On The Baconian Method

On Bacon's Project:

"... after the brilliant, often witty, and always challenging Bk I, Bk II proves to be a rather pretentious, even half-baked collection of veiled theories, Hermetic innuendos, Scholastic distinctions, and labels. Had only Bk II survived, more than one Ph.D dissertation would have been needed to est precisely what the Baconian method was."

 - Daniel Robinson, An Intellectual History of Psychology

On Science And Nominalism

Maritain, an Aristotelian-Thomist roasts the failure of modern science and nominalism

‎The error of pseudo-scientific mechanism clearly supposes the error of nominalism. If the universal doesn't directly or indirectly designate an essence but only a collection of individual cases, its not at all possible to understand how scientific law can be necessarily the succession of singular events contingent.

- Jacques Maritain, Degrees of Knowledge (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999).

On Descartes, Newton, And Mathesis

And therefore our present work sets forth mathematical principles of natural philosophy. The difficulty seems to be to find the forces of nature from the phenomena of motions and then to demonstrate the other phenomena of these forces.

- 1724, Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles for Natural Philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)