Volume 8, Issue 1, Fall 2003
Reading the History of Philosophy
Richard A. Lee, Jr.
Pages 103-120
Tracing the Logic of Force
Roger Bacon’s De Multiplicatione specierum
Roger Bacon’s On the Multiplication of Species is an attempt to analyze efficient causality in terms of forces that are multiplied from agent to patient. This essay argues that this has significant implications for the traditional distinction between appearance and reality in that Bacon refuses to think efficient cause in terms of some other reality that does not appear and yet is the ground of appearance.