(15) From Scholasticism to Empiricism
- Jon Smart
- Apr 22
- 10 min read
This is the 15th blog post in the Organising for Outcomes series. It is helpful to understand where we’ve come from, how today’s ways of working have evolved, and the context that those ways of working evolved in. This helps us to understand why we’re working the way we’re working and what we might want to change in today’s context, which is significantly different compared to previous technology-led revolutions.
In the previous post, we looked at the rise and rise of a scientific mindset and the direct link from the Scientific Revolution in the 1600s, to Scientific Management in the Age of Steel in the early 1900s, to the same prevailing mindset still in place in most organisations today.
In this post, we take a closer look at how Francis Bacon, Galileo, and René Descartes challenged tradition and authority (it's true because a Greek philosopher or the bible says so) with observation, experimentation, and reason. It highlights the shift from scholasticism to empiricism while also exposing a legacy: a reductionist, mechanical, clockwork universe worldview, which is still the prevailing mindset with most people in most organisations today.
Francis Bacon, 1620, Novum Organum, Father of Empiricism & Scientific Thinking
The philosophical underpinnings of the Scientific Revolution were laid out by Francis Bacon (1561 to 1650), who is commonly regarded as the father of empiricism. In 1620, he published Novum Organum (New Instrument), which is a direct play on the title of Aristotle’s collection of treatises on logic known as the Organon (Instrument), written approximately 2,000 years earlier in 350 BCE. Bacon served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England under King James I.
From Scholasticism
Prior to Francis Bacon, the predominant approach to learning in Europe (from about 1100 BCE) was known as Scholasticism. It was built on authority, argument and tradition, reconciling the writings of ancient Greek philosophers (such as Aristotle) with Christian theology. Scholasticism started in monastic schools, which were the basis for the earliest European universities, and were the places where ancient texts were translated.
The scholastic method started with an axiom or question from a source of authority such as Aristotle’s writings or the Bible (e.g. Does God exist?), presented objections (arguments against God existing), stated the ‘correct’ position as per the scriptures (on the contrary, God exists), laying out the full response using logic and philosophy (including defining the meanings of words) and finally refuting the objections. Effectively it started with a conclusion and was a debate to confirm the conclusion, a process known as deductive reasoning, this approach itself formulated by Aristotle.
Bacon was critical of this approach for learning. In The Advancement of Learning (1605) he doesn’t beat around the bush:
“This kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the schoolmen : who [have an] abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading, their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator), as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges.
For the wit and mind of man, if it [...] work upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless, and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit.” (source: Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 1605)
To Empiricism
Instead, Bacon espoused a bottom-up, empirical, scientific approach, observing actual behaviour, discovering patterns, forming a general rule and then testing and refining based on ongoing observations. This is a process of inductive reasoning, learning from evidence and is the basis of scientific thinking.
“Man can do and understand so much only as he has observed in fact; beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything” (source: Francis Bacon et al., The Works of Francis Bacon, Longman, 1859)
For example, Observation: the sun always rises in the east. Rule: the sun always rises in the east because I observe it to. Not because it is written in the Book of Joshua that God ordained the order of the heavens that way and could halt the motion of the sun; a passage later invoked to defend the geocentric worldview against Copernicus and Galileo.
Bacon writes in Novum Organon that the old way to knowledge is to start and end with a truth which is “settled and immoveable” and that:
“The other [way] derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way” (source: Bacon et al., The Works of Francis Bacon)
This approach, while a huge leap forward for learning, is reductionist. It assumes that the whole can be understood by understanding the parts, like taking a watch apart and putting it back together again, like we live in a clockwork universe. It is also deterministic. It assumes that nature behaves according to laws or rules which once discovered through observation consistently predict the future.
It would take us another 330 years, in the 1950s, with the work of biologists like Jan Smuts and Ludwig von Bertalanffy, for us to realise (again) that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’, that in non-mechanical ‘systems’ (such as people, or nature) there is emergent behaviour. E.g. a butterfly flaps its wings and there is a tornado a thousand miles away and we don’t know why. Ironically, in 330 BCE, Aristotle wrote “A whole is not just a sum of parts, but something further”. The applicability of the Scientific Revolution turns out to have been smaller than first thought, with success in astronomy, physics and chemistry but encountering difficulties when applied to biological or social systems.
In parallel to Bacon’s writings, Galileo (born three years after Bacon, in Italy) was transforming humanity’s understanding of the heavens. With his telescope, he observed mountains and craters on the moon, moons orbiting Jupiter and phases of Venus, all evidence that contradicted the Earth centred universe. Aware of Copernicus’s 1543 work and having demonstrated that objects in motion remain in motion, Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1632, arguing for a heliocentric cosmos in which the Earth orbits the Sun. Soon after its publication, the Catholic Church found him “vehemently suspect of heresy”, banned the publication of the book (as it had done in 1616 with Copernicus’s publication) and sentenced Galileo to lifelong house arrest. More than 360 years later, in 1992, Pope John Paul II acknowledged the Church’s error in condemning him.
At the time of their publications, Galileo was renowned across Europe as a scientist, while Bacon was celebrated as a statesman. Together, they embodied a growing movement of science over authority, of evidence over dogma.
Bacon’s writings and Galileo’s experiments laid the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution, a monumental shift away from ‘because ancient Greek philosophers or the Bible says so’ toward observation, experimentation, and rational inquiry. Yet this revolution also gave rise to a reductionist and deterministic worldview, treating the world as a machine, one that remains dominant today in how most organisations think and work, even when operating in complex, emergent, human systems where the nature of the work is unique and unknowable.
René Descartes, 1637, Discourse on the Method (of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences)
René Descartes (1596 to 1650), a French philosopher and mathematician, was born a generation after Bacon and Galileo. Descartes also had a significant influence on the emerging Scientific Revolution as a principal architect of a mechanical view of the world. Towards the end of his life, Descartes was famous across Europe and to this day his name lives on in the Cartesian coordinate system.
Like Bacon, Descartes was not satisfied with the prevailing approach to learning. In ‘Discourse on the Method’ he writes:
“As soon as I had finished the entire course of study, I found myself involved in so many doubts and errors, that I was convinced I had advanced no farther in all my attempts at learning, than the discovery at every turn of my own ignorance. And yet I was studying in one of the most celebrated schools in Europe” (source: René Descartes, A Discourse on Method)
Descartes sought a new foundation for knowledge, one that was certain, rational and free from dogma. He starts his line of reasoning with not accepting any preconceived wisdom or learning:
“I thought that I could not do better than resolve at once to sweep [existing opinions] wholly away, that I might afterwards be in a position to admit either others more correct, or even perhaps the same when they had undergone the scrutiny of reason.” (source: Descartes, A Discourse on Method)
His famous declaration “Cogito, ergo sum”, “I think, therefore I am”, placed the individual mind, rather than divine revelation at the centre of understanding.
Descartes stated that the surest path to truth was to divide complex problems into their simplest parts and build understanding from the ground up through logical reasoning.
“Divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution.
Commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning
in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence.” (source: Descartes, A Discourse on Method)
This is a reductionist, mechanical, divisional, stance. The whole is the sum of the parts. As this mindset grew in popularity it’s easy to see how division of labour came about in the 1700s with role based silos, as per the pin factories documented in Diderot’s Encyclopédie in 1751.
Nature, Descartes argued, was composed entirely of matter in motion, a vast mechanism governed by deterministic laws that, once discovered, would enable humanity to predict and control its behaviour. To paraphrase from ‘Principles of Philosophy’ (1644), “All the phenomena of nature are explained by matter and motion alone.” .
The human body, too, he describes as a machine, separate from the immaterial mind. In ‘Treatise on Man’ (1662), he likens muscles and tendons to “springs which serve to move mechanisms” and compares bodily functions and movement to “the movements of a clock, from the arrangements of its counterweights and wheels”.
For Descartes, reality consisted of two fundamentally different kinds of substance:
Mind (the thinking substance)
Matter (the extended substance)
The mind is active, free and immaterial; matter (including the body and nature) is passive, mechanical and governed by deterministic laws.
This separation of mind and matter, observer and observed, fuelled a profoundly reductionist worldview: the belief that by isolating and understanding each part, we can predict and control the whole. This approach fueled centuries of scientific and industrial progress, but it also encouraged us to see the world, and organisations, as machines rather than living systems. This is known as Cartesian dualism and became a cornerstone of Western thought.
In 1663, thirteen years after his death, the Catholic Church banned Descartes' work, judging that his method of doubting everything, rationalism, and a mechanistic view of nature, undermined the theological worldview on which its authority, and power, rested.
Even during his lifetime, Descartes was cautious: he lived in the Dutch Republic for 21 years, a Protestant country where he could write and publish more freely. After Galileo was found guilty of heresy, Descartes halted publication of his next book ‘The World, or Treatise on Light’, which presented a mechanistic and heliocentric model of the cosmos similar to Galileo’s.
The Catholic Church ban on Descartes’ work remained in force for more than three hundred years, lasting the entire remaining lifetime of the Index of Prohibited Books, which was only abolished in 1966, ending an era of church control over intellectual freedom. It’s a reminder that new ways of thinking often meet resistance from the systems they disrupt. Doubt, in Descartes’ time, was heresy. Today, with an open mind, it can lead to learning, innovation, and improvement.
By the 1660s, Cartesianism had become a standard subject across Protestant Europe, with Descartes replacing Aristotle in the study of the philosophy of nature.
This included at the University of Cambridge, where Isaac Newton was a student between 1661 and 1665. Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy was now the standard text in natural philosophy and was hugely influential on a young Newton, who referenced Descartes fifty to sixty times across his works, and would go on to transform Cartesianism.
Isaac Newton, 1687, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Isaac Newton (1643–1727) is one of the most influential figures of the Scientific Revolution. Newton’s work unified and extended the insights of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Kepler into a single, coherent framework grounded in mathematical laws.
Appointed Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in 1669, Newton went on to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in 1687, the title intentionally positioning it as a replacement to Descartes Principles of Philosophy. Pierre-Simon Laplace, French polymath who later built on Newton’s laws wrote that “the Principia is pre-eminent above any other production of human genius”, a widely shared sentiment. Newton himself said modestly in correspondence “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
The Principia established Newton’s three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation, presenting the universe as an immense, orderly mechanism governed by precise, predictable mathematical laws. Newton described laws governing mass, force and motion using the precise mathematical tools of geometry and the newly invented calculus.
This became a defining feature of modern science and, later, of industrial and organisational thinking. The world, and by extension the organisation, came to be seen as a machine that could be measured and understood with predictable ‘laws’ and rules. Illustrative of the ‘whole is no more than the sum of the parts’, reductionist, physical context is on the first page of Principia: “The motion of the whole is the sum of the motions of all the parts.”
Nature came to be seen as a giant machine, rather than a living organism or divine creation. This “clockwork universe” idea implied that if you knew all the parts and rules, you could predict everything. Laplace even imagined a “demon” that could calculate the entire future of the universe if it knew every particle’s position and motion. “For such an intelligence, nothing would be uncertain; the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.” This mechanistic mindset reinforced reductionism as the path to truth.
Newton’s work was the culmination of a new worldview in which observation, experimentation, and mathematical reasoning replaced divine authority as the foundation of knowledge. As President of the Royal Society from 1703 and later Master of the Royal Mint responsible for reforming England’s coinage, Newton’s influence extended beyond science into philosophy, economics, and even management practices. Building on the work of others, Newton’s articulation of a rational, mathematically explainable law-governed universe shaped not only the Enlightenment but also a deterministic mindset that continues to influence how we work and organise today. If you’ve ever described your business as a “well-oiled machine,” you’re thinking like Isaac Newton.
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