The Reformers of Aristotelian Logic
For the first half of the seventeenth century, as we have seen, Aristotelian logic dominated in the British Isles, pervading not only university, but also sophisticated treatises from outside the university. The consent was almost unanimous, and a British
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The Reformers of Aristotelian Logic
9.1
Francis Bacon and the Problem of Induction
For the first half of the seventeenth century, as we have seen, Aristotelian logic dominated in the British Isles, pervading not only universities but also sophisticated treatises from outside the academic framework. The consent was almost unanimous, and a British Aristotelian school with an empiricist strand was born and disseminated at the universities. The problem of sensation and induction was paramount to all the most important Aristotelian philosophers, who tried to elaborate a method for scientific knowledge. This is a peculiarity of British Aristotelianism. In Germany, logic was useful for solving theological disputes or as an ancillary discipline to ontology and metaphysics—that is, its study was not primarily the foundation of scientific method. However, not all British philosophers of the time were favourable to Aristotle in finding a scientific method. The most notorious example is undoubtedly Bacon, who seems to have made a struggle against Aristotelianism one of his programmatic ideas. But a closer look at his methodology reveals that his philosophy would be inconceivable outside the framework of the British Aristotelian movement, which had reevaluated the roles of sensation and induction for research and discovery. As we shall see, Bacon took certain ideas on the doctrine of induction from Aristotelians such as Digby, Brerewood and Sanderson, and re-elaborated them within a wider philosophical project. In this sense, even Bacon may be considered to some extent as an Aristotelian.1 Bacon’s projected image as an anti-Aristotelian (or, better, as an anti-Scholastic) was forcefully defended by John Stuart Mill in his A System of Logic, where he states that the Cambridge logician, simply for elaborating a new scientific method grounded on induction, should be opposed to the Aristotelian tradition: ‘it was, 1
On Bacon’s alleged Aristotelianism cf. Robert E. Larsen, ‘The Aristotelianism of Bacon’s Novum Organum’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 4 (1962), 435–450; Louis A. Kosman, The Aristotelian Backgrounds of Bacon’s Novum Organum (Harvard, 1964).
M. Sgarbi, The Aristotelian Tradition and the Rise of British Empiricism, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4951-1_9, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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9 The Reformers of Aristotelian Logic
above all, by pointing out the insufficiency of this rude and loose conception of induction, that Bacon merited the title so generally awarded to him, of founder of the inductive philosophy. … His writings contain, more or less fully developed, several of the most important principles of the inductive method’.2 In particular, Mill recognizes Bacon’s criticism of the logicians of his time: ‘the method almost exclusively employed by those professing to treat such matters inductively, is the very inductio per enumerationem simplicem which he condemns; and the experience, which we hear so confidently appealed to by all sects, p
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