Bacon and Descartes

Bacon and Descartes

Class Notes

Descartes

Selfhood and embodiment
-where soul meets body
-mind/body “interface”

how to conceive the soul, the mind, the self

a legal entity

Pineal Gland / melatonin
-where does the “experience” originate
-the passions of the soul
Decartes – a mind separate from the body.

What are the arguments for the existence of God?
What are the arguments of natural law?

The earth following the laws of God’s creation.

Decartes – circular reasoning. I know, therefore God, therefore I know.

Bacon
-We must master nature
-as portrayed in fictional “New Atlantis” society that has done so

we don’t have to live with it, but rather we can control it

Royal Society 1660
Probe and vex nature
Empirical method

To use science to train, shape, alter, master and take from nature. To use it as proof of our intellect and power.

Nature forced out of her Natural state – squeezed and molded.

“waste howling universe” – excuse for loss of land (North America)
negative depictions of the wild and uncontrolled (feminine?) forces of unharnessed environment.
Empathy or analogy to assume experience or truth of another’s experience.

Bacon and Descartes together freeing Nature from privileged position of past.

Pursuits of truth vrs likelihood or probability.
Social ethics of Bacon were to be used for betterment of man.
Humanity is there to be served so a moral obligation to technocratic aristocracy.

“steward of nature”
custodianship
secret societies
code of intellectuals
intellectual elite

Rosacrutions/freemason

A theological scheme.
A particular vision of progress to a particular outcome. Destiny.

Book Quotes

Bacon

-16 “the divine philosopher (Solomon) declares that “it is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but it is the glory of the King to find a thing out.”

22 induction
-“I consider induction to be that form of demonstration which upholdes the sense, and closes with nature, and comes to the very brink of operation, if it does not actually deal with it.”

23 faulty logic
“the logicians borrow the principles of each science from the science itself; secondly, they hold in reverence the first notions of the mind; and lastly, they receive as conclusive the immediate informations of the sense, when well disposed.”

25 sense, mind, perspective and error
-“but in forming its notions mixes up its own nature with the nature of things” (the human mind)
-“that the intellect is not qualified to judge except by means of induction, and induction in its legitimate form.”

Decartes

27 The nature of God
“I already knew in myself very clearly that there is distinction between intellectual and bodily natures, when I considered that every composition is an indication of dependence and that dependence is manifestly a defect, I concluded that it could not be a perfection in God to be composed of these two natures and that, consequently he was not such.”

33 on God having established laws of nature to develop itself
“all things which are purely material would have been able, in time, to become as we observe them today.”

117 Rule One
- The aim of studies should be to guide one’s intelligence towards making well-founded, true judgments about everything that one encounters.”