Roger Bacon

Biography

Roger Bacon was born with Ilchester, in the Somerset in England, in 1214. He entered to the Franciscains in 1240. Having studied at Oxford and Paris, it was fixed at Oxford, teaching Aristote in particular.

It was delivered with heat to the study of all known sciences of its time, especially of physics and acquired soon an instruction extremely higher than its century. Some of its fellow-members, jealous of his merit and irritated of what it had censured their manners dissolues, showed it Sorcellerie: though he had written itself against the magic, he was condemned and passed in the dungeons most of his long life. With the advent of the pope Clément IV, which had it in great regard, it found freedom in 1265, but after the death of this lit pope, it remained in hillock with new persecutions and was locked up in Paris, during ten years, in the Couvent of Franciscains. It left prison only few years before its death.

One owes him of clever observations on the Optique (it had the idea of the Trichromie) and the refraction of the light; a reflection on the Rainbow - of which it measures the angular opening: 42° and counts the alternatives: Dew, fountains, prisms - which rather gives an opinion for the vision of Robert Grossetête than that of Ibn Al-Haytham, as well as a description of the Darkroom.

One sometimes allotted the invention of the to him Gunpowder, that of the magnifying glasses, the Télescope, the Air pump and a combustible substance similar to the Phosphore; one finds in any case in his writings of the passages where these various inventions are described rather exactly.

He proposed as of 1267 the Réforme of the calendar, without to have been informed of former work of Omar Khayyam.

Its greater merit finally is to have given up the purely speculative method and to have advised and have practiced itself the experiment. However, it was not free of the errors of its time, and accepted in the Alchimie and the Astrologie, or at least let it think.

Its work

The purpose of works of Bacon are the intuition of the Vérité, i.e. the scientific certainty, and this truth to be reached is for him the hello. The Science proceeding of the heart is thus essential. The means of this research is the Expérience, because by testing the truth, it reveals it. Thus, only the Expérience of certainty in the scientific discipline is source. This Expérience is done by the authority of the scientists and the spontaneous Raisonnement which is held in contact with the things. Bacon thus rejects the purely abstract Raisonnement S which are sterile for the advance of sciences.

Roger Bacon created the applied science by making Expérience the only source of scientific knowledge.

This Expérience, which links what is thought and what is felt, constitutes the scientific certainty. But this certainty would have yet any insurance, no immutability, if it were not helped of a divine illumination and interior.

Roger Bacon does not grant as much importance than his contemporaries to the Foi for the research of the truth in the scientific discipline. For him, the knowledge of the divine and the Révélation cannot enter in conflict with the knowledge of nature.

Roger Bacon included/understood before others that Aristote had made some errors in connection with the natural Phénomène S, which by no means prevented it from integrating the thought of Aristote, like that of Plato, which it regards as fathers of the Church in the Histoire of the religion.

He criticizes the theology of his time on the scientific aspects. He was persecuted because he called into question balance between Foi and Raison, with the relative advantage of the Raison. For him, only wisdom is that of the books.

Roger Bacon denounced the Croisade S, which it conceived like companies of domination on people: rather than to massacre the “infidels”, it would have been necessary to preach the Évangile to them. But it noted whereas nobody at his time had still studied in a systematic way the languages and the beliefs of the people to be reached.

Roger Bacon is regarded as one of the possible authors of the Manuscrit of Voynich, a work quantified which did not deliver all its secrecies to date and whose paternity remains discussed.

Roger Bacon is one of the precursors of the Renaissance. He inspired Auguste Count which, in the prism of the ideas of the 19th century, interpreted its work in a perhaps reducing and partial way.

Publications

Roger Bacon left writings on almost all the parts of science. Its principal works are:

the Opus Majus (published by Samuel Jebb, London, 1733, in-ful.), that he addressed to the pope Clément IV, and where he had proposed to gather all his doctrines; he made of them two successive recastings under the names of Opus Minus and Opus tertium (these two works were published only in 1860, in London, by J.S. Brewer).

In its works, Opus Majus , Opus Washout and Opus Tertium , it is released from the authority as regards Théologie as well as sciences.

He wrote:

Epistola of secretis operibus naturae and artis and nullitate maguae , Paris, 1542
Of retardandis senectutis accidentibus , Oxford, 1590, and several treaties of alchemy, whose main thing is the Speculum alchemicum .

Girard de Tournus translated into French, 1557, the Epistola of secretis under this title: Of the admirable capacity of art and nature and the Mirror of alchemy .

One must with Emile Charles: R. Bacon, his life, its works and its doctrines , 1862.

Bibliography: texts

Anheim (Etienne), Grevin (Benoit), Mortard (Martin), Interpretation Judeo-Christian, magic and linguistics: a collection of new notes allotted to Roger Bacon, in: Files of doctrinal and literary history of the Middle Ages 68 (2001), 95-154.
Released (Alain of), the summulae dialectices of Roger Bacon, III. Of termino , Of enuntiatione , in: Files of doctrinal and literary history of the Middle Ages 53 (1986), 139-289.
Released (Alain of), the summulae dialectices of Roger Bacon, III. Of argumentatione , in: Files of doctrinal and literary history of the Middle Ages 54 (1987), 171-278.

Bibliography: critical studies and comments

Roger Bacon and the sciences /ED. Jeremiah Hackett. Leiden: Brill, 1997. (Studien und Text zur Geistesgeschichte of Mittelaters; 57). ISBN 90-04-10015-6.
Hackett (Jeremiah), Maloney (Thomas S.), has Roger Bacon Bibliography, New scholasticism 61 (1987), 184-207.
Lindberg (David C.), Science ace handmaiden: Roger Bacon and the patristic Tradition, Isis 78 (1987), 518-536.
Maloney (Thomas S.), extreme The realism off Roger Bacon, Review off metaphysics 38 (1985), 807-837.
Lindberg (David C.), One the natural Application off mathematics to: Roger Bacon and his predecessors, British Newspaper for the History off Science 15 (1982), 3-25.
Delorme (G.), article Roger Bacon, in: catholic Dictionary of Theology (Paris 1932), vol. 2, p. 8-31.

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