Roger Bacon on the Conceivability Matter

This contribution analyses Roger Bacon’s solution to the problem of how humans can conceive matter. Being potential and formless, the effort to ground a partial knowability of matter has intrigued many medieval philosophers. Their solutions were often intertwined with the ontological assumptions they made about this peculiar metaphysical entity and their ontological commitment about its existence. In the case of Bacon, this already problematic point is further complicated by his complex ontology based on radical formal pluralism (= any composite has a plurality of non-incidental forms) and extreme realism. The first section of the chapter examines Bacon’s discussion of the problem in his Questions on Physics, where the solution is provided by the analogical strategy: matter can be known by analogy to the form. However, can this procedure be applied also to the case of prime matter? The second section explores Bacon’s distinction between secondary and specific matters and the ontological structure characterising the composite that he envisioned. I argue that the analogical strategy must be complemented with another procedure able to get below “the matter we know” (proximate matter). The third section analyses Bacon’s criticism of the doctrine of the unicity of matter in the Opus tertium. In this context, I examine Bacon’s discussion of reversed abstraction to conceive the genus generalissimum and argue that this procedure is required to complement the analogical strategy in the case of the conceivability of prime matter.