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    Medieval Philosophy: A Practical Guide to Roger Bacon
    Medieval Philosophy: A Practical Guide to Roger Bacon
    Medieval Philosophy: A Practical Guide to Roger Bacon
    Ebook73 pages1 hour

    Medieval Philosophy: A Practical Guide to Roger Bacon

    By M. James Ziccardi

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    About this ebook

    This book is one in a series of reviews that has been extracted in its entirety from M. James Ziccardi's "The Essence of Medieval Philosophy".

    It is intended to serve as a primer for students of medieval philosophy with an emphasis on some of the more important works of Roger Bacon.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherM. James Ziccardi
    Release dateFeb 28, 2013
    ISBN9781301757398
    Medieval Philosophy: A Practical Guide to Roger Bacon
    Author

    M. James Ziccardi

    M. James Ziccardi lives in Southern California with his wife and daughter and has been a software analyst for over twenty-five years. Reading and writing about philosophy is his passion.

    Read more from M. James Ziccardi

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      Book preview

      Medieval Philosophy - M. James Ziccardi

      Medieval Philosophy: A Practical Guide to Roger Bacon

      M. James Ziccardi

      Copyright 2011 by M. James Ziccardi

      Smashwords Edition

      Section 1 - Preface

      The following is one in a series of reviews that has been extracted in its entirety from M. James Ziccardi’s "The Essence of Medieval Philosophy".

      It is intended to serve as a primer for students of medieval philosophy with an emphasis on some of the more important works of Roger Bacon.

      Section 2 - Notes on the Text

      Square brackets [] found within quotes are mine; Parentheses () found within quotes are Roger Bacon’s.

      Sections in bold type or that are underlined are intended by me to highlight critical points.

      Section 3 - Roger Bacon (Biography)

      (c. 1214 – c. 1294)

      The next philosopher in our review is the English-born Franciscan friar, Roger Bacon, or Doctor Mirabilis (Wonderful Teacher), as he was also known. As is the case with his scholastic contemporaries, little is known regarding the early life of Roger Bacon. Indeed, much of our information on Bacon comes to us through his own writings, especially the Opus Majus, its supplement, the Opus Minus, and its introduction, the Opus Tertium - all of which were completed in 1267 at the behest of Pope Clement IV. From these writings it is believed that Roger Bacon was born sometime around the year 1214 at the Ilchester Friary, a Dominican monastery located in Somerset County in the southwest of England. Because of the extensive amounts of time and money that Bacon would eventually come to devote to experimental research, it is further believed that Bacon was born into a family of at least some modest wealth.

      Bacon’s prime years of research and study, a period which spans about forty years beginning with his admission into Oxford at the age of thirteen, may be divided into two roughly equal periods separated by his entrance into the Franciscan Order, which is believed to have occurred sometime between the years 1245 and 1250. According to his own words, Bacon spent the first twenty years of his education in the independent study of both language and science - two subjects which would lead to repercussions in his later works as a Franciscan. During his time at Oxford, Bacon studied under one the greatest intellectuals of his day, the Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste, who at the time was also the Chancellor of Oxford. It was through the research of Grosseteste that Bacon came to refine his interests in science, and especially in physics and optics. Upon his entry into the Franciscan Order, however, Bacon’s involvement in research seems to have diminished sharply, most likely due to the financial demands of acquiring expensive instruments and materials - a demand which would have been seen as being inconsistent with the Franciscan life of poverty.

      By the beginning of the thirteenth century, it was becoming apparent that Oxford was placing more emphasis on science than on theology. To the contrary, the University of Paris had by that time already established itself as the center for all theological studies throughout medieval Europe. Thus, when Bacon went to there in or around the year 1240, he noticed a stark distinction between the two universities. To begin with, Bacon was dismayed to find that so few, if any, of the faculty were willing to learn Greek, or for that matter, any language other than Latin. At the time, the writings of Aristotle were just beginning to be translated from their original Greek into Latin, although only after first being translated into either Arabic or Syriac, and from those into Castilian (Spanish). Bacon maintained that in order to fully understand any writer’s intent, his works must be read in the language in which they were written. For this reason, Bacon claimed that the works of many of the early philosophers, and especially those of Aristotle, were being gravely misconstrued, especially at a time when the works of Aristotle, namely, the Physics, Metaphysics, and Psychology, had only recently been given the permission of being taught. Bacon even went so far as to claim that based on false and ignorant translations, it were better to do away with it altogether than that it should be carried on by men ignorant of the language in which Aristotle wrote, and destitute of the scientific training which alone could qualify them for explaining him. Hence, as he wrote in the Compendium Studii Theologiae, Aristotle’s works are the foundation of all wisdom, but they must be studied in the original to be of any profit. Finally, according to Bacon, the misinterpretation of Aristotle, coupled with the

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