Francis Bacon’s Radical Skepticism
“What Bacon offers is a new picture of the world, a new way of seeing things.”
In “Introduction to Western Philosophy,” Dr. Nathan Schlueter, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, contends that modern philosophy departs from the older way of looking at the world. Born in 1561, Francis Bacon is best known for developing the scientific method. That radical skepticism inherent in his method is on full display in his wholesale rejection of the philosophical tradition that came before him. In The Great Instauration, Bacon writes,
For let a man look carefully into all that variety of books with which the arts and sciences abound, he will find everywhere endless repetitions of the same thing, varying in the method of treatment, but not new in substance, insomuch that the whole stock, numerous as it appears at first view, proves on examination to be but scanty. And for its value and utility it must be plainly avowed that the wisdom which we have derived principally from the Greeks is but like the boyhood of knowledge, and has the characteristic property of boys: it can talk, but it cannot generate; for it is fruitful of controversies but barren of works.
Isn’t that a shocking paragraph? In one fell swoop, he dismisses the titans of ancient Greek philosophy like Plato and Aristotle, in whom we find the origins of Western philosophy, as well as those thinkers who derived their understanding of nature and human beings from them—Medieval philosophers such as St. Thomas Aquinas.
Dr. Schlueter sums up Bacon’s far-reaching aim succinctly: “Bacon says the goal is generation, fruit, works; not understanding, but production. This is why Bacon is sometimes called the ‘father of modern science,’ because he wants to give us a way of knowing how to dominate and control nature for the assistance of human beings.”
If you’d like to learn more about Bacon or other philosophers in the Western tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas, Kant, and Nietzsche, sign up for the course and join us in the pursuit of knowledge of eternal things.
