Bacon, Roger [addendum]
Twentieth-century research on Roger Bacon requires some changes to the account above. It is clear that Richard Rufus, and not Bacon, was the first to lecture on the new Aristotle at Paris circa 1235. Bacon responded to the ideas of Rufus in his Parisian Quaestiones (c. 1240s). He returned to these topics in his last work Compendium of the Study of Theology (1292).
Sometime around 1247, Bacon departed from his teaching at the University of Paris. For the next twenty years he devoted his time to a study of the following works: Ibn al-Haytham Optics, the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum on statecraft, the Centiloquium, the Commentary on the Centiloquium, and numerous works on astrology. Most important here was the work of Abu'mashar (Albumassar). The Communia mathematica, the Communia naturalium, and the Compendium studii philosophiae were most probably written in Paris.
Research on Bacon since the mid-twentieth century has yielded the following results:
1) Bacon plays a significant role in the history of logic, semantics, and semiotics. Bacon's originality stands out in regard to semiotics, philosophical grammar, quantification, theory of natural sense, univocity, and supposition.
2) The new editions of the De multiplicatione specierum (1266) and the Perspectiva (1266) have placed these two texts in their proper context as important works in natural philosophy and philosophy of mind.
3) Scholars have gained a greater understanding of Bacon's aims in his knowledge of mathematics, astronomy-astrology, music, experimental science, alchemy, and medicine. Bacon presents himself as an advocate for the experimental science of others such as Petrus Peregrinus of Maricourt. Nevertheless, his account of Perspectiva as a model of an "experimental science" is fundamentally important for the later development of optics, perspective, and philosophy of mind, and for methodology in science.
4) Bacon's treatise on Moralis philosohpia develops proto-humanist concerns. Overall, in his later post-1266 philosophy, Bacon subordinates his earlier Aristotelianism to a Stoic division of philosophy and to mainly Platonic concerns.
Aristotelianism; Aristotle; Logic, History Of; Philosophy of Mind; Platonism and the Platonic Tradition; Semantics; Stoicism.
Bibliography
Works by Roger Bacon
Fredborg, Karen Margarita, Lauge Nielsen, and Jan Pinborg, eds. "An Unpublished Fragment of a Work by Roger Bacon." Traditio 34 (1978): 75–136.
Lindberg, David C. Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the "Perspectiva," with English Translation, Introduction, and Notes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Lindberg, David C. Roger Bacon's Philosophy of Nature: A Critical Edition, with English Translation, Introduction, and Notes, of "De Multiplicatione specierum" and "De speculis comburentibus." Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1983.
Linden, Stanton J. The Mirror of Alchimy. New York: Garland, 1997.
Maloney, Thomas S. Compendium of the Study of Theology. Leiden: Brill, 1988.
Maloney, Thomas S. Three Treatments of Universals. Binghamton: MARTS, 1989.
Molland, George. "Roger Bacon's Geometria speculative." In Vestigia Mathematica: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Mathematics in Honor of H.H.L. Busard, edited by M. Folkerts and J. P. Hogendijk. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 1993.
Works About Roger Bacon
Hackett, Jeremiah, ed. Roger Bacon and The Sciences: Commemorative Essays. Leiden: Brill, 1997. This volume introduced new work on languages and the natural sciences.
Hackett, Jeremiah, ed. Vivarium: An International Journal for the Philosophy and Intellectual Life of the Middle Ages and Renaissance Leiden: Brill, Vol. XXXV, N. 2 (September, 1997). This volume introduces new work on language, physics, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. It also includes a bibliography.
Rosier-Catach, Irene. La parole comme acte: Sur la grammaire et la semantique au XIIIe siecle. Paris: Vrin, 1994. In this work, the author situates Bacon in the context of philosophy of language in the thirteenth century.
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