Bacon & Dregs
alice wellintown
alicewellintown at gmail.com
Fri Aug 23 15:49:16 CDT 2013
Apt too, act two, Act 2, too, II, 1+1
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/57392/
On Friday, August 23, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:
> In a trash can I found a book of Bacon. This essay is the sweetest.
> "Of Innovations"
>
> It's also apt.
>
> http://www.authorama.com/essays-of-francis-bacon-25.html
>
>
> On Friday, August 23, 2013, Markekohut wrote:
>
> VERY LIKE! witty.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Aug 23, 2013, at 7:49 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > So, Knowledge is Power. And knowledge, as Bacon defined it, against
> > the Dregs and Aristotle, is the foundation of Empire. And, Bacon's
> > Empire, built on the foundation of knowledge and power, on NAtural
> > Science, has been built. The Industrial Revolution, steam,
> > electricity, these are the manifestations of Bacon's dream of Empire.
> > The father of induction confronted the Dregs. And in like manner, the
> > clash, the culture, custom, clash, against traditions, beliefs, all
> > that was muddy and prone to a foggy way of seeing things, to a
> > slugishness of mind, was driven by a curiosity about new and different
> > ideas. The fear of others, of far of places, of all that ancient Dregs
> > had invented about the unknown and yet discovered places, must be met
> > with direct experience, with contact and more contact, with more and
> > more repudiation of the ancient Dregs at home, and where adventure and
> > exploration was.
> >
> > Bacon tastes great.
> >
> > On 8/23/13, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Bacon's struggle to overcome intellectual blockades and the dogmatic
> >> slumber of his age and of earlier periods had to be fought on many
> >> fronts. Very early on he criticized not only Plato, Aristotle and the
> >> Aristotelians, but also humanists and Renaissance scholars such as
> >> Paracelsus and Bernardino Telesio.
> >>
> >> Although Aristotle provided specific axioms for every scientific
> >> discipline, what Bacon found lacking in the Greek philosopher's work
> >> was a master principle or general theory of science, which could be
> >> applied to all branches of natural history and philosophy (Klein
> >> 2003a). For Bacon, Aristotle's cosmology, as well as his theory of
> >> science, had become obsolete and consequently so too had many of the
> >> medieval thinkers who followed his lead. He does not repudiate
> >> Aristotle completely, but he opposes the humanistic interpretation of
> >> him, with its emphasis on syllogism and dialectics (scientia operativa
> >> versus textual hermeneutics) and the metaphysical treatment of natural
> >> philosophy in favor of natural forms (or nature's effects as
> >> structured modes of action, not artifacts), the stages of which
> >> correspond—in the shape of a pyramid of knowledge—to the structural
> >> order of nature itself.
> >>
> >>
> >> Bacon began to struggle with tradition as early as 1603. In Valerius
> >> Terminus (1603?) he already repudiates any mixture of natural
> >> philosophy and divinity; he provides an outline of his new method and
> >> determines that the end of knowledge was “a discovery of all
> >> operations and possibilities of operations from immortality (if it
> >> were possible) to the meanest mechanical practice” (Bacon III [1887],
> >> 222). He opposes Aristotelian anticipatio naturae, which favored the
> >> inquiry of causes to satisfy the mind instead of those “as will direct
> >> him and give him light to new experiences and inventions” (Bacon III
> >> [1887], 232).
> >>
> >> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/francis-bacon/#NatStrTra
> >>
> >> It may surprize some to learn that Bacon's great obstacle was
> >> Aristitole ands how Arisitole was adopted, but we when we remember
> >> that Aristotle stressed that only that which was already known could
> >> be learned, that is, that the growth of learning, of knowledge
> >> involved simply bringing together, a synthesis, of the universal truth
> >> of reason and the particular of sense. Growth of knowledge belonged to
> >> "becoming", that is, to change, and is thus inferior to what is known,
> >> to knowledge that, through reflexivity, that is the manipulation of
> >> this in syllogistics or demonstration.
> >>
> >> So, as Aristotle struggled against the Dregs, now Bacon must struggle,
> >> and the Ancient Dregs include Aristotle and his fellow travelers.
> >>
> >> Demonstration of the old truths is the stuff of school boys in a lab.
> >> Bacon would fly out inot the u
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130823/d67edbd4/attachment.html>
More information about the Pynchon-l
mailing list