Bacon Roger :: Essays Papers

Bacon RogerRoger Bacon was an English Scholastic philosopher, scientist and one of the most influential teachers of the 13th century.He was born in Ilchester, Somersetshire in 1214. Roger Bacon was educated at the universities of Oxford and Paris. He remained in Paris after completing his studies and taught for a while at the University of Paris. When he returned to England in about 1251, he entered the religious order of the Franciscans and lived at Oxford. He carried on active studies and did experimental research in alchemy, optics, and astronomy.Bacon was critical of the methods of schooling of the times, and in the late 1260s, at the request of Pope Clement IV, he wrote his Opus Majus (Major Work). In this work he represented the necessity of a reformation in the sciences through different methods of tuitioning languages and nature. The Opus Majus was an cyclopaedia of all science, embracing grammar and logic, mathematics, physics, experimental research, and moral philosophy . The response of the pope to Bacons chef-doeuvre is not known, but the work could not in any share have had much effect in Bacons time, because it reached Clement during the period of his bleak illness.Bacons revolutionary ideas about the study of science caused his condemnation by the Franciscans for his dissentient views. In 1278 the general of the Franciscan order, Girolamo Masci, later Pope Nicholas IV, forbade the reading of Bacons books and had Bacon arrested. later on ten years in prison, Bacon returned to Oxford. He wrote Compendium Studii Theologiae (A Compendium of the case of Theology, 1292) shortly before his death.Despite his advanced knowledge, Bacon accepted some of the customary but later disproved beliefs of his time, such as the existence of a philosophers colliery and the efficacy of astrology. Although many inventions have been credited to him, some of them undoubtedly were derived from the study of Arab scientists. His writings brought new and ingenious views on optics, particularly on divagation on the apparent magnitude of objects and on the apparent increase in the size of the sun and moon at the horizon. He found that with sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal, a substance (now known as gunpowder) could be produced that would imitate lightning and cause explosions.