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Comparative legal philosophy applied to legal institutions
Comparative legal philosophy applied to legal institutions Author:Luigi Miraglia Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV BACON, DESCARTES, AND GROTIUS Modern philosophy, the daughter of the Renaissance, was born of doubt. Its chief founders, Bacon and Descartes, sought for... more » a secure basis of knowledge, free from the doubt of the ancient hypotheses. Bacon placed, over against the Aristotelean Organ, the "Novum Organum," in which induction, as the primal factor, acquires a new experimental character. Man, in his opinion, could not conquer nature without a knowledge of her laws, without interpreting her. And the interpretation of nature demanded experience. Experience should be free from all that the mind introduced therein of itself; that is, from prejudices or dogmas. It should use the form of induction, based on facts in which the law of the phenomena was exemplified; such a fact is called by Bacon a prerogative instance. Descartes to reconstruct science turned to thought. He followed a movement opposed to that of Bacon. For Descartes, the senses are not true witnesses; the only indubitable knowledge of existence itself is from the "cogito ergo sum." This knowledge, which is primal, is clear, because the ego is present to itself; and is distinct, because thought is the characteristic by which the ego differs from all other entities. From this primal knowledge, from the knowledge of self-existence, are born through deductive processes all cognitions. Science always exists where a clear and distinct knowledge of things can be had; the mind doubts, because it is imperfect. If it believes itself imperfect, it must have the idea of the perfect or infinite. If it has the idea of the infinite, it means that an infinite cause has impressed it.Inherent are the ideas of the ego and of God; acquired are the ideas that man forms, whose cause lies outside of him. The representations that refer to e...« less