Oh dear. It turns out I thought MoR referenced Francis Bacon, not Roger Bacon… Francis was just so much more available as a “great person from the history of rationality and science” that I must have kept misreading the name every time. I had to check Wikipedia just now to make sure I knew who Roger Bacon even was!
Thanks for correcting me, then.
It does seem a bit odd why Harry would attach such importance to Roger Bacon, compared with someone like Francis.
It might be the extra cool-factor of Roger being farther back in history (died
about 700 years before Harry Potter went to Hogwarts) than Sir Francis (about
360 years).
Roger Bacon lived in the 13th century and is credited as one of the
earliest advocates of the scientific method. Giving a scientist his
experimental diary is sort of like giving a writer the pen, not of
Shakespeare, but of someone who helped invent writing.
In the 19th century it was a widely held interpretation that Bacon was a modern experimental scientist who emerged before his time. [...] However, in the course of the 20th century, the philosophical understanding of the role of experiment in the sciences was substantially modified. [...] As a result, the picture of Bacon has changed. One recent study summarized that: “Bacon was not a modern, out of step with his age, or a harbinger of things to come, but a brilliant, combative, and somewhat eccentric schoolman of the thirteenth century, endeavoring to take advantage of the new learning just becoming available while remaining true to traditional notions… of the importance to be attached to philosophical knowledge”.[26] Bacon is thus seen as a leading, but not isolated, figure...
In other words, the things he did and wrote were always known correctly, but now it’s known that others said similar things too. He wasn’t a rationalist revolutionary or “ahead of his time”, he was a point in an uninterrupted progression towards the modern idea of science.
Oh dear. It turns out I thought MoR referenced Francis Bacon, not Roger Bacon… Francis was just so much more available as a “great person from the history of rationality and science” that I must have kept misreading the name every time. I had to check Wikipedia just now to make sure I knew who Roger Bacon even was!
Thanks for correcting me, then.
It does seem a bit odd why Harry would attach such importance to Roger Bacon, compared with someone like Francis.
It might be the extra cool-factor of Roger being farther back in history (died about 700 years before Harry Potter went to Hogwarts) than Sir Francis (about 360 years).
Eliezer says (emphasis mine):
Yes, that makes sense. Although the WIkipedia article on Roger Bacon has a section called “Changing interpretations of Bacon” that says:
In other words, the things he did and wrote were always known correctly, but now it’s known that others said similar things too. He wasn’t a rationalist revolutionary or “ahead of his time”, he was a point in an uninterrupted progression towards the modern idea of science.