Roger Bacon (redirected from Admirable Doctor)

Bacon, Roger 

Born circa 1214 in Ilchester; died circa 1292 in Oxford. English philosopher and naturalist.

Bacon taught at the university in Oxford and belonged to the Franciscan Order. He planned a vast encyclopedia of knowledge, the preparatory work for which made up his Great Work, Smaller Work, and Third Work. Bacon believed that universals existed only in the One, which is not dependent on the general or on the principle of thought. By this means, Bacon emphasized not so much the subjectivity of the general (as did the adherents of nominalism) as the objectivity of the One. Not satisfied with the alchemists’ concept of a single “primal matter” without qualities, Bacon proposed the idea of qualitatively different elements, the combinations of which form concrete things. Bacon rejected the atomistic doctrine of the indivisibility of atoms and the doctrine of the vacuum. Criticizing the Scholastics, he saw the basis of all knowledge in experience, which can be of two kinds: inner (mystical “illumination”) and external. Bacon foresaw the great importance of mathematics, without which, in his opinion, not one science could exist, and he foresaw many discoveries, such as the telephone, self-propelled vehicles, and flying machines. He worked out a plan for a Utopian estate republic in which the source of power would be the plebiscite; he demanded the eradication of ignorance and the extension of secular education.

WORKS

Opera hactenus inedita, fasc. 1-16. Oxford, 1909-40.

REFERENCES

Trakhtenberg, O. V. Ocherki po istorii zapadno-evropeiskoi srednevekovoi filosofii. Moscow, 1957.
Little, A. G. Roger Bacon’s Life and Works. Oxford, 1914.
Easton, S. C. Roger Bacon and His Search for a Universal Science. Oxford, 1952.
Heck, E. Roger Bacon. Bonn, 1957.

V. P. ZUBOV