Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

INTRODUCTION 5
Born in 1561, Bacon is sometimes discussed in books on Renaissance
philosophy, 16 but it is better to regard him as a modern in whom some traces of
the Renaissance remained. Certainly, he agreed with the Renaissance
philosophers in his scorn for the scholastics; he agreed, too, with some
Renaissance writers in his view that magic was not to be rejected entirely, and
his views about the nature of knowledge have a Renaissance ancestry. 17 But he
was as dismissive of Renaissance authors as he was of the scholastics, saying of
them that their concern was primarily with words. 18 He saw himself as a
revolutionary, the provider of a new logic—a ‘Novum Organum’—which was to
supercede the old ‘Organon’ of Aristotle. Aristotle’s logic had already been
attacked by humanist logicians, of whom the most influential in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries was Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée, 1515–72). 19 But the aims
of Bacon and Ramus were quite different. Ramus was concerned with thinking in
general, and his aim was to replace the Aristotelian syllogism by a less formal
logic, which would correspond more closely to the way in which people actually
think. 20 Bacon, on the other hand, was concerned chiefly with scientific thinking.
It has been said of Bacon that he made ‘the first serious attempt to formulate
and justify the procedure of natural scientists’. 21 For many, this attempt is to be
found in Bacon’s discussions of induction—that is, of that type of argument in
which one reaches universal conclusions from particular instances. His ‘Novum
Organum’, his ‘New Instru ment’, was to be a systematic way of reaching such
conclusions. Tables of observations were to be drawn up, and universal laws
were to be derived from these by the application of certain rules. 22 Such laws,
Bacon thought, were not wholly satisfactory, in that they told us nothing about
the fundamental structure of reality; none the less, they were known, in that they
provided us with rules for the manipulation of nature. 23 This introduces Bacon’s
distinctive view about the nature of knowledge: namely, that to know is to make.
As mentioned earlier, the view has Renaissance antecedents, but Bacon applies it
to what we now regard as the beginnings of modern science. It is his emphasis on
the fact that the inquirer should not just observe, but should also intervene in
nature, that has led him to be called, not the first philosopher of induction, but
the first philosopher of experimental science. 24
Whatever its merits, Bacon’s philosophy of science also had serious
deficiencies; it is widely recognized that Bacon has no grasp of the importance
that mathematics has for the sciences. 25 This cannot be said of the philosophers
whose ideas are the concern of over half of this volume: namely, the seventeenthcentury
rationalists. As mentioned earlier, 26 the term has generated some
controversy. It is used to pick out a number of seventeenth-century philosophers,
the chief of whom were Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, though Malebranche
and the Flemish philosopher Geulincx are also included. Now, it must be
admitted that none of these ever called himself a rationalist, nor can they be said
to have constituted a school, in the sense of a group of people who saw
themselves as separated from others by virtue of their adherence to certain shared
principles. They seem, indeed, to have been more conscious of their disagreements