Talk:Roger Bacon

message: In this and many other articles on science. Just read the first line: 
:"He is sometimes credited as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method[1] inspired by the works of Plato and Aristotle via early Islamic scientists and Jewish scholars: Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides."
The implication is that Avicenna, Averroes and Maimonides were mere transmitters of Greek knowledge. This cannot be further from the truth. For example, Ibn Al-Haytham's work on optics was probably the earliest recorded use of the complete "Scientific Method" (the basis of Modern Science). Such bias is simply unacceptable. This is article reeks of continued attempts by eurocentric thinkers to efface their debt to Arab science. 
"Inspired by the works of Plato and Aristotle" could well be eliminated here. It just adds bias to the article. Roger Bacon was clearly influenced, heavily by the work of Arab thinkers. More by the Induction of Ibn Haytham rather than the Deduction of Aristotle; of the scientific philosophy of Avicenna and Averroes more-so than that of Plato.
Revolting. Rlinfinity (talk) 21:44, 8 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't see the problem.  It says he was "one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method" and says who he was inspired by.  How does that detract from them?  Dicklyon (talk) 01:21, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: You misread Rinf. The problem is the word via. That said, Rinf's comment is a mess of prejudice itself. Bacon was primarily interested in Aristotle and did use the Arab writers primarily as a conduit to that end. — LlywelynII 11:11, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  So much Systemic Bias 

message: That book on 'Democracy in Islam', is of questionable topical focus here. First, it is actually emphasizing the Islamic influence on Bacon, not the Aristotelian one, so as a citation it was misused. Second, the names of the authors suggest rather obvious bias, they provide no supporting evidence, and their outlying point of view can hardly be found in your average work on Bacon. It's true that the Secret of Secrets may have had such origins. But it's not certain, and Bacon never read Arabic. The subsequent reference, Glick et al., discuss this in some detail without the sweeping remarks from 'Democracy in Islam'. I going to change Islamic to Arabic to follow them closer, by the way. Have mörser, will travel (talk) 16:03, 16 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  'Democracy in Islam', etc. 

message: Roger bacon mentions AlHazen (The guy who is known as the father of scientific method) several times in his book. I am gonna change the part which states "... of possible arabic origin" because there is no doubt that AlHazen influenced him. 
Link.--Arsaces (talk) 08:40, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: The article on Al Hazen itself states he was possibly of Arabic origin. Montalban (talk) 03:08, 2 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible of Arabic origin?  

message: ===Category===
This article is currently in :Category:Scholastic philosophers, but as 
: Bacon withdrew from the scholastic routine and devoted himself to languages and experimental research.
and
: He was an enthusiastic proponent and practician of the experimental method of acquiring knowledge about the world.
shouldn't he also belong to :Category:Empiricists
:Yes. Done! —Aetheling 23:37, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Also, yes, but probably not one instead of the other. — LlywelynII 11:11, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Scholasticism

message: This article is currently in :Category:Scholastic philosophers, but as 
: Bacon withdrew from the scholastic routine and devoted himself to languages and experimental research.
and
: He was an enthusiastic proponent and practician of the experimental method of acquiring knowledge about the world.
shouldn't he also belong to :Category:Empiricists
:Yes. Done! —Aetheling 23:37, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Also, yes, but probably not one instead of the other. — LlywelynII 11:11, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Category

message: Aristotle, though certainly not an empiricist, did at least try to derive science from the real world.  Scholasticism relied on deduction from certain authorities (of whom Aristotle was one) whose claims were simply defined to be true—the real world had very little to do with it.  In claiming that Bacon started to break from Scholasticism, I think we should careful not to also claim that he was breaking from Aristotle. —Ryan McDaniel 19:45, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scholasticism (specifically on Aristotle) 

message: Much of this article still shows the influence of the outdated historiography of the 1911 Brittanica article.  I've added a section on changing interpretations of Bacon that addresses the principle issues.  Obviously, more changes still need to be done to the body of the article.  --SteveMcCluskey 16:52, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The "featured article" on cannon used the 1771 version of Brittanica (I kid you not ). The 1911 edition is perhaps more problematic as it gave credence to the then-recent (c. 1904) Hime gunpowder theory, which not only gave the dubious decryption of a non-working formula, but did it in order to prove that Bacon was the first to discover gunpowder, and that he was hiding from the inquisition. One cannot escape the feeling that there was a veneer of British nationalism in all that, much like German sources of the time tended to support Albert Magnus or Berthold Schwarz as inventors of gunpowder. Granted, Lynn Thorndike and George Sarton only published their criticism of the Hime theory starting from 1915 or so (starting with Thorndike in Science (journal), ), and communications were much slower at the time. I'm not sure who Robert Steele was (the 1928 critic of the Hime theory in Nature (journal) ), but neither Thorndike nor Sarton were British. Nonetheless, some British sources clang to the Hime theory well into the 20th century. The late Ian V. Hogg comes to mind. Have mörser, will travel (talk) 00:40, 15 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dated historiography 

message: How can this section be said to be unsourced/unreferenced, when it consists of quotations from Bacon's works, each referenced ? -- HenriLobineau
:This section has since been removed, but probably better to use them in the appropriate sections or as side images in any case. There's always Wikiquote we can link to for laundry lists. — LlywelynII 11:12, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quotations 

message: ===Death===
His life seems to peter out in 2010, with no mention of when, where and how he died.  A death date of 11 June 1294 gets quite a run on Google, although some cites say it's "possible" or "probable" rather than "certain".  A death year of 1292 is also found.  --  JackofOz (talk) 00:59, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: 2010?? — LlywelynII 11:11, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

text: Article now says he died in 1294.  Also, see my earlier post above - "Death".  I'd still like to know how the specific date of 11 June 1294 came about.  --  Jack of Oz [your turn] 12:56, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Date of death

message: His life seems to peter out in 2010, with no mention of when, where and how he died.  A death date of 11 June 1294 gets quite a run on Google, although some cites say it's "possible" or "probable" rather than "certain".  A death year of 1292 is also found.  --  JackofOz (talk) 00:59, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: 2010?? — LlywelynII 11:11, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Death

message: Currently, the article states that Bacon was born c. 1214 (correct), but that he died in 1240.  That is patently false, as the article itself tells of events in his life in the 1270s.  Presumably, the estimated time of his death is something like c. 1280.  Perhaps someone with a bonafide source could supply a more accurate death date.  Lapisphil (talk) 02:22, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Article now says he died in 1294.  Also, see my earlier post above - "Death".  I'd still like to know how the specific date of 11 June 1294 came about.  --  Jack of Oz [your turn] 12:56, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Death Date? 

message: No, you cannot use an entry on "Anti-Aging Medicine" in an "Encyclopedia of Aging" to contradict Britannica, the DNB, and every focused scholarly treatment on the guy's life that says, essentially, we have no idea where or when he died: just that it was sometime around 1292 and close enough to Oxford to get the body back for burial. Don't overstate your sources or use the weakest ones to try to contradict the strongest. — LlywelynII 13:43, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Date of death

message: :"His advocacy of scientia experimentalis has been argued to differ from modern experimental science beavers,[12] and many "
I'm pretty certain thats not meant to say beavers, but I'm unsure what it is a mistype of. Could someone more familiar with the sources fix this?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.192.35.132 (talk) 18:26, 28 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The history shows that the word "beavers" was added by someone. Reverted to the earlier edit. biriwilg 05:21, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Beavers? 

message: In many sites Bacon is cited as an early cryptologist .. in his work  "Concerning the Marvelous Power of Art and of Nature and Concerning the Nullity of Magic" wrote about nescessity of ciphers and listen several methods.  It's true? detailed info? 88.149.245.72 (talk) 21:14, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cryptography? 

message: The article states that Bacon regarded Peter of Maricourt and John of London as "perfect mathematicians", as do other sources such as the online DNB. However, the Wikipedia article on Peter suggests that the comment is probably a gloss by a later writer. No reference is given for this statement. Does anyone know whether it is generally accepted that Bacon described these two as perfect mathematicians? Dudley Miles (talk) 13:47, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Wikipedia is not a source. Did you have any better reason to doubt the many sources that are focused on the presumptive speaker? — LlywelynII 11:11, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Peter of Maricourt 

message: This paragraph is bylined 'dubious':
:"Probably the most comprehensive and accessible description of Roger Bacon's life and times to a modern reader is contained in the book Doctor Mirabilis, written in 1964 by the science fiction author James Blish. This is the second book in Blish's quasi-religious trilogy After Such Knowledge, and is a complete, at times biographical recounting of Bacon's life and struggle to develop a 'Universal Science'. Though thoroughly academically researched, with a host of accurate references, including extensive use of Bacon's own writings, frequently in the original Latin, the book is written in the style of a novel, and Blish himself referred to it as 'fiction' or 'a vision'."
What is dubious about it? This is a very readable and easy-to-obtain book (try ebay) which covers Bacon's life and times. Blish spent several years researching the book, from 1958 until it was published in 1964, with Anne Faber of Faber and Faber as well as several other academics providing detailed medieval data (see Ch 7 - 'Imprisoned in a Tesseract' David Ketterer ). The references referred to are, unsurprisingly, in Doctor Mirabilis. Apart from the Foreword (where Blish refers to the work as a 'fiction or a vision') and the latin texts scattered throughout the book, there are half a dozen pages of notes at the back. But remember, this is meant to be a novel, not a reference book....  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.13.162.172 (talk) 23:46, 19 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I support the assertion - could the contributor who assigned the 'dubious' status please step forward? This is weaselly nitpicking, and a clear failure to read the article and interpret context. Shame on you ! --Deepshark (talk) 12:17, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: User:Stevenmitchell added that, and including the inline comment "This is totally ridiculous and unsubstantiated. For the author to come to that conclusion, they would have to ignore half of the information written about and by him. This book is based on research from 45 years ago - it is hardly current..."  I tend to agree.  If you want to say a piece of fiction is ""Probably the most comprehensive and accessible description of Roger Bacon's life and times", then you better cite a good secondary source for that opinion. Dicklyon (talk) 01:19, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: How about the reference I gave? (see Ch 7 - 'Imprisoned in a Tesseract' David Ketterer ) And Deepshark5 is quite correct below in interpreting my words - note that I did not say 'correct' because nobody can claim at this distance that ANY depiction of Roger Bacon is correct. What I said it that it is comprehensive (covering his life from about 18 years old until his death), and accessible (because it is instantly available on ebay or Amazon at a low cost). Both of these are easily verifiable non-interpretable facts. It is clearly specified as fiction - it happens to be very well researched for its time (see my reference above); if you know of any other comparable work in existence, scholarly or not, please include it as a reference. I believe that this is pretty much the only work covering Roger Bacon's life which a non-specialist can access in practice, beyond encyclopedia entries.     —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.13.162.172 (talk) 11:30, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Re last post by Dicklyon: Could you recommend a better parsing or phrasing ? Blish (1964) notes himself that '...A genius and his works remain unruly to this day...' Things haven't changed much since then, and working with Roger's Opus Tert. is a real headache - I gave it a go at University. Nevertheless, I suspect the assertion does have some validity - there are very few English language books that are not scholarly in form and function that give an account of Roger Bacon. In addition, there does not appear to be much research undertaken about Roger Bacon - searches on publisher's websites such as Springer, Elsevier, Wiley etc. who have Science History journals do not appear to be saying much about recent work in relation to Bacon studies - though please correct me if I am wrong, I have merely being skimming abstracts. The main contributor could perhaps be interpreted as saying that Doctor Mirabilis is the most non-scholarly English language account of Bacon's life. Would this perhaps be a better way to phrase the statement ? comments please - I can make the correction very quickly, if you would like me to do so (and its a quick job too!) --Deepshark (talk) 03:23, 27 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't have any particular knowledge or insights about this, just pointing out that interpretive statements should follow sources. If you want to say something interpretive about a source (fiction or otherwise), you need another source that does that; otherwise, just reports fact and opinions from the source itself.  Dicklyon (talk) 03:35, 27 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: It's now over a year since this discussion. Is the tag saying the claim is "dubious" still needed?— Rod talk 22:11, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: No. The offending text should just be redone. Fixt. — LlywelynII 11:11, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bacon in Fiction 

message: The article is written like a fansite, RB is, by writers measures obviously a superman, inventing everything conceivable and everything else 400 years before all the dummies, Newton, Einstein, Witten and everybody else. Not to speak about the lowly platyshelmintes of ourselves!! F.ex.:
:Bacon possessed one of the most commanding intellects of his age, and made many discoveries while coming near to many others, despite many disadvantages and discouragements.
equals to factually nil-nada - just a waste of breath/bandwidth,
:Bacon also wrote a criticism of the Julian calendar which was then still in use.
yeah, but was the criticism of the correct kind?
:He first recognized the visible spectrum in a glass of water, four centuries before Sir Isaac Newton discovered that prisms could disassemble and reassemble white light.
yeah, but did he correctly describe what was happening? Anyone can play with a pair of pieces of glass.
:Believing that the craftsman and skilled tradesman had a greater knowledge of reality than that of his peers in the ivory towers, Bacon was an enthusiastic proponent and practitioner of the experimental method of acquiring knowledge about the world.
yeah, all we other lowly subhumans (nil-nada content) ... etc...
I prefer a factual and dry story about the scientific implications of what he did, not this fansite kind of text. Rursus dixit. (mbork3!) 16:57, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree on most of your points.  The peacock claims need to be rewritten -- he was a major figure but not one of the most commanding intellects.  The claim about the spectrum is definitely off -- particularly since Bacon (like most of his contemporaries) distinguished light from color. On the other hand, his criticism of the Julian calendar was right on target. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 19:56, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: On the other hand again, Bacon makes some spectacularly accurate predictions - cars, aircraft, submarines, hydraulics, suspension bridges and such, which he foresaw could be the result of following his proposed schema for scientific investigation. No matter how you depict that, it's going to look impressive...  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.13.162.172 (talk) 11:43, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Fansite!

message: I was developing a new version for the paragraph that (1) ignores the Goldstones and (2) is mainly based on the quotation by Michael H. Shank above --which, unlike the other sources, has the important feature of providing an overview of the opinions among current (reliable) scholars.
I previously planned to make changes only after carefully listing reasons that make the Goldstones unreliable. But I noticed yesterday yet another problem: the quotation by Bacon is from before the time of the supposed imprisonment. As such, the current text is patently misleading and needs to be replaced. I will use the text I was preparing and hope other editors help improve and expand the topic from this new starting point. --Leinad-Z (talk) 11:09, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: The Goldstones should only appear in the role they themselves were focused on: as proponents of Bacon's connection to the Vo. MS. The thorough fisking of their mistakes should occur at its own page but they should be mentioned and discredited here for the sake of people coming here after seeing their work or other items based on it. No, of course they shouldn't be used as sources for any points on Bacon's life, however much closer they might be to the truth of his incarceration than some of the revisionist historians are. — LlywelynII 11:21, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Changes...

message: The last chapter of their book starts with "INSTEAD OF BEING THE MAKING OF BACON'S REPUTATION, the cipher manuscript turned out to be the ruin of it."  Never mind that no serious work on Bacon has spent any time on the Voynich MS before or after. And they wildly flap their arms on the edge of the abyss after that, trying to show that the 20th century reevaluations of Bacon couldn't have possibly been caused by anything else. For example, after dismissing Thorndike and Hackett, they write "As for the academic community, the only serious study of Bacon's life since Thorndike was Stewart Easton's Roger Bacon and His Search for a Universal Science. Easton, while assuring the reader that he had “tried to keep from any bias for or against” Bacon, went on to say, “I have worked on the assumption that he cannot have been unique, and that his originality, as, indeed, all human originality, has rested on his treatment of materials familiar to large numbers of people in his time.” Would Easton have taken the same approach if he were writing about Newton or Einstein? As it was, through the filter of that assumption, Easton came to the conclusion, not surprisingly, that little that Bacon did was original (or unique)." Etc. Have mörser, will travel (talk) 23:46, 18 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, when you're trying to make them into crackpots, listing a completely cogent and well-taken point they make w/r/t Easton isn't really the way to go about it. — LlywelynII 11:17, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Goldstones are amusing 

message: Note he is a major background character in Ecco's "Name of the Rose" and also that he is said to have written on hiding messeages in paintings as well as the more obvious cyphers.Wblakesx (talk) 10:44, 11 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Which obvious cyphers? — LlywelynII 11:11, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: The Name of the Rose

message: I have hunch how the fringe theory of the 7:5:5 gunpowder formula became 6:5:5, which has been reproduced in parallel by some the popmilhist book industry and, more depressingly, by some chemistry books as recent as , published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2009. The earliest place where I found the error is in Ordnance, Volumes 3-4, 1922, p. 282. The "VII" from Hime became "VI" there. It's amusing that a crackpot theory started based on a copying error has produced an offspring by the same method!  Have mörser, will travel (talk) 16:49, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  crackpottery 

message: There should be some uniformity in naming that work. Both (Medieval) Latin and English capitalization rules are used, and both the 'j' and the 'i' version appear, sometimes next to each other e.g., "As a result Bacon sent the Pope his Opus Majus, [...]. Besides the Opus maius [...]" Have mörser, will travel (talk) 04:02, 17 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: That's because we  here. Fixt. — LlywelynII 11:11, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  'Opus Majus', 'Opus maius' 

message: This is actually true at least in part, I'm making a note here to dig a citation for it. Uʔ (talk) 20:05, 26 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Astrology 

message: A few outstanding minds like Roger Bacon stood out, but they were regarded with great suspicion by the Church.  Small wonder that Bacon had vast contempt for the prevailing knowledge of his time and he thought that he could learn more from the man in the street than from renowned scholars.  He felt that the only road to truth lay in experimentation, not in abstract statements about God, the soul, and angels.  While predicting the invention of the airplane, the submarine, and the motor car, he urged also the study of mathematics to give a quantitative basis to science.  Still he was suffering from the limitations of his time.  His main purpose was to substantiate the truth of the Bible and he believed in experimental science to ward off the onslaughts of the Anti-Christ
---some jerk on the Internet  (talk)  14:47, 29 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, thanks. It's quite difficult to consider Mayer as RS about Bacon, but at least we know he emitted that opinion. ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 07:53, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quote from Mayer 

message: The article contains the following:
: he began to lecture at the university of Paris, then the centre of intellectual life in Europe.
Should this not be 'western' Europe as intellectual life continued in Constantinople despite the relative 'dark ages' of the west Montalban (talk) 03:05, 2 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Europe - or just the west? 

message: A "trivia" banner has been added to the "In popular culture" section of this article, suggesting "This article appears to contain trivial, minor, or unrelated references to popular culture." Do other editors feel this is appropriate/valid and should any changes be made a s a result?— Rod talk 10:52, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  In popular culture/trivia 

message: This etching from 1721 about the South Sea Bubble references to "Fryer Bacon’s celebrated Metallick Vissage", depicted on the screen on the upper middle left. The British Museum's catalogue of 1873, p. 580, says this alludes to the effrontery of the schemers. Just a very small note, maybe it is interesting. --Missyfox (talk) 16:31, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  A True Picture of a Famous Skreen, 1721 

message: There are two major philosophers named Bacon who are considered central figures in the schools of empiricism and the scientific method. I suspect that many Wikipedians visit the page on Francis Bacon when they're looking for Roger Bacon and vice-versa. (This has definitely happened to me.) I'd like to add a disambiguation to the top of both pages. Any objections? (If you do object, alternative approaches would be welcome.)
(Crossposted to talk:Francis Bacon)--Rxtreme (talk) 16:15, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Disambiguating Roger and Francis Bacon 

message: Zzz 2409:4089:BC12:1641:0:0:CCC8:2011 (talk) 15:35, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dr homi bhabha