A NEW BEGINNING?

What we know today as early modern philosophy was forged in the opening years of the seventeenth century, in the writings of such thinkers as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and René Descartes. We think of this period as the beginning of modern philosophy in part because these philosophers saw themselves as the vanguard of an intellectual revolution, whose goal was to break with the philosophy of the past. Here they identified their most important target as Aristotle, whose teachings in logic and metaphysics had dominated educated opinion in Europe through most of the previous millennium. Almost all of the best-known philosophers and scientists of the seventeenth century saw Aristotle’s views as a significant impediment to the advance of knowledge, and believed that progress could only begin once the edifice of Aristotle’s system had been razed and philosophy could begin to rebuild on solid foundations. The metaphor of demolishing the old to make room for the new is familiar to students of philosophy from Descartes’s First Meditation, but the English philosopher Francis Bacon had employed it some twenty years before Descartes. In his New Organon (another allusion to Aristotle, whose logical works were known as the organon, or “instrument”), Bacon declares: “It is futile to expect a great advancement in the sciences from overlaying and implanting new things on the old; a new beginning has to be made from the lowest foundations, unless one is content to go round in circles for ever, with meagre, almost negligible, progress” (New Org., I.31).