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The Need for Francis Bacon's Philosophy Essay

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The Need for Bacon's Philosophy Works in This Complicated World

We live in interesting times. We, meaning those of us living in the United States of America near the close of the twentieth century, are a part of the most technologically advanced civilization the world has ever know as well as the biggest economy in the world to date. Because of our country's wealth and power, it attracts immigrants from many other nations. Furthermore, because of advances in communications technology, meaning especially television and the Internet, we are exposed to different lifestyles and experiences from all over the world. And these experiences are not just passively presented to us for our viewing pleasure-there are forces actively engaged …show more content…

Bacon tried to do nothing less than give his age a new philosophy. Having become convinced that science in his day was not really science at all, but disputation of concepts that had not been informed by the materials facts of actual things, Bacon made it his objective to bring men into more intimate confrontation with the stuff of the world, with the actual concrete phenomena with which man was surrounded. Bacon accused the Scholastic philosophers of spinning "cowebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit," of withdrawing "themselves too much form the contemplation of nature, and the observation of experience," and of tumbling "up and down in their own reason and conceits." Rather than spiders that spin complex webs for their own profits only, Bacon would have his people work as bees, producing useful creations for all.

Bacon was convinced that man could come to be sovereign over nature and use nature's resources for his greater delight in life if he could only the right approach to the study of the world. That approach was not the deductive, syllogistic approach of the logic of Aristotle and his disciples, the Schoolman, but rather it was the inductive method of arriving at a truth only after having collected numerous pieces of evidence, only

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