was resolved in favor of a combination of the two methods. The Newtonian natural philosophy, which became the consensus view in the eighteenth century, was a synthesis of the two. Newton used the Baconian method of induction to establish the empirical laws (the three laws of motion, the law of universal gravitation, Kepler’s three laws) and the Cartesian method of deduction to derive the consequences of those laws. The synthesis was the new model of natural philosophy, and it was the model that the Scientific Revolution produced.
The Wider Influence
Bacon and Descartes were, in their own time, two of the most influential natural philosophers in Europe. Bacon’s essays were widely read, and his program of inductive natural philosophy was the model for the Royal Society, which was founded in 1660 by a group of Bacon’s admirers. Descartes’ philosophy was the dominant natural philosophy on the Continent in the second half of the seventeenth century, and it was the framework within which many of the leading natural philosophers of the period, including Huygens, Malebranche, and Spinoza, worked. The two figures were also, the source of the two great philosophical traditions of modern Europe. Bacon is often taken as the father of British empiricism, and Descartes as the father of Continental rationalism. The distinction is too sharp, but it has a real basis. The empiricist tradition, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was associated with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume; the rationalist tradition was associated with Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. The dispute between the two traditions is the dispute between the Baconian and the Cartesian methods. The full story of the two traditions is the central narrative of the philosophy of science section in the origins section. The ways in which the two methods were combined, in the work of Newton and his successors, is the central narrative of the Newton page and of the Laws of Motion and Gravity section.
The Limits of the Two Programs
Neither Bacon nor Descartes, in the end, fully realized his program. Bacon’s inductive method was, in the form he set out, too rigid to be applied in practice, and it was replaced by more flexible methods of hypothesis formation and testing. The New Atlantis, with its depiction of Salomon’s House, was a fictional institution, and no actual institution of the kind was ever founded, although the Royal Society came close. Descartes’ deductive method, similarly, was too rigid to be applied in practice, and it was replaced by more flexible methods of mathematical modeling. The Cartesian vortex theory, in particular, did not survive the empirical tests of the Principia. The two programs, however, were not failures. They were the founding documents of the new natural philosophy, and they set the terms in which the Scientific Revolution was conducted. The combination of careful observation, controlled experiment, mathematical analysis, and aggressive public defense that the two programs together described was the new model of natural philosophy, and it was the model that the Scientific Revolution produced. The standard image of the two figures, as the prophets of the new science, is, accurate. They were the figures who articulated the program that the new natural philosophers would, in the next century, carry out.