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Roger Bacon (1214 – 1292) – Biography (2003) (st-andrews.ac.uk)
54 points by abudabi123 on April 12, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments



Yesterday I finished reading "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco for the second time. Fantastic book. It talks about a series of crimes in an abbey, and one of the lead characters, William of Baskerville, is a Franciscan logician who uses his mind and deductive abilities to eventually find the common thread among the crimes. He knew and regards Roger Bacon as his master many times in the book, and also mentions William of Occam. Highly recommended to read. It's a masterpiece.


I love this biography because it shows how contact with the Islamic world was beneficial and generative to the West (and put the West back in contact with aspects of its intellectual inheritance that it had lost, like the thought of Aristotle).


"The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco touches on these themes. Its lead character, William of Baskerville, is very much in the Roger Bacon mold.


The biography of Bacon mentions the influence of St Augustine, who, in his Confessions (written in the 300s) cites a lost work by Cicero as turning him away from his sinful life including lust, conceit, Manachaeism, and the theater, among other vices.

That a revered saint could give credit to a pagan thinker was surprising when I first read it, as I assumed ancient Catholic theologians would be more conservative and “pure” in their philosophy, especially on the heels of their persecution by various Roman emperors.


[flagged]


Please do not take HN threads into religious flamewar. It's the last thing we need, and fortunately is particularly avoidable.

Fortunately your other recent comments have all been good HN posts—thank you!


It was not meant to start a flame war as this was truly a sad moment in history.


Intent is not enough with such posts. If your comment pattern-matches to flamewar then it will generally produce flamewar whether you intended it that way or not. There needs to be enough information to disambiguate your intent, and the burden is on the commenter to include that.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...


This is something bought up every time science is mentioned in the context of the Islamic world in the Middle Ages, but it's more nuanced than that. Every civilization goes through cultural trends, and Luddites are universal. It's also helpful to think of scientific progress accelerating in places where different civilizations can interact, and the core Arab lands had reached a sort of homogeneity by the Middle Ages, and some level of intellectual stagnation, pretty similar to Europe in the Early Middle Ages. Contrast with parts of the Islamic world at the periphery, and you see a great deal of innovation. The early Ottoman period was one of major technical innovation, as was the Indian subcontinent.


Trivia:

There is a street named after him (Rodger Bacon Dr.) in Reston, VA.

Right across from it is Isaac Newton Sq, where the lab that discovered the Reston Ebola Virus was located. Around the corner is Michael Faraday Dr.


Calling Bacon just a mathematician (first sentence of the text) seems quite reductive. Other than that it was an interesting read. I think the Wikipedia page is better - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bacon


Medieval cancel culture! Imprisoned incommunicado by his fellow Franciscans in the convent in Ancona, Italy, 1278-1290 for teaching views too novel.




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