Francis Bacon And John Bacon's Contribution To The Intellectual Revolution

The 17th century marks a major turning point in scientific development due to the political climate in Western Europe. Strong centralized European states began to compete on an international scale through acquiring wealth and power through their colonies in the Americas and Asia. They also began to fight one another in Europe, which resulted in warfare growing more complex and expensive. The demand for new military technology increased which also furthered the scientific research during this period. The political environment in England was fueled by the execution of Charles I after the English Civil War. Modern political ideology by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke would later aid the Americans during the Revolutionary War. The impact and importance of this …show more content…
Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. His most famous contributions to the Intellectual Revolution was his philosophical work and the introduction of Cartesian geometry. In his work, Discourse of Method, Descarte tackles the problem of skepticism, which was helpful to the study of philosophy and the development of the natural sciences. He starts his line of reasoning by doubting everything in order to assess the world from a clear perspective. Bacon also tackles this problem in his work by saying that the idols of the tribe, the cave, the marketplace, and the theater, all prevent us from observing nature with a clear mind ( Aughterson 394). Descartes is able to solve this problem by saying “never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such”(Aughterson 400). This was influential for the Intellectual revolution going on because it forced people to rid themselves of all the past traditions in order to look at nature from a different perspective. By doing this, human progress in the sciences, philosophy, religion, and politics would be able to be