High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Roger Bacon, O.F.M. (c. 1214 1294), also known as Doctor Mirabilis, was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on empiricism. He is sometimes credited as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method inspired by the works of Plato and Aristotle via early Islamic scientists and Jewish scholars: Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides. Roger Bacon was born in Ilchester in Somerset, possibly in 1213. The only source for his date of birth is his statement in the Opus Tertium, written in 1267, that "forty years have passed since I first learned the alphabet".