Western Culture Global Presents

The Top 100 Heroes of Western Culture
These individuals have most contributed to replacing ignorance with knowledge, savagery with civilization, disease with health, tyranny with liberty, poverty with abundance, and despair with happiness.



#14: Roger Bacon (1214-1294)

Roger Bacon (1214-1294) was an English philosopher, Franciscan friar and a father of modern science.

During Bacon’s time, scientific explanations of the world were downplayed and likely condemned (largely because of Christianity), and arguments based solely on tradition and prescribed authorities dominated instead.

Bacon to a significant extent rejected this second-handed approach of the establishment (often at his own peril) and viewed the world with his own eyes.

Bacon was influenced by Robert Grosseteste and the experimental scientific methods of Alhazen and Avicenna. Bacon's method consisted of a repeating cycle of observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and independent verification. He wrote down in detail the way in which he conducted experiments so that others could reproduce and independently test and verify his findings.

Further, his emphasis on using mathematics and measurement to understand nature was crucial to the development of the scientific method. And he promoted the following idea without which science is not possible: The material world is fully natural and operates by causation, without a "spiritual being" undermining its lawful and understandable operation.

For his contributions, Bacon must be considered an important contributor to the scientific method, a method upon which advanced civilization and all of its benefits largely depends.




Go to #15: Adam Smith


Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — Home
Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Numerical Order
Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Century
Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Category