Roger Bacon 1219 – 1292
Roger Bacon was an English Franciscan friar, philosopher, and early advocate of experimental method, sometimes called Doctor Mirabilis. Trained at Oxford and Paris, he produced the Opus Majus at the request of Pope Clement IV, an encyclopedic argument that the study of languages, mathematics, optics, and experimental science was essential to Christian learning. He made significant contributions to the science of optics and anticipated several later inventions in his speculative writings. His emphasis on experience and mathematics foreshadowed the methods of early modern science.
Key facts
- Nationality
- English
- Era
- Medieval
- Movements
- Scholasticism, Medieval, Christian
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Roger Bacon:
“Argument can prove nothing; experience alone can give certainty.”
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Attributed to Roger Bacon:
“Mathematics is the gate and key to the sciences.”
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Attributed to Roger Bacon:
“There are four chief obstacles in grasping truth, which hinder every man, however learned: the influence of frail and unworthy authority, long-established custom, the sense of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of one's ignorance behind a show of wisdom.”
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Attributed to Roger Bacon:
“Without experiment nothing can be known sufficiently.”
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Attributed to Roger Bacon:
“All knowledge proceeds from God, and all wisdom is from him.”