Francis Bacon and the Scientific Method By : Ahmed Samy El-bahrawy
Bacon's classification of the sciences
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| 3 Bacon's classification of the sciences What Bacon wanted from science was not to increase man's knowledge of nature, but rather the science by which man controls nature and changes his type of life on earth. The truth is that he penetrated into the essence of inductive science, tried to draw its structure, put a classification for it, and elaborated on its experimental methods. Bacon tried to arrange the existing sciences according to our perceptive powers, which he confines to three powers memory, imagination, and reason. Memory: its subject is history, and history is of two types a civil history specific to man, and a natural history specific to nature. Civil history is divided into two parts ecclesiastical history, and civil history in the sense of the word is divided according to the documents we use, including political, literary, scientific and artistic memoirs and translations. Natural history is divided into three sections the description of celestial and terrestrial phenomena, the description of mutants that reveal hidden forces in ordinary cases, and the description of the arts as human means to change the course of nature. The imagination: its subject is poetry, and poetry is divided into story poetry, descriptive poetry, representational poetry, and symbolic poetry, which is an interpretation of stories and legends and the extraction of the meanings contained in their images, an ancient interpretation that was common in the Renaissance. The mind: its subject is philosophy, and philosophy deals with three subjects nature, man, and God. There is natural philosophy, which is divided into metaphysics or the science of formal and final causes, and to nature or the science of efficient and material causes, which is divided into mechanics and magic. There is humanistic philosophy or the philosophy of man, which is divided into what deals with the soul (science of reason or logic, science of will or ethics, and what deals with social and political relations. As for divine philosophy or natural theology, it paves the way for it with the science of first philosophy, or the science of elementary principles, such as that equal quantities if they are added to unequal quantities result in unequal quantities, and that the two terms that agree with a third term of them agree, and that everything changes but nothing perishes, etc. That, and this science is the common stem between the sciences of the mind. But to what extent is Bacon's classification of sciences acceptable Obviously, this classification has several weaknesses 1- It is a subjective classification based on our perceived powers. 2- Bacon thinks that one of the forces of knowledge is sufficient for the establishment of one science, and this is a mistake because a single knowledge combines to establish all the forces with the existence of a discrepancy between the sciences. 3- It places the perceptual powers in one rank, while the mind is superior to the other perceptual powers....etc. |