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Messagefrom General Critics"this results in a mechanical conception of the body" a mechanical conception , divide facts and rational and logical answers from uncertainties.
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Messagefrom General Critics"His method was to start by questioning his assumptions and reconstructing all knowledge from a foundation of certainty" first assumptions, then questioning, asking for answers.
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page037from Building Ideasthe Meditations, published in 1637 and 1641, grew out of a similar reforming objective. Though he was, unlike Bacon, more of a “hands-on” researcher, publishing a collection of works on optics, geometry and meteors, it was his writing on philosophical principles that brought him the widest recognition and assured him a place in the history of ideas. The full title of the brief and clear summary of his methods – which he wrote in French instead of Latin as a means to popularize his message – was the “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences”. Like Bacon, he was intent on providing “instruments” for the mind, to assist in its quest for a clear comprehension of the world, uncompromised by tradition and received conventions. This process involved transcending the body and the messy “confusion” of perceptual experience in order to avoid the “illusions” of the realm of the senses and understand the reality behind mere appearance. His method was to start by questioning his assumptions and reconstructing all knowledge from a foundation of certainty:
Thus, as our senses deceive us at times, I was ready to suppose that nothing was at all the way our senses represented them to be … But I soon noticed that while I thus wished to think everything false, it was necessarily true that I who thought so, was something. Since this truth, I think therefore I am, was so firm and assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were unable to shake it, I judged that I could safely accept it as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.17 It was this clear separation of the reasoning mind from the uncertainties of the crude, “feeling” body that provided Descartes with his starting point for a whole new system of knowledge. The human being, however, is divided in this system, like a pilot steering a ship, and this results in a mechanical conception of the body which is reduced to the level of an automaton. Although Descartes claimed that only animals were in fact true machines, as they lacked any kind of 17 René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Bobbs-Merrill, New York. 1956, pp 20-21.
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page036from Building Ideasfor ancient wisdom. He proposed a new beginning which would start from observation and build up from simple axioms towards more abstract principles. He described this way of working, from the particular towards the general, as an “instrument” for the mind, just like a tool works for the hand. He saw quite clearly the relationship between knowledge and power and felt that nature’s mysteries would yield before his methods. He wanted, as he put it in his preface: “… to conquer, not an opponent in argument, but Nature herself in action: to seek, in short, not elegant and probable conjectures, but certain and demonstrable knowledge…”.15
Bacon’s ideas directly inspired what soon became a widespread preoccupation with research in the sciences and led, in 1660, to the establishment in London of a group called the Royal Society. The institution was set up to support individuals in the pursuit of new knowledge through the process of experiment and many famous figures, including Robert Hooke and Issac Newton, were involved in the society’s pioneering activities. The fact that Christopher Wren was a founder member and president, and that Hooke himself also designed several buildings, makes clear that the early growth of the “profession” of the architect was tied up with the beginnings science. Even Francis Bacon’s work betrays a crossover of ideas, as his essay, Of Building, makes clear. The application to useful purposes was his goal for new knowledge, not merely the pleasure of discovery for itself. He extended this principle to his thinking on architecture and came up with a now familiar conclusion: “Houses are built to live in, and not to look on; therefore, let use be preferred to uniformity, except where both maybe had.”16 The Mechanical Mind – René Descartes What Bacon had achieved for the growth of the sciences in England, René Descartes achieved in France and his Discourse on Method and 15 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Open Court, Chicago, 1994, p 40. 16 Francis Bacon, Essays, J.M.Dent, London, 1994, p 114.
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page035from Building Ideas- looking “inwards” at the body instead of outwards at the heavens – and concerned the physical structure and systems of human anatomy. The Fabric of the Human Body was the work of Andreas Vesalius, the Flemish physician and anatomist who distrusted the traditional understanding of the workings of the body due to its theoretical derivation from dissections done on animals. In response to this neglect of a solid basis in physical fact, Vesalius insisted, like Copernicus had done, on gathering his own experimental evidence and dismissing all previous notions born of superstition and speculation .
The most striking aspect of Vesalius’ approach to the presentation of his studies is the mechanical and systematic way in which the components of the body are separated out for inspection. As the skin and the muscles are stripped away almost violently, the organs and bones which are revealed by this process are examined independently in isolated illustrations. In spite of the difficulties of obtaining corpses for dissection, his revolutionary methodology led to significant discoveries as well as arousing opposition from the Church. It was the same opposition to “heretical” new practices that Galileo was to encounter just a few decades later, when he took up the principle of Copernicus’ new universe and confirmed it, to his cost, with his newly acquired telescope. With the body as a system divided into its constituent components, it wasn’t long before the forces that animated the resulting “assembly” also began to yield to a similar kind of mechanical analysis. In 1628, when William Harvey published his conclusions on the circulation of the blood due to the pumping action of the heart, the notion of the body as a mechanical contraption was beginning to take root in philosophy. The English philosopher and Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon set out in more formal terminology what he intended would serve as the basis for a rigorous and systematic experimental science. In the Novum Organum (1620) (“New Instrument; or, True Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature”) he established the approach to scientific investigation that became the foundation of modern technological advancement. Bacon was frustrated with pace of human progress which, to him, was being stifled by its respect
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